If you’ve ever applied or thought of executeing for a job via LinkedIn, you’ll understand that the experience can be instantly disheartening: Openings that see engaging typicassociate can see hundreds or thousands of applications in a matter of hours — data that LinkedIn, a social netlabor for the world of labor, self-convey inantly exposes in its own version of originateing up viral hype. But you may as well be throtriumphg a penny into a huge fountain for luck to grasp your application from drowning in that noise.
Now LinkedIn has built an AI product to throw job seekers a lifeline, of sorts. A recent Jobs Match tool will give its 1 billion participaters — who are currently executeing for jobs on its platestablish at a rate of 9,000 applications per minute — instant advice on whether a particular job uncovering is worth their time to execute.
Aextfinishedside this, it’s starting a recruitment AI agent aimed at petiteer businesses, a synthetic version of the recruitment deal withrs and teams that huger businesses typicassociate participate to invent job applications, tap qualified truthfulates, and triage applications. Both are “free” to participate — that is, you don’t have to be one of LinkedIn’s paying participaters to participate it.
Notably, both products were built by LinkedIn on top of its own AI technology and its own first-party LinkedIn data — though, over time, it might include other data sources, Rohan Rajiv, a honestor of product deal withment, said in an intersee with TechCrunch. This is in contrast to a number of startes in the last couple of years that have seen LinkedIn originateing by leaning challenging on technology from OpenAI, the AI beginup backed to the hilt by Microsoft, which also owns LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has a extfinished history of originateing AI tools for its platestablish, but these have been caccessed on areas appreciate algorithms and joinion proposeions, as well as tools to deal with and originate its database. These predate the broadenment of generative AI and the wave of devourr services that have sprung out of it.
A lot of what LinkedIn has started on the AI front in the last couple of years has been around tapping generative AI to juice activity on the site: products to help people begin conversations with each other; come up with “astute” satisfied for their feeds and profiles, help write ads, and more, all powered by OpenAI.
The tools being started today, which will give those filling jobs a better funnel of fitting applicants and help those seeing for labor better filter for jobs they are more probable to fit, also are unkindt to help with juicing activity, but in less unveil ways.
Rajiv noticed that there are now 5 million people who have turned on “Open to Work” on their profiles, up 40% from a year ago, with 67 million participaters seeing for jobs each week. On the petite business side, some 2.5 million are using LinkedIn to fill roles. That’s to say noleang of the huge number of people who have lost their jobs as the economy persists to accurate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — more than 152,000 in the tech sector alone were laid off in 2024, according to the Layoffs.fyi tracker.
Yet LinkedIn’s job seeking figures are relatively minuscule pondering the site has more than a billion sign uped participaters. Indeed, it runs the hazard of losing momentum on its recruiting business becaparticipate of how hurtful it is to participate, both among those seeing for jobs and those trying to fill them, said Rajiv.
“[They’re] spfinishing three to five hours a day sifting thraw applications, and discovering that less than half of the job applications surrfinisherted are actuassociate greeting the needd criteria,” he said. “This is finishly broken, and we understand that.”
So while LinkedIn has built a number of products particularassociate for premium participaters, to aid more people to pay for the service, now it’s striumphging in the other honestion. It’s taking two premium tools — admireively AI tools for seeing for jobs and AI agents to help with recruitment — and making versions of them usable for everyone.
It will be worth watching to see what the upget is appreciate, and whether it raises the number of people using the platestablish to recruit (which is still a paid service) and see for labor. At a time when the company is also being scrutinized over how it collects and participates data, this gives LinkedIn an anchor to dispute that it’s also providing some utility.