Enacy Mapakame
Social media platform, LinkedIn, which is used to meet like-minded professionals, look for employment, and develop skills has moved to develop an AI assistant tool used for recruitment.
The AI Hiring Assistant is a new product designed to tackle a number of recruitment tasks, including ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts and developing them into job descriptions, sourcing candidates, and engaging with them.
LinkedIn sees the new product as a milestone
The Hiring Assistant is being touted as a milestone in LinkedIn’s AI trajectory. The product targets recruiters, who are the social media platform’s most lucrative users.
Although LinkedIn targets to roll out the tool in the coming months and most probably in the first quarter of 2025, it said the AI assistant is now active for a select group of customers. Companies like AMD, Canva, Siemens, and Zurich Insurance among other big entities are among the pioneers of the AI assistance service.
LinkedIn’s development of this service was not time-consuming as the parent company, Microsoft has a deep financial and operational relationship with OpenAI. The relationship has led to LinkedIn developing more AI-related products and services including Hiring Assistant which is the latest product from the pivotal chapter.
How the Hiring Assistant Works
The AI assistant takes off a sizeable amount of work from the humans, and notable is that the company has launched AI tools for recruiters. These includes its first GenAI helpers for sorting candidates as part of the ‘Recruiter 2024’.
LinkedIn Vice President of product, Hari Srinivasan in an interview admitted that, “Hiring Assistant is designed to take on recruiters most repetitive task so that they have more time to focus on productive areas of their work.”
Hiring Assistant uses job postings from other organizations that a user likes to craft custom-made full job descriptions or to just note what a recruiter wants a prospective candidate to have.
According to Srinivasan, the AI-powered system will list the qualifications needed and suggest a number of candidates that are suitable for the role advertised that the recruiter interacts with. The AI can use algorithms to search for candidates based on skills and not where one resides or where they went to school.
Hiring Assistant includes a third-party application that tracks data although it is based on LinkedIn data which is 1 billion users, 68 million companies, and 41,000 skills.
Some of the features yet to be added to Hiring Assistant include messaging and scheduling support for interviews and also handling follow-ups when candidates have questions before or after interviews. The goal for the AI supported system is to reduce time spent on non-essential tasks.
The product is unique as it is LinkedIn’s first business-to-business (B2B) product tailor-made for recruiters.
Recruiters react to LinkedIn Hiring Assistant
Despite LinkedIn not being the pioneer of the space, its reputation will have an impact on the market. The current leader of the automated recruitment space, Paradox for almost a decade has been automating high-volume recruitment and offering an agent that not only helps recruiters but also helps those looking for jobs.
Unlike its competitor LinkedIn, Paradox is not focused on sourcing, but it does automate the rest of the process which includes candidate inquiries, interview scheduling, onboarding, and assessment.
Paradox has received good reviews, with Chipotle saying that their hiring time has been reduced by 75%, and LinkedIn Hiring Assistant has also been praised by various users.
“Doing a normal search took north of 15 minutes before the advent of AI, but now with the AI-assisted search, time has been reduced drastically to about 30 seconds to get results.”
Victoria Ostryd Soderlind, senior recruitment specialist, Toyota Material Handling Europe.
“The AI-assisted search is much more convenient and easier to execute. Time saved is very notable,” she added.
Octopus Energy head of talent acquisition Olivia Brown said the LinkedIn features had proven helpful for recruiters, enabling to handle more tasks.
“The LinkedIn AI features have helped our recruiters to do more, to improve, and to gain more experience faster in the activities of the company,” said Brown.
“The issue is to be spending more time in the correct places where our time is more productive and LinkedIn’s AI features have allowed recruiters and staff to do just that,” added Brown.
