Comparison
Savvanta vs LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world and Savvanta does not compete with it for a single minute of anybody's day. It is worth a comparison page anyway, because LinkedIn made a decision in this market that tells you more than any vendor claim could.
LinkedIn tried this and stopped. LinkedIn Skill Assessments — unproctored, fifteen multiple-choice questions, a badge for the top 30% of scorers, one retake inside six months, and failed attempts invisible to recruiters — are retired. LinkedIn's own explanation is that hirers increasingly value “examples of how a candidate applied their skills”. Read that as a finding, not as marketing: the company with the most hiring data on earth looked at a short unproctored quiz and concluded it was not worth showing to a recruiter.
What does each of these actually give me?
Reach, and a profile the candidate wrote about themselves. It is the best distribution channel in hiring and nothing here suggests otherwise. It processes roughly 11,000 applications a minute, up about 45% year on year, a rise LinkedIn attributes largely to AI submission tools.
Source: eWeek, reporting LinkedIn
No reach at all. What you get is one recorded, marked, human-confirmed attempt at the work, for candidates you already found — most of them on LinkedIn.
What this meansThe honest relationship is sequential, not competitive. LinkedIn is how the person reaches you. Savvanta is how you find out whether the profile was true.
How is a skill verified?
It is not, currently. With Skill Assessments retired, a skill on a profile is a self-report, optionally endorsed by contacts, or attached to a credential or course. When the assessments did run they were explicitly unproctored and scored on a curve — a badge meant top 30% of test-takers, not competence at a defined standard.
The candidate does the job for an hour or two under continuous recording, and is marked against a fixed six-level scheme published on this site before you buy. The standard is absolute, not a percentile: level 5 on a criterion means a stated thing was done, regardless of how anyone else performed.
What this meansA curve tells you who beat the other applicants at a quiz. A criterion tells you whether the person cleared the bar the job actually has. Those are different questions and only one of them survives a hiring manager asking why.
Can I see what the person did?
You can see what they say they did, plus whatever they have posted. There is no artefact of work produced under observation.
Screen, webcam, microphone and — on Windows and ChromeOS — system audio are recorded continuously for the whole attempt, chunked and stored, not sampled. Stop any required stream mid-attempt and a 90-second budget starts draining across the rest of the test; at zero the attempt is red-flagged and submitted for you. The report quotes the timestamped moment behind every score, so a hiring manager reads evidence rather than a number.
What this meansThis is the gap LinkedIn itself named on its way out — hirers want examples of applied skill. A recording of the applied skill is the most literal possible answer to that.
What LinkedIn does better
- Everything about finding people. Sourcing, reach, passive candidates, InMail, the network graph. We do none of it and have no plans to.
- Free at the point of use for candidates, with an audience no assessment vendor will ever match.
- Recruiter workflow. LinkedIn Recruiter is a mature product with pipeline management we do not attempt.
If you are choosing between LinkedIn and Savvanta, you have mis-framed the decision. Nearly every Savvanta candidate arrives from a LinkedIn post.
Read the thing itself rather than a claim about it. The report an employer receives is published in full — real criteria, real weights, an invented candidate, and the conduct finding placed above the score. No form.
Read a sample reportOr browse the 64 mark schemesFrequently asked questions
Are LinkedIn Skill Assessments still available?
No. LinkedIn has retired them, stating that hirers increasingly value examples of how a candidate applied their skills. Any badge still visible on a profile was earned before retirement, on an unproctored multiple-choice test scored against the top 30% of test-takers.
Does Savvanta replace LinkedIn?
No. Savvanta has no sourcing product, no job board and no candidate database. It evaluates candidates you have already found, wherever you found them.
Can I send a Savvanta assessment to someone I found on LinkedIn?
Yes. That is the normal case: you post or source on LinkedIn, and the assessment link goes to the applicants you want to take seriously.
Is a LinkedIn endorsement worth anything as evidence?
As evidence of ability, very little — endorsements are unverified and given by contacts. They are a social signal, and reading them as a skills check is the error the retirement of Skill Assessments implicitly acknowledges.