LinkedIn announces its next generation recruiter agent

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For HR leaders and recruiters who work in the LinkedIn ecosystem, changes are coming. LinkedIn announced the next generation of its AI agent for recruiters, Hiring Assistant 2, at the company’s Talent Connect customer event in New York City this week.

LinkedIn’s new Hiring Assistant 2 is fitted with what the company claims to be better advanced reasoning, memory, and personalization for recruiters. The aim is to deliver better candidate recommendations based on companies’ and recruiters’ historic data, inputs, and preferences. Each requisition, candidate, and hire improves the system because the agent learns recruiters’ preferences and habits.

The agent does “not just do what I told it to do. It does what I meant to tell it. That’s a big difference. Do what I meant, not what I said,” Dan Reid, LinkedIn’s VP of product management, said at the event. “Quite simply, it understands more about how you hire, not how everybody hires, but how you hire.”

The evolution introduces new signals for recruiters in the hiring process related to candidate quality, including bolstered processes for member verification and additional insights from partner ATSs, pre-screening replies, and work experiences. Reid also pointed to deepening and expanding LinkedIn’s ATS partnership to streamline the workflow.

“What a fit signal does, it goes way beyond that checklist of the nice-to-haves and must-haves. It brings together what Hiring Assistant understands about the role, the candidates, remembers your hiring preferences,” he said.

The news comes as LinkedIn expands its roster of connected apps, so members can connect their user activity from external partners such as Base44, Fiverr, Duolingo, and Hubspot with their profiles. Company officials also announced moves to expand the connected apps list further. Recruiters looking for candidates’ exposure to specific tools or products can see verification directly on LinkedIn.

Hiring Assistant 2 features expanded agentic workflow capabilities, allowing for more automation in the hiring process, Reid said the company said via its press release. Its first version, which was expanded globally last fall, tackled intake, candidate search, candidate evaluation, and initial outreach. The new 2.0 tool can also incorporate automation in steps related to manager feedback, screening and evaluating responses, and coordinating interviews with actual humans.

It can also reason about which tools and processes would best be deployed, Reid told customers. The assistant tool, he said, can conduct and evaluate screenings based on a recruiter’s or company’s own rubric, and intuitively move priority candidates along different paths based on hiring needs.

Company officials emphasized that humans are in the driver’s seat; recruiters can enable and disable different steps, override recommendations, and review the actions agents are performing on their behalf. The agent’s human oversight comes as companies, compliance and HR teams, and their employees navigate the new challenges that come with more AI in the hiring process, to strategically deploy the technology and mitigate risk related to privacy and bias.

“The goal isn’t just more information,” Reid said. “It’s about providing you more confidence to make the choice that you need to make. Ultimately, that choice, however, is always going to be yours. Hiring choice is yours. Hiring Assistant 2 is going to help you better understand applicants, so you can make those better choices.”

LinkedIn is rolling out the updates for customers who currently use Hiring Assistant (in English) in November. The updates are free and require no migration or changes from customers.