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If you have ever applied or thought about applying for a job via LinkedIn, you know that the experience can be immediately disheartening: Openings that seem interesting typically can see hundreds or thousands of applications in a matter of hours – given that LinkedIn, a social network for the world of work, expose proudly in his own version of building a viral hype. But you might as well throw a penny into a giant fountain for luck to keep your application from drowning in that noise.
Now LinkedIn has built an AI product to throw job seekers a lifeline, of sorts. A new Jobs Match tool will give its 1 billion users – who currently apply for jobs on its platform at a rate of 9,000 applications per minute – immediate advice on whether a particular job opening is worth their time to apply for.
Meanwhile, it is launching an AI recruitment agent aimed at smaller companies, a synthetic version of the recruitment managers and teams that larger companies typically use to design job applications, tap qualified candidates and triage applications. Both are “free” to use – that is, you don’t have to be one of LinkedIn’s paying users to use them.
In particular, both products were built by LinkedIn on top of its own AI technology and its own first-party LinkedIn data – although, over time, it could incorporate other data sources, Rohan Rajiv, director of the product management, he said in an interview with TechCrunch. This is in contrast to a number of launches over the past two years that have seen LinkedIn build by leaning heavily on technology from AI startup OpenAI. supported by Microsoftwhich also owns LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has a long history of building AI tools for its platform, but these have been focused on areas such as algorithms and connection suggestions, as well as tools to manage and build its database. These predate the development of generative AI and the wave of consumer services that have emerged from it.
A lot of what LinkedIn has launched on the AI front in the last couple of years has been around tapping generative AI for juice activity on the site: products to help people start conversation with each other; comes with “insightful” content. for their feeds and profileshelp write adsand more, all powered by OpenAI.
The tools that are launched today, which will give those filling jobs a better funnel of suitable candidates and help those looking for a better filter for the jobs that are more likely to fit, are also intended to help with the juice activity , but in less public ways.
Rajiv noted that there are now 5 million people who have activated “Open for work” on their profiles, up 40% from a year ago, with 67 million users looking for jobs every week. On the small business side, about 2.5 million use LinkedIn to fill roles. That’s to say nothing of the huge number of people who have lost their jobs as the economy continues to recover in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — more than 152,000 in the technology sector alone will be laid off in 2024, according to u Layoffs.fyi tracker.
However, LinkedIn’s job search numbers are relatively small considering that the site has more than a billion registered users. Indeed, it runs the risk of losing momentum on its recruiting business because of how painful it is to use, both among those looking for jobs and those trying to fill them, said Rajiv.
“(They’re) spending three to five hours a day reviewing applications, and they’re finding that less than half of the job applications submitted actually meet the required criteria,” he said. “This is completely broken, and we know it.”
So, while LinkedIn has built a number of products specifically for premium users, to encourage more people to pay for the service, now it is in the other direction. It takes two premium tools – respectively AI tools for job search and AI agents to help recruitment – and make versions of them usable for everyone.
It will be worth watching to see how the uptake is, and if it increases the number of people who use the platform to recruit (which is still a paid service) and look for work. At a time when the company is also be scrutinized on how it gathers and uses data, this gives LinkedIn an anchor to argue that it also provides some utility.
