LinkedIn has just launched its very own AI agent, and it’s designed to streamline every aspect of the recruiting process – from devising professional job descriptions from informal notes to identifying and following up with potential candidates.
The platform’s swiss-army-knife AI tool acts in a similar way to ChatGPT, harnessing advanced capabilities like conversational memory to deliver more personalized and useful results. However, despite the potential it could bring to savvy recruiters, LinkedIn hasn’t always got it right when using AI in recruiting.
We explore everything you need to know about LinkedIn’s very first AI agent, unpacking its advanced features, and exploring its potential repercussions on the wider job market.
LinkedIn Hiring Assistant: A Recruiters New Right-Hand Man?
LinkedIn’s new AI Hiring Assistant is a highly integrated AI agent, designed to handle a wide variety of repetitive and mundane recruiting tasks.
From defining the role to conducting interviews, LinkedIn believes its first AI agent can automate 80% of the typical recruiting workflow, leaving recruiters to focus on parts of their job that are more strategic and deliver more value.
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“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
Its release comes a year after LinkedIn launched ‘Recruiter 2024” – a suite of features that used generative AI to streamline the hiring process for talent leaders. While the new Hiring Assistant builds on these capabilities, the agent goes a step further, by automating a wider array of recruiting tasks and harnessing experiential memory – an advanced AI capability that allows the agent to remember previous interactions with the recruiter, allowing for more personalized, useful suggestions.
LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant also accepts a much wider variety of input. Recruiters are able to enter job descriptions, notes, or prompts into the platform to assist with different stages of the hiring process. Recruiters can also enter feedback to the agent, to ensure its output is aligned with their specific needs.
On top of its current AI toolkit, LinkedIn is planning to introduce new features to its Hiring Assistant soon, including messaging and scheduling support for Internews, and handling and follow-up capabilities when candidates have questions after interviews.
LinkedIn’s Chequered History With AI
Much like other social media platforms, AI is proving to be a lucrative cash cow for LinkedIn. In 2023 alone, LinkedIn Premium subscriptions brought in $1.7 billion in revenue, after the platform decided to keep its best AI features – like AI writing assistants and personalized career advice – behind a paywall.
However, while LinkedIn currently appears to have its finger on the pulse of the technology, its history with AI hasn’t always been smooth sailing. In 2021, the company acknowledged that the recommendation algorithms it was using to match candidates with opportunities were producing biased results. Specifically, the AI-powered algorithms ended up referring more men for open roles than women, because male candidates were more aggressive at seeking out new opportunities.
The platform’s ‘Takeaway’ feature – which condenses LinkedIn posts into bullet point formats – also sparked a backlash among users for omitting key information, and prioritizing AI efficiency over original human-led content.
With other popular social media platforms adopting a similarly bullish approach to AI, mistakes like these are hardly uncommon. However, as LinkedIn continues to incorporate the emerging technology into more of its core processes, failing to do so with a cautious hand could risk X repercussions that spill out onto the wider recruiting landscape.
How Could LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant Change the Recruiting Landscape?
The dawn of LinkedIns first recruiting AI agent is likely to yield huge opportunities for the sector, especially at a time when recruiters are grappling with increasingly complex hiring processes, and fallouts from shifting employee mindsets.
Yet, while the AI toolkit will undoubtedly ease workloads for recruiters, there are concerns these AI time-saving features could adversely impact the job market as a whole if the human aspect of the role becomes secondary.
As LinkedIns 2021 blunder provided, relying too heavily on AI algorithms can inadvertently perpetuate cases of bias and discrimination against candidates. This has been evidenced time and time again, with Amazon’s AI hiring model encountering similar gender biases when trying to hire for technical roles.
Research also shows that candidates are less likely to respond to AI-generated messages in the first place, with bot-sounding messages from recruiters understandably receiving fewer responses than those with a human touch.
However, LinkedIn believes that a recruiter’s use of AI doesn’t need to be all-or-nothing. Recruiters using Hiring Assistant are able to opt out of using specific processes as they wish and choose to complete tasks manually instead. As a result, they can choose which recruiting tasks to automate, and which to pour more time and energy into, without removing the human element which is so crucial to the profession as a whole.
