LinkedIn rolls out new generative AI tool for job seekers

LinkedIn has introduced a new feature for premium users that uses generative AI to help jobseekers find new roles.

The social media platform, owned by Microsoft, debuted the AI chatbot, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, to a subset of US-based premium career members on 1 November 2023. 

LinkedIn said the AI tool will leverage a knowledge graph based on data from its 1 billion members and 67 million employers to provide users with advice on how they can tailor their profile to make applications more successful and evaluate whether or not they are a good fit for roles.

The AI will also analyze a user’s posts on their feed and suggest relevant opportunities that users may have missed in their search. 

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VP of Engineering Lei Yan said the target for the new tool is for job seekers to receive a bespoke experience tailored to their sector and skills,

"We’re transforming the job seeking experience for our Premium subscribers to be more personalized, efficient, and adaptive with the help of AI. Premium subscribers will also see personalized takeaways and insights on posts and articles in their feed to help them build professional knowledge and stay up to date in their domain.”

The new chatbot follows the integration of several AI features on the social networking platform in recent months. In May 2023, the firm introduced a raft of AI enhancements such as automatically generated, personalized recruiter messages, AI-enhanced job descriptions, and a profile building service.

Concerns around AI in recruitment

The use of AI in the recruitment sector has received some criticism in recent years.. For example, in 2018 machine learning engineers at Amazon, which had been using automated application review processes since 2014, discovered the recruiting mechanism had an internal bias against women.

The system, trained on the hiring patterns from the previous 10 years, was observed to be recreating the gender-based inequalities that existed in the company’s previous recruitment cycles. 

Recent research has shown racial bias, in addition to gender-based inequality, remains a pervasive issue in tech recruitment, suggesting AI systems trained on currently available datasets are likely to reflect this bias, and may even amplify it.

The potential for AI to address employment inequalities

Yet AI’s impact on labor market inequalities has the potential to be a positive one if applied in specific ways. This is the argument of the founder and chief executive of Melbourne-based startup Sapia.ai, Barb Hyman.

The hiring automation service interviews thousands of candidates simultaneously via text chat, which removes many of the factors that might influence an AI or human in charge of recruitment, claimed Hyman when speaking to The Guardian in March 2023. 

“The only way to remove bias in hiring is to not use people right at the first gate,” Hyman says. “That’s where our technology comes in: it’s blind; it’s untimed, it doesn’t use resume data or your social media data or demographic data. All it is using is the text results.”