LinkedIn Launches Exciting Gen AI Features in Recruiter and Learning

This week LinkedIn announced some massive Gen AI features in its two flagship products: LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Learning. Let me give you an overview.

Let me start with LinkedIn Learning.

As you know, learning is a complex process. Employees want to ask questions, jump around from topic to topic, and get advice on what they need to know next. Well the product team at LinkedIn Learning has just unveiled their new AI-powered coaching feature, allowing users to ask questions and get narrative answers generated from courses tailored to them, based on insights about their skills and roles.

Consider the demo below. As you can see from the “Learn with AI” button, users can now ask questions and get narrative answers generated from courses. Initially focused on the softskills (PowerSkills), LinkedIn plans to expand this functionality to other courses over time.

This feature, which is likely to appear on many other learning platforms (our JBA Copilot, for example) has an enormous impact on the market. No longer do we have to take a one-hour course or search the internet for tips on a topic: the entire learning library is suddenly unlocked for content, reference, and support.

Not only does this add tremendous value to LinkedIn Learning, it begs the question of where coaching networks go. I won’t belabor that topic, but over time these types of “teaching assistants” or “in line coaches” could help employees with mental health issues, personal relationship challenges, and of course questions about technologies, tools, coding, and data analytics.

LinkedIn is starting with its management and softskills courses, but you can see where this is going. And other vendors (Udemy, for example) are working on this too.

Now On To LinkedIn Recruiter

There are many manual writing and analysis tasks for recruiters. We have to write job descriptions, set up queries for sourcing, send emails to candidates, respond to candidate questions, schedule interviews, record and analyze interviews, write job offers, and even analyze and negotiate salary. All these steps take time, require data, and often become bottlenecks because there are approvals and others involved.

Enter the “automated tools” of LinkedIn Recruiter. Look at this demo, it will really blow your mind.

LinkedIn groups these product innovations into four categories:

• AI-assisted candidate discovery: fast and easy sourcing, filtering, selection, skills analysis
• Smarter suggestions: suggesting locations, job titles, skills, companies, and other criteria that would expand the results of a search
• Simplified candidate outreach: AI-assisted InMails, automated InMail followup messages, CRM and email integrations.
• Actionable data and insights: in-depth reports and insights to analyze job advertisements, posting performance, traffic, and dozens of other things.

As you can see, AI can aid and automate many time-consuming things we do in recruiting. And in every step the “generated” or automated process can be driven by data in the LinkedIn Economic Graph or your own company’s vast database of employee and candidate information.

Consider this demo of Recruiter’s AI-assisted messaging. You can see how Gen AI could save hours of time and leverage data on skills, labor market information, and company values in a highly-tuned “assistant” manner.

Search is similarly important. As this demo shows, users get an easy alternative to the complex “faceted search” or boolean logic that recruiters have to learn. The AI can prompt the user and iterate down a search path without necessarily forcing the user to understand every search criteria and data element in the system. They can search in their own words.

Bottom line: Generative AI is going to transform the way we recruit people, hire, set pay, and learn. As a strong leader in the recruitment and learning markets, LinkedIn is showing us how Gen AI can be a tool for productivity, better operations, and helping employees and recruiters become “SuperPowered” in their work.

Additional Information

Understanding AI in HR: Research Study

The Role Of Generative AI In HR Is Now Becoming Clear

People Analytics Evolved: Systemic Analytics Powered by AI

The HR Tech Workshop, Certificate Program By The Josh Bersin Academy

Talent Acquisition At A Crossroads: Certificate Program By The Josh Bersin Academy