LinkedIn has launched its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters TechCrunch

LinkedIn, the social platform used by professionals to connect with others in their field, find jobs and develop skills, is shutting down its latest effort to build artificial intelligence tools for users. Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to take on a wide range of recruiting tasks, from taking sketchy notes and brainstorming, turning into lengthy job descriptions, to sourcing and engaging with candidates.

LinkedIn is describing the hiring of Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: it's its first “AI agent,” according to the Microsoft-owned company… and it's targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative users (employers).

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

The platform has always been an early adopter of AI on its back end — (somewhat eerily) folding AI techniques into its algorithms to create surprisingly accurate connection recommendations to users.

The viral rise of generative AI a few years ago, however, left LinkedIn — like nearly every tech company — scrambling to bring its front end up to speed.

LinkedIn doesn't have to look far to start fixing this. Microsoft has a deep financial and operational partnership with generative AI giant OpenAI, and LinkedIn has been leaning heavily on that relationship lately to roll out a number of tools, including learning coaches, marketing campaign assistants and candidate selectors; writing and job search aids; and Profile Refresher — driven by APIs from OpenAI's GPT large language model.

Hiring assistants is the latest, and in some ways a more important chapter, in that story — and so it's an interesting one for a few reasons.

First, it is notable for how much work it takes out of human hands. The company has actually launched AI tools for recruiters earlier. A year ago, it unveiled its first GenAI helpers to pick candidates as part of “Recruiter 2024” (actually revealed as a new car model in 2023).

If it's testing the waters, LinkedIn is now asking employers to just jump in.

“It's designed to take away a recruiter's most repetitive work so they can spend more time on the most impactful part of their job,” 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'd like to find in it, as well as job postings you'd like to see from other companies or roles.

Instead, it's a list of qualifications you're looking for, as well as an initial pipeline of candidates you can interact with — for more potential hires who are like some or less like others — with algorithms designed, according to Srinivasan, based on other indicators (such as where a person lives or go to school) search based on skills instead.

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

LinkedIn says Recruiting Assistant will soon get more features, such as messaging and scheduling support for interviews, as well as handling follow-ups if candidates have questions before or after interviews. Basically it's intended to cover many of the (time-consuming) admin-style tasks, and take some thought, that recruiters have to do every day.

Second, unlike other AI features LinkedIn has released, Recruiter's Recruiting Assistant is aimed at LinkedIn's B2B business, the products it sells to the recruiting industry.

The company has not provided an update on how Talent Solutions (which includes its recruiter business) has been performing since July 2023, when it said it surpassed $7 billion in revenue for the first time. But LinkedIn has already shown that AI is – for now at least – an important business driver for the company. In particular, premium subscriptions, taken up by general consumers, are already being driven by increased use of AI tools (some tools are only available to premium users).

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

“We're really focused on making recruiting assistant great,” Eran Berger, VP of engineering, said in an interview. “It's all the bleeding edge, and I mean everything from the experience and how our users are going to interact with it, to the technology that supports it. And so we're really nailing that the technology that we've developed is applicable to many of the problems that we're trying to solve for our members and customers. But at this point, you know, we really want to nail it down, and then we can figure out where to go from there.”