LinkedIn has entered the agentic age by launching its first AI bot, Hiring Assistant. Like most agents, it was built to help recruiters address their more repetitive tasks and provide them the freedom to focus more on more impactful jobs to be done.
“Over half (55 percent) of HR professionals globally say expectations of them at work are higher than ever before, and 42 percent feel overwhelmed by how many decisions they have to make each day,” writes Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s vice president of product.
Recruiters can assign LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant various tasks, including helping identify ideal candidates and reviewing applications. However, the AI agent will not operate autonomously. LinkedIn emphasizes that human recruiters will remain in complete control throughout the process.
Hiring Assistant will use job postings, descriptions, and intake notes to generate role qualifications and develop a pipeline of qualified candidates. The agent can also be used to parse through whatever Applicant Tracking System the company uses to surface previous applicants to see if any might be an ideal fit.
Although Hiring Assistant is LinkedIn’s first AI agent, the company has been experimenting with generative AI for a while. Last year, it released Recruiter 2024, an AI-assisted recruiting experience. LinkedIn discovered that “hirers who use AI-assisted messages see a 44 percent higher acceptance rate and they are accepted over 11 percent faster by job seekers, compared with those who do not use AI-assisted messages. And AI-assisted Search sessions saw an overall +18 percent higher InMail acceptance rate when compared with search sessions with manual filters.”
Hiring Assistant draws on the advanced technology behind LinkedIn’s Recruiter 2024, including AI-driven messaging, semantic search, and insights from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph. For the first time, LinkedIn is also using large language models for extensive automation, enabling the Hiring Assistant to learn from each recruiter’s feedback and preferences to deliver personalized insights. An orchestration layer taps into the models’ reasoning abilities, allowing the assistant to organize and respond intelligently to recruiter interactions, making the recruiting process more targeted and efficient. “This layer helps us take a real-world approach to tasks—iterative, asynchronous, and collaborative,” Aarathi Vidyasager, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering, explains in a blog post.
Though Hiring Assistant can sync with third-party Applicant Tracking Systems, it’s mainly trained on internal data. That includes data from LinkedIn’s more than 1 billion members, 68 million companies, and 41,000 skills.
In addition to using the AI agent in-house, Hiring Assistant is in the hands of recruiters from select customers such as AMD, Canva, Siemens, and Zurich Insurance.
“At Siemens, our focus is on our people—which means it’s so important for our recruiters to have the time they need to get to know candidates and recognise the unique capabilities and perspectives that they bring to the table,” Mike Demarest, a talent acquisition leader at Siemens, remarked in a statement. “We’re excited to be part of the charter for Hiring Assistant. It will take away some of the repetitive sourcing work so our team can get back to doing what we do best—helping people to find the right opportunities for their careers.”
Hiring Assistant is currently in a private preview. LinkedIn says a broader rollout of the AI agent will be in late 2025.
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