LinkedIn, the social platform that professionals use to connect with others in their fields, find jobs, and develop their skills, is wrapping up its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for its users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to help you perform a wide range of recruiting tasks, from capturing snippets of notes and thoughts and turning them into longer job descriptions to finding and engaging with candidates.
LinkedIn describes Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory. The Microsoft-owned company says it’s its first “AI agent,” and it’s targeted at recruiters, who happen to be one of LinkedIn’s most profitable user categories.
LinkedIn said the AI assistant is currently being used by a “select group” of customers (large companies such as AMD, Canva, Siemens, and Zurich Insurance). It will be rolled out more widely in the coming months.
The platform has always been an early adopter of AI on the backend, including (somewhat ominously) incorporating AI techniques into its algorithms to generate surprisingly accurate connection recommendations for users.
But with the rapid rise of generative AI a few years ago, LinkedIn, like most other tech companies, is scrambling to keep its front end up to date.
LinkedIn didn’t have to look far to start fixing the problem. Microsoft has a deep financial and operational partnership with generative AI giant OpenAI, and LinkedIn has recently doubled down on that relationship, rolling out a number of tools including learning coaches, marketing campaign assistants, and candidate screening tools. I’m doing it. Writing and job hunting helper. Profile Refresher – All powered by OpenAI’s GPT large-scale language model API.
Hiring Assistant is the latest, and in some ways more important, chapter in that story, and it’s interesting for several reasons.
First, it’s remarkable how much work it takes out of the human hands. In fact, the company has previously released AI tools for recruiters. A year ago, the company announced its first GenAI helper for classifying candidates as part of “Recruiter 2024” (actually, it will be announced in 2023, similar to new car models).
If that’s a test for you, LinkedIn is asking recruiters to jump on board.
“We’re empowering recruiters to take on the most repetitive tasks so they can spend more time on the most impactful parts of their jobs,” Hari Srinivasan, vice president of products at LinkedIn, said in an interview. “It’s designed,” he said in an interview, admitting, “That’s a big statement.”
The product includes the ability to upload a complete job description and note what you’d like to see, along with job postings from other companies and positions you like the look of.
It then becomes not only the list of qualifications you are looking for, but also the first pipeline of candidates that you can interact with using the algorithms designed for the search, and who are similar or similar to others. Find potential candidates for employment. Srinivasan says it’s based on skills rather than other indicators (such as where a person lives or went to school).
The AI assistant also integrates with third-party application tracking systems, but ultimately the entire system will be trained on LinkedIn data spanning 1 billion users, 68 million companies, and 41,000 skills.
According to LinkedIn, more features will soon be added to Hiring Assistant, including support for messaging and interview scheduling, and handling follow-ups if candidates have questions before or after an interview. Basically, its purpose is to cover many (time-consuming) admin-style tasks, as well as take on some of the thinking that recruiters need to do on a daily basis.
Second, unlike many of the other AI features LinkedIn has released, Hiring Assistant is targeted very squarely at LinkedIn’s B2B business, or products sold to the recruiting industry.
The company has not provided an update on the performance of Talent Solutions (which includes its Recruiting business) since July 2023, when it announced revenue of over $7 billion for the first time. But LinkedIn has proven that AI remains a key business driver for the company, at least for now. Specifically, premium subscriptions by consumers are already being driven by increased usage of AI tools (some tools are only available to premium users).
It remains to be seen whether that will affect how recruiters pay for services on the platform, and whether recruiters will see these tools as a help or a threat. Either way, LinkedIn is unlikely to slow this train down.
“We are serious about making Hiring Assistant great,” Erran Berger, vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “This is all cutting-edge, and that means everything from the experience and how the user interacts to the technology that underpins it. We’re focused on making sure it’s applicable to the problem we’re trying to solve for our members and customers. But for now, we really want to make this a success. You can see where we’re going from there.”
