• by Colin Kirkland , October 29, 2024

LinkedIn is utilizing Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI to bring recruiters a new AI-powered tool that it says will take on their most repetitive tasks when using the app, including uploading full job descriptions and sourcing and engaging with potential candidates.

The business-to-business social platform is describing its Hiring Assistant as its first “AI agent,” one that the company’s Vice President of Product Hari Srinivasan recently said was developed to help recruiters “spend more time on the most impactful part of their jobs.”

Now live with a “select group” of customers, including AMD, Canva, Siemens and Zurich Insurance, Hiring Assistant is trained on data from LinkedIn's 1 billion users, 68 million companies and 41,000 skills, providing recruiters with a list of qualifications and a group of initial candidates to connect with, along with algorithms that will search for more candidates based on specific skills.

The company says that as the tool rolls out over the next several months, it will receive features like messaging, scheduling support for interviews, and follow-up sessions with candidates after interviews.

Unlike many of LinkedIn's other AI-powered features, Hiring Assistant is focused primarily on the platform’s B2B business, in regard to the recruitment industry, which the company has been developing AI tools for since its announcement of “Recruiter 2024.”

In February, for example, LinkedIn unveiled conversational prompts to help build recruiting projects, improved recruitment process tracking, and AI recommendations for titles and skills in job ads.

Hiring Assistant has been designed to automate more of the recruitment process. However, its success depends on what users think. “This is all bleeding edge, and I mean everything from the experience and how our users are going to interact with it, to the technology that backs it,” said LinkedIn’s VP of engineering, Erran Berger.