AI Tools Continue to Change the Hiring Landscape

LinkedIn’s AI recruiting agent will soon tailor its candidate recommendations to each recruiter’s own hiring history. The company announced LinkedIn Hiring Assistant 2, a new version of its AI agent for recruiters that remembers how individual recruiters and their companies hire and applies those preferences to future searches.In LinkedIn’s example, a recruiter who asked the first version for a product management candidate got exactly that. The new version would also look for someone close to the office, in the retail industry, with mid-level experience, if that is what the recruiter has hired for before.Dan Reid, the VP of product at LinkedIn Talent Solutions, told customers at the company’s Talent Connect event in New York City that the agent learns "not how everybody hires, but how you hire," HR Brew reported.LinkedIn is pitching the upgrade as an answer to a crowded market. Global hiring is down 30%, and applications per applicant are up 30% compared with pre-pandemic levels, the company says. LinkedIn says more than 20,000 companies now use its agentic hiring products, including AMD, Cisco, and Zillow. The company reports that recruiters are four times more likely to contact candidates sourced by Hiring Assistant than those found through traditional methods, and 27% more likely than they were six months ago.But recruiters still keep the controls. They can switch individual steps on or off, override recommendations, and review what the agent has done, HR Brew reported.That boundary matches what practitioners have said about AI in hiring. During a panel at From Day One’s March virtual conference, titled "Smart Tools, Smarter Hiring: How TA Leaders Can Leverage Their Human Judgment," speakers noted that AI recruiting tools prove most useful for high-volume tasks such as screening questions, scheduling, and candidate matching.But the panel also agreed that giving AI the final say doesn’t work. “We don’t have AI making decisions," Angie Lombardo, the VP, global director of operations for talent acquisition at Arcadis, said. As agentic AI becomes more involved in the recruiting process, HR leaders who use these new tools have to decide which steps the agent should run, who reviews its recommendations, and how often someone checks its work.Ade Akin covers artificial intelligence, workplace wellness, HR trends, and digital health solutions.(Photo by gmast3r/iStock)