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It’s safe to say we’ll be hearing a lot more about AI agents in 2025. Momentum has been picking up as we near the end of 2024, with companies like Asana, Salesforce and Microsoft rolling out their versions of these autonomous AIs. Today, LinkedIn joins their ranks with the launch of its Hiring Assistant.
True to its name, Hiring Assistant is an agent aimed at automating many of the administrative tasks that consume a recruiter’s day: writing job descriptions, identifying and ranking candidates, handling outreach and, in cases where the prospect approves, pre-vetting candidates. The company estimates its agent can reduce the amount of time recruiters spend on admin by 70%.
How Hiring Assistant Works
Hiring Assistant bases its recruitment efforts on materials the recruiter provides including notes and job descriptions and is also able to identify previous applicants fitting the role in the company's applicant tracking system. As part of the briefing collateral, recruiters can share the profile of an ideal candidate to help the system better grok requirements.
The company believes two things set its agent apart in an already competitive field:
- Experiential Memory — Experiential memory is the company's term for the growing understanding the Hiring Assistant builds around the preferences and needs of an individual recruiter. The agent will grow more personalized for the recruiter through their accumulated interactions around things like candidate fits, preferred skills and past hires. It can further be customized at a project level, with the potential to further customize at the organizational-level down the line.
- Access to the LinkedIn Economic Graph — A LLM is only as good as the data it is trained on. In this case, the existing model gathers additional context from the 1 billion members, 68 million companies and 41,000 skills represented in the LinkedIn Economic Graph. A company spokesperson said the Hiring Assistant is not trained on member data, but rather on insights from its Economic Graph.
An agent orchestration layer makes it possible for the Hiring Assistant to work across tools and departments to handle the multiple steps in the hiring workflow.
The company is quick to note the recruiter stays involved at every step, having the final say in which candidates to contact and archiving those that aren't a fit.
During a press briefing, LinkedIn Talent Solutions VP Hari Srinivasan said with its ability to recognize the skills and experience a job requires, Hiring Agent would support a skills-based hiring approach, the much lauded but still not commonly practiced method of finding job candidates based on abilities and not degrees.
Today's announcement builds on the company’s Recruiter 2024 release, which introduced a raft of AI tools to support recruiters and job applicants. In this case, Hiring Assistant uses the AI-generated messages to reach out to potential candidates. The company has future plans to use this tool to write follow-ups to basic candidate queries. The company claims early adopters of the AI messaging have seen 44% higher acceptance rate.
Related Article: LinkedIn Digs Into Values-Based Hiring With New Features
The Job Landscape in 2024
Recruiters in 2024 are working in a dramatically different world than recruiters in 2022. LinkedIn’s Chief Economist, Karin Kimbrough, noted there was one job for every two and a half job seekers, a big change from 2021 when power tipped in favor of employees.
Kimbrough's data is backed up in the October LinkedIn Workforce Report. Hiring in the United States was down 6.3% year over year (YoY) between September 2024 and September 2023. One of the hardest industries hit in terms of white collar jobs were administrative and support services, which were down 12.3% YoY.
The new jobs expected to emerge as a result of the generative AI wave are slow in surfacing, with LinkedIn identifying only two new careers that have emerged since ChatGPT’s launch: head of AI (23% growth YoY) and prompt engineers (29% YoY growth).
What has clearly changed following ChatGPT's launch is the number and variety of ways AI is being incorporated into the job market. And while the majority of tools were built with recruiters in mind, we're starting to see the first tools geared towards job seekers emerging. At a time when corporate jobs receive 250 or more applications on average and job seekers share stories of job hunts that span seven, eight, nine months and longer, any tool that can improve the recruiting process — for recruiters and for job seekers — is welcome. We'll be watching the roll out of Hiring Assistant to see if it meets this need.
Related Article: Is AI Good or Bad for Recruiters? It's Complicated
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Hiring Assistant Availability
Today’s launch comes one week after parent company Microsoft introduced a tool to create autonomous agents in Copilot.
Hiring Assistant is currently in limited release, with early adopters including Canva, Siemens and AMD. The plan is to do a gradual roll out globally in the coming months. The company did not reveal the cost, but confirmed it is an add-on charge for LinkedIn Recruiter customers.
