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If you’ve ever applied for a job or considered applying through LinkedIn, you’ll know that the experience can be immediately frustrating: Openings that seem interesting can usually see hundreds or thousands of applications within hours – LinkedIn, the business social network, proudly builds viral hype expose your own version. But you might as well throw a penny into a giant fountain for luck so that your application doesn’t get drowned out in the noise.
Now LinkedIn has created an AI product to throw job seekers a lifeline of sorts. The new Jobs Match tool will provide instant advice to its 1 billion users, currently applying for jobs on its platform at 9,000 applications per minute, whether a particular job opening is worth applying for.
In addition, it is launching an artificial intelligence recruiting agent aimed at small businesses, a synthetic version of the teams that hiring managers and larger businesses typically use to prepare job applications, screen and screen qualified candidates. Both are “free” to use – meaning you don’t have to be a paid LinkedIn user to use it.
Notably, both products are built on LinkedIn’s own AI technology and its own first-party LinkedIn data — though over time it may integrate other data sources, director of product management Rohan Rajiv told TechCrunch. This is in contrast to a number of introductions over the past few years that have seen LinkedIn build on AI startup OpenAI’s technology. Powered by Microsoftwhich also owns LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has a long history of building artificial intelligence tools for its platform, but these have focused on areas such as algorithms and connection suggestions, as well as tools for managing and building a database. These predate the development of generative AI and the resulting wave of consumer services.
Many of LinkedIn’s AI launches over the past few years have revolved around tapping into generative AI for activity on the site: products to help people start conversations with each other; Meet “skilled” content for them feeds and profilesplease help write an adand more, all powered by OpenAI.
The tools launching today will give those filling jobs a better funnel for suitable applicants and help job seekers better filter jobs they might be a better fit for.
Rajiv noted that there are now 5 million people who have “Open for Work” enabled on their profiles, which is 40% more than a year ago, and 67 million users are looking for work every week. On the small business side, about 2.5 million people use LinkedIn to fill roles. That’s to say nothing of the huge number of people who have lost their jobs as the economy continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic — more than 152,000 people were laid off in 2024 in the tech sector alone. Layoffs.fyi tracker.
However, LinkedIn’s job seeker numbers are relatively small considering the site has over one billion registered users. Indeed, there is a risk that hiring momentum will be lost because of how painful it is to use, both among job seekers and those trying to fill them, Rajiv said.
“(They) spend three to five hours a day reviewing applications and find that less than half of the job applications submitted actually meet the required criteria,” he said. “It’s completely broken and we know it.”
So while LinkedIn has developed a number of products specifically for premium users to encourage more people to pay for the service, it’s now swinging in the other direction. It buys two premium tools – respectively, AI tools looking for a job and AI agents to assist employment — and make their versions available to everyone.
It’s worth watching to see how the reception goes and if it increases the number of people using the platform to recruit (still a paid service) and look for work. At the same time as the company is checked about how it collects and uses information, this gives LinkedIn an anchor to claim that it also provides some utility.
