LinkedIn debuted an artificial intelligence hiring assistant on Tuesday. The tool can source candidates and ask screening questions, the job-focused platform said.
The AI agent, “Hiring Assistant,” invites recruiters to, for example, outline the role they’re looking to fill, or describe their perfect candidate.
LinkedIn has been using the tool internally, Hari Srinivasan, vice president of product, LinkedIn Talent Solutions, said on a press call. It is available to a group of charter customers and the company will expand that group over the next year, according to Srinivasan. It will be sold as an add-on to LinkedIn’s Recruiter product, but pricing hasn’t been announced.
What could LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant do?
The tool is expected to create hiring plans, source job candidates and analyze search results, rather than only returning a list of potential candidates. Hiring professionals will be able to use the tool to conduct outreach in bulk, but with customized messages, and it will also ask screening questions. And through feedback, it learns the user’s preferences.
“The idea is, as the hiring assistant works with the recruiter … it learns from its interactions with the recruiter,” Erran Berger, the company’s lead product engineer, said. He called the feature “experiential memory.”
The hiring assistant “learns from the feedback, and it becomes better and better at helping the recruiter do their job,” he said.
The big picture
While LinkedIn has long used AI in other offerings, Berger said he believes agents are the next wave of AI technology. Competitors’ recently deployed agents certainly bear that out — but LinkedIn said it’s betting on its deep collection of data to set it apart.
And the firm said it has worked diligently to address concerns about AI worsening workplace bias. “We want to make sure that we're launching unbiased models to help all recruiters across industries and regions find the right talent based on skills and experience,” Berger said. “To keep the Hiring Assistant’s activity transparent and accountable, we make sure that every action that it takes [is] logged and audited, just in the same way that we would do with a human recruiter,” he said.
Berger also made clear that Hiring Assistant is a work in progress, saying LinkedIn will learn from charter customers’ experiences and hone the AI assistant’s technology accordingly.
“As we learn, we’re going to have to make modifications to that technology and innovate further,” he said.
While there could be additional products down the line, LinkedIn is “really focused on making this the best tool that exists for recruiters,” he said, “and I think that’s a long road.”
