LinkedIn, the professional networking service that connects people to jobs, skills, and other contacts in their industries, is unveiling a new product for developing artificial intelligence tools for users. It's called Hiring Assistant, a tool meant to help manage a range of recruitment work-from ingesting messy jottings and ideas to be fleshed out into longer job descriptions to finding candidates and contacting them.

LinkedIn is describing Hiring Assistant as a milestone in its AI trajectory: It is, per the Microsoft-owned company, its first "AI agent" and one that happens to be targeting one of LinkedIn's most lucrative categories of users — recruiters.

According to LinkedIn, the AI assistant is now live with a "select group" of customers, including large enterprises like AMD, Canva, Siemens, and Zurich Insurance. The service will roll out more broadly in the coming months.

This was a platform that had always been cutting-edge when it came to back-end AI, folding all manner of AI techniques into its algorithms in creepy ways yet somehow generating rather surprisingly good connection recommendations for users and more.

It was, however, when a couple of years ago a wave of generative AIs came crashing in viral style that LinkedIn, like pretty much every other company in the tech world at this time, really panicked to try and bring their front-end capabilities up.

LinkedIn didn't have to look too far to start to fix that. Microsoft has a deep financial and operational partnership with the generative AI giant OpenAI, and LinkedIn has been leaning hard into that relationship to roll out a number of tools lately, including learning coaches, marketing campaign assistants, and candidate sorters; writing and job hunting helpers; and profile refreshers — all powered by APIs from OpenAI's GPT large language model.

It is the newest, and in many respects a more critical chapter, in that story-and so it's an interesting one for a couple of reasons.

But what's really notable is how much it takes the work out of human hands. Indeed, LinkedIn rolled out AI tools for recruiters last year as part of "Recruiter 2024," though those tools came out more quietly-at first, sort of like a new car model coming out as just a few prototype designs. If that was a beta test, LinkedIn is asking recruiters to take the whole dive.

"It's designed to take on a recruiter's most repetitive task so they can spend more time on the most impactful part of their jobs," LinkedIn's VP of product, Hari Srinivasan said in an interview— "a big statement," he admitted.

The product allows for full job descriptions to be uploaded or just noting what you want it to have, including the job postings that you might like the look of from other companies or roles.

That, in turn, becomes a set of qualifications you are looking for as well as an opening pipeline of candidates that you can engage with — to see whether there are more hiring possibilities like some or perhaps not at all like others — through algorithms that focus their searches on skills instead of other criteria, including where someone lives or was schooled, Srinivasan said.

The AI assistant also integrates with third-party application tracking systems, although the whole system is trained on LinkedIn data, which covers 1 billion users, 68 million companies, and 41,000 skills.

LinkedIn said Hiring Assistant is due to get more features soon, such as messaging and scheduling support for interviews, and handling follow-ups when candidates have questions before or after interviews. Basically the idea is that it's to cover a lot of those time-consuming admin-style busywork tasks, plus some of the thinking that recruiters have to do on a daily basis.

Unlike most of the other AI features LinkedIn has rolled out, Hiring Assistant is very squarely aimed at LinkedIn's B2B business, the products it sells to the recruitment industry.

The company hasn't updated how Talent Solutions, which includes its Recruiter business, has been performing since July 2023, when it said it had passed revenues of $7 billion for the first time. But LinkedIn already proved that AI-for now at least-is an important business driver. Specifically, Premium subscriptions that ordinary consumers take are now being driven by a rise in the use of AI tool usage-with some only available to Premium users. Whether that trickles down to how recruiters buy services on the platform and whether they think these tools are a friend or foe, only time will tell. Either way, LinkedIn's not going to slow down this train.

"We're really focused on making Hiring Assistant great," said Erran Berger, VP of engineering, in an interview.

"This is all bleeding edge, and by that I mean everything from the experience and how our users are going to interact with it, all the way down to the technology that backs it. So, we are really focusing on nailing that as a lot of the technology that we have built is very relevant to problems we're trying to solve for our members and customers.". We know that right now, we really just want to nail this, and then we can figure out where we go from there."