close
close

LinkedIn is launching its first AI agent that takes on the role of job recruiters

LinkedIn is launching its first AI agent that takes on the role of job recruiters

LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, search for jobs and develop skills, is embarking on its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Employment assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide range of recruitment tasks, from ingesting notes and rough thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions, to sourcing and interacting with candidates.

LinkedIn describes Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it is, according to the Microsoft-owned company, its first “AI agent”… And one that happens to target one of LinkedIn’s most profitable user categories (recruiters).

LinkedIn said the AI ​​assistant is now live with a “select group” of customers (large enterprises like AMD, Canva, Siemens and Zurich Insurance, among them). It is slated to roll out more widely in the coming months.

The platform has always been one of the earliest adopters of back-end AI — (somewhat creepily) weaving AI techniques into its algorithms to produce surprisingly accurate connection recommendations for users, for example.

However, the viral rise of generative artificial intelligence a few years ago left LinkedIn — like almost every other tech company — scrambling to get its front end up to speed.

LinkedIn didn’t have to look far to start fixing that. Microsoft has a deep financial and operational partnership with generative AI giant OpenAI, and LinkedIn has leaned heavily into that relationship to launch a number of tools lately, including learning coaches, marketing campaign assistants and candidate screeners; writing and job search aids; and profile refreshes — all powered by APIs from OpenAI’s GPT large language model.

Hiring Assistant is the latest and, in some ways, more essential chapter in that story – and so it’s an interesting one for a couple of reasons.

First, it is remarkable for how much it takes the work out of human hands. In fact, the company has also released AI tools for recruiters. A year ago, it unveiled its first GenAI helpers for sorting candidates as part of “Recruiter 2024” (actually revealed, as a new car model, in 2023).

If that was testing the waters, LinkedIn is now asking recruiters to jump in.

“It’s designed to take the most repetitive task out of a recruiter so they can spend more time on the most important part of the job,” Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s vice president of product, said in an interview – “a big statement,” he admitted.

The product includes the ability to upload full job descriptions or just write down what you want them to have, along with job postings you like from other companies or roles.

In turn, this becomes a list of qualifications you’re looking for, as well as an initial pipeline of candidates you can interact with – to search for more potential hires that are similar to or less similar to others – with algorithms meant to Search based on ability rather than other indicators (such as where a person lives or went to school), Srinivasan.

The AI ​​assistant also integrates with third-party app tracking systems, though ultimately the entire system is trained on LinkedIn data, which spans 1 billion users, 68 million companies, and 41,000 skills.

LinkedIn said the Hiring Assistant will soon get more features, such as help with messaging and scheduling interviews, as well as handling follow-ups when candidates have questions before or after interviews. Basically, the goal is for it to cover a lot of (time-consuming) administrative tasks, plus take on some of the thinking that recruiters have to do on a daily basis.

Second, unlike many of the other AI features LinkedIn has rolled out, Hiring Assistant is aimed directly at LinkedIn’s B2B business, the products it sells to the recruiting industry.

The company did not provide an update on the performance of Talent Solutions (which includes its recruiting business) since July 2023, when it said it exceeded revenue of 7 billion dollars for the first time. But LinkedIn has already demonstrated that AI — at least for now — remains an important business driver for the company. Specifically, Premium subscriptions, taken by regular consumers, are already underway driven by an increase in the use of AI tools (with some tools only available to Premium users).

It remains to be seen whether this will influence how recruiters pay for services on the platform and whether they see these tools as a help or a threat. Either way, LinkedIn is unlikely to slow this train down.

“We’re very focused on making the hiring assistant great,” Erran Berger, VP of engineering, said in an interview. “This is extremely advanced, and I mean everything from the experience and how our users will interact with it, to the technology that supports it. So we’re really focused on finding that a lot of the technology we’ve built is applicable to the problems we’re trying to solve for our members and customers. But right now, you know, we really want to get to that and then we can figure out where we go from there.”