
LinkedIn today announced it has added an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to its platform that will identify job candidates on behalf of recruiters and assist in applicant reviews.
Currently available to a limited number of customers, the Hiring Assistant tool to its platform extends the AI capabilities that LinkedIn has been embedding across its online community of more than one billion members to now include an agentic AI framework.
Hirers will be able to upload job descriptions, and intake notes and job postings into Hiring Assistant to build a pipeline of qualified candidates. They will also be able to leverage Hiring Assistant to identify past applicants in their applicant tracking system, using a Recruiter System Connect capability that LinkedIn provides.
At the same time, LinkedIn is expanding the capabilities to an existing AI coaching tool that it makes available to recruiters to include more interactive sessions using both text and voice, and is making three AI professional certificates available for free via its LinkedIn Learning service through the end of the year.
Those skills and capabilities are critical for recruiters because there are now 2.5 job seekers of every open position, says Karin Kimbrough, chief economist for LinkedIn. “There’s been major change,” she says.
That imbalance naturally creates a more pressing need for recruiters to find a more productive method for reviewing job applicants. Hiring Assistant, for example, promises to streamline the hiring process by continuously learning each recruiter’s preferences.
Over the coming year, Hiring Assistant will also gain messaging and scheduling support capabilities to enable automated candidate follow-ups in addition to generating automatic responses to basic candidate questions about the role and interview process.
LinkedIn reports that organizations that are already using AI to message potential job candidates are resulting in a 44% higher acceptance rate. AI-assisted search sessions also saw a more than 18% increase in InMail acceptance rates when compared to search sessions with manual filters.
Of course, jobs themselves are evolving rapidly in the age of AI. Many existing positions may soon no longer exist, while new jobs that previously would not have existed are being invented. Organizations of all sizes have a vested interest in becoming more profitable, so it’s likely there will be significant economic disruption in the months and years ahead that will be attributable at least in part to AI. Regardless of how AI is employed, however, humans will still be needed to supervise workflows.
The challenge for everyone from the CEO on down is to make sure their skills and expertise remain relevant in the AI era. In fact, LinkedIn already provides access to more than 1,000 AI courses.
Ultimately, there will be very few jobs that won’t be impacted by AI to one degree or another. It’s not that AI will replace employees so much as it enables someone else with AI skills to perform that task more efficiently. It’s up to each individual to decide to what degree they want be the employee with those AI skills or not.