LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, hunt for jobs, and develop skills, is taking the wraps off its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide array of recruitment tasks, from ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts to turn into longer job descriptions, through to sourcing candidates and engaging with them.
LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first “AI agent”… And one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn’s most lucrative categories of users (recruiters).
LinkedIn said the AI assistant is now live with a “select group” of customers (large enterprises such as AMD, Canva, Siemens and Zurich Insurance among them). It’s slated to be rolling out more widely in the coming months.
The platform was always an early adopter of AI in its back end — (somewhat creepily) folding AI techniques into its algorithms to produce surprisingly accurate connection recommendations to users, for example.
The viral rise of generative AI a couple of years ago, however, left LinkedIn — like pretty much every other tech company — scrambling to bring its front end up to speed.
LinkedIn didn’t have to look too far to start to fix that. Microsoft has a deep financial and operational partnership with generative AI giant OpenAI, and LinkedIn has been leaning hard into that relationship to roll out a number of tools lately, including learning coaches, marketing campaign assistants, and candidate sorters; writing and job hunting helpers; and profile refreshers — all powered by APIs from OpenAI’s GPT large language model.
Hiring Assistant is the latest, and in some ways a more pivotal chapter, in that story — and so it’s an interesting one for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s notable for how much it takes the work out of human hands. The company has, in fact, launched AI tools for recruiters before. A year ago, it unveiled its first GenAI helpers for sorting candidates as part of “Recruiter 2024” (actually revealed, like a new car model, in 2023).
If that was testing the waters, LinkedIn’s now asking recruiters to just jump in.
“It’s designed to take on a recruiter’s most repetitive task so they can spend more time on the most impactful part of their jobs,” Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s VP of product, said in an interview — “a big statement,” he admitted.
The product includes the ability to upload full job descriptions, or just note what you want it to have, along with job postings that you like the look of from other companies or roles.
In turn, that becomes a list of qualifications you’re looking for, as well as an initial pipeline of candidates that you can interact with — to look for more potential hires that are similar to some, or less like others — with algorithms designed to search based on skills rather than other indicators (such as where a person lives or went to school), per Srinivasan.
The AI assistant also integrates with third-party application tracking systems, although ultimately, the whole system is trained on LinkedIn data, which spans 1 billion users, 68 million companies and 41,000 skills.
LinkedIn said Hiring Assistant is due to get more features soon, such as messaging and scheduling support for interviews, as well as handle follow-ups when candidates have questions before or after interviews. Basically the aim is for it to cover a lot of (time-consuming) admin-style tasks, plus take on some of the thinking, that recruiters have to do daily.
Second, unlike many of the other AI features that LinkedIn has released, Hiring Assistant is very squarely aimed at LinkedIn’s B2B business, the products it sells to the recruitment industry.
The company hasn’t provided an update on how Talent Solutions (which includes its Recruiter business) is performing since July 2023, when it said it had passed revenues of $7 billion for the first time. But LinkedIn has demonstrated already that AI — for now at least — remains an important business driver for the company. Specifically, Premium subscriptions, taken by ordinary consumers, are already being driven by a growth in AI tool usage (with some tools available only to Premium users).
Whether that will carry into how recruiters pay for services on the platform, and whether they see these tools as a help or a threat, remains to be seen. Either way, LinkedIn is unlikely to slow this train down.
“We’re really focused on making Hiring Assistant great,” said Erran Berger, VP of engineering, in an interview. “This is all bleeding edge, and I mean everything from the experience and how our users are going to interact with it, to the technology that backs it. And so we’re really focused on nailing that a lot of the technology we’ve built is applicable to problems that we’re trying to solve for our members and customers. But right now, you know, we really just want to nail this, and then we can figure out where we go from there.”
