When LinkedIn released its first product for recruiters leveraging agentic AI, tasks were on the chopping block. The new tool was designed to help these people pros focus on what they do best (and, not for nothing, enjoy the most): making meaningful human connections with professionals and helping build successful teams for their organization.

“Ultimately what people are trying to do on LinkedIn is go from a billion people to that one perfect hire,” said Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s VP of product.

In the year or so since its launch, LinkedIn Hiring Assistant has helped the platform’s charter customers—more than 500 companies and 8,000 early users, according to LinkedIn—save more than four hours per role and review 62% fewer profiles, according to an analysis of its early agent use. They’re also seeing InMail acceptance rates blossom by 73%.

“Which means that recruiters need to spend less time looking at profiles, less time writing messages with no reply in order to get to that right side of perfect hire,” Srinivasan said.

The new LinkedIn Hiring Assistant helps extrapolate useful evaluation criteria from the “marketing asset” of a job description, those must-haves and the nice-to-haves.

“If you come in with an intake that you think is so precise, but it doesn’t match the language that is on someone’s profile, or, more accurately, it creates a talent pool that is either too narrow or too wide, you end up with a bad set of search criteria,” he said, adding that LinkedIn’s model iterates and helps narrow down the criteria through natural language.

The agent also leverages the more than one billion monthly users on the platform and the wealth of historic search data to help recruiters best develop intake criteria using candidate profiles in the process.

LinkedIn’s Hiring Assistant is also trained to help surface better candidates for open requisitions. The agent relies on “evidence-based hiring” techniques to not only surface those relevant candidates, but also articulate which skills and competencies are associated with the profile that suggested the AI make such a recommendation.

This unlock, Srinivasan said, impacted InMessage acceptance, he added. In addition to messaging better candidates with a stronger match to the role, the LinkedIn Hiring Assistant is able to better personalize auto-generated communication into “a much more detailed message on a much more detailed search.”

Additionally, LinkedIn’s agent helps manage small recruiting operations after hours or when a recruiter is away from their desk. Agents can handle some basic screening questions that save recruiters both time and effort assessing basic competency for the role, ensuring proper work authorization is secured, and that location or relocation criteria is met.

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