When LinkedIn released its first product for recruiters leveraging agentic AI, tasks were on the chopping block. The new tool was designed to help these people pros focus on what they do best (and, not for nothing, enjoy the most): making meaningful human connections with professionals and helping build successful teams for their organization.
“Ultimately what people are trying to do on LinkedIn is go from a billion people to that one perfect hire,” said Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s VP of product.
In the year or so since its launch, LinkedIn Hiring Assistant has helped the platform’s charter customers—more than 500 companies and 8,000 early users, according to LinkedIn—save more than four hours per role and review 62% fewer profiles, according to an analysis of its early agent use. They’re also seeing InMail acceptance rates blossom by 73%.
“Which means that recruiters need to spend less time looking at profiles, less time writing messages with no reply in order to get to that right side of perfect hire,” Srinivasan said.
The new LinkedIn Hiring Assistant helps extrapolate useful evaluation criteria from the “marketing asset” of a job description, those must-haves and the nice-to-haves.
“If you come in with an intake that you think is so precise, but it doesn’t match the language that is on someone’s profile, or, more accurately, it creates a talent pool that is either too narrow or too wide, you end up with a bad set of search criteria,” he said, adding that LinkedIn’s model iterates and helps narrow down the criteria through natural language.
The agent also leverages the more than one billion monthly users on the platform and the wealth of historic search data to help recruiters best develop intake criteria using candidate profiles in the process.
LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant is also trained to help surface better candidates for open requisitions. The agent relies on “evidence-based hiring” techniques to not only surface those relevant candidates, but also articulate which skills and competencies are associated with the profile that suggested the AI make such a recommendation.
This unlock, Srinivasan said, impacted InMessage acceptance, he added. In addition to messaging better candidates with a stronger match to the role, the LinkedIn Hiring Assistant is able to better personalize auto-generated communication into “a much more detailed message on a much more detailed search.”
Additionally, LinkedIn’s agent helps manage small recruiting operations after hours or when a recruiter is away from their desk. Agents can handle some basic screening questions that save recruiters both time and effort assessing basic competency for the role, ensuring proper work authorization is secured, and that location or relocation criteria is met.
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What about IRL? “Technology is changing everything, right? So it’s changing the talent that we’re looking for and how we go about attracting and retaining that talent,” said Nicole Lovell, VP of global talent for global infrastructure company Jacobs, which works on projects connecting people with everything from bridges and public transit systems to semiconductors and AI data centers.
Lovell manages a team of more than 100 TA pros across a dozen countries, and has been a charter customer with LinkedIn for more than a decade. Lovell’s team hires thousands of people each year worldwide on a variety of types of projects and began piloting the agent last fall.
“It’s really shaken things up for us in terms of streamlining, sourcing and outputting really quality candidates,” Lovell said. “Anything we could do to speed up the process [and] improve our quality of hire, we need to do.”
For Jacobs, in consulting “talent is our core differentiator,” and passive recruitment constitutes a large portion of the company’s TA strategy, and LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant has most aided her talent organization’s capacity for the relationship building and face time needed to make an impact.
“Sometimes it takes six months to get somebody to a place where they’re willing to talk to a hiring manager, we can now invest our recruiters time in that space,” Lovell said. “Much more value add than sifting through a bunch of résumés that come back in a Boolean search.”
Lovell said “change management is a big, big piece of this.” Lovell said it was important for her recruiters to learn the technology, create new approaches, and become “power users,” adding that consistently using and understanding the agent delivered the biggest impacts on time savings and efficiency.
What’s next? The tool will be available globally by the end of the month, according to the company.
LinkedIn is also working to bolster its ATS integrations, the technology powering its sourcing and screening abilities, and finding new ways to improve collaboration with hiring managers in the intake process, Srinivasan said.
“I feel there’s so much more to do, and I am positive, when we launch this, we will learn a lot,” Srinivasan said. “More people will give us more problems…it’s kind of the fun part.”