LinkedIn thinks it has the solution to our hiring crisis

Paloma Canseco has applied to 250 jobs since July. She’s tweaked cover letters and filled out long, monotonous forms on different companies’ internal job postings. And last week, she got a call back from a recruiter about a graphic-design job. Robin was polite and friendly on the phone, asking Canseco open-ended questions, like, “Tell me about your last project and what you liked about it.” But Robin wasn’t a person. It was an AI recruiter.

Canseco hung up. “This is meant to be a conversation,” she tells me. “I’m not going to spend my time with this recruiting company if they don’t hire actual recruiters.” It takes her half an hour to apply to each job on average, she says, and putting that effort in only to be met with an automated response feels like an insult.

Job hunting has never been fun, but the process “feels broken,” says Rohan Rajiv, the head of career products at LinkedIn. According to the company’s data, job applications are up 20% since last year. It’s an intense and frustrating process. And LinkedIn wants to fix the disconnect, in part by fighting AI … with AI.

Earlier this year, the company rolled out new AI tools to premium subscribers. People could open a chat window and ask a chatbot whether they were a good fit for a job based on their profile and the job description. Then, this summer, LinkedIn unveiled an update that would use generative AI to quickly write cover letters based on job descriptions and a user’s profile. I tried it and found the results weren’t bad — a cover letter may just need a few tweaks or extra personalization before it sounded like me.

In the coming weeks, LinkedIn will begin making its AI job-matching tools widely available to all users, Rajiv tells me. They can visit any job listing and ask LinkedIn to show how they match up, and generative AI will detail how well they fit the role and break down how a recruiter may evaluate their profile. The hope is that with more transparency, people will apply to fewer jobs — but ones that better fit their qualifications — and stop “swinging at every pitch,” Rajiv says, adding: “It’s natural to make quantity and volume your friend. But the greater the volume, the tougher the match.”

The age-old career advice that there’s no harm in trying, it turns out, has a limit that we’ve stretched past the point of insanity. Can LinkedIn save us from hiring hell?

Only 30 years ago, most people largely found jobs through their networks, career fairs, and newspaper ads. Monster launched its job board in 1994, and LinkedIn came around about a decade later. Recruiting software and AI, which seemed like opportunities to streamline the process, have in some ways further complicated the art of landing a good gig. Applicants are asked to fill out long forms that repeat the information already outlined on their résumés and LinkedIn profiles, in what seems like an endurance test of their ever-depleting sanity. Sites like LinkedIn are great for searching tons of relevant job openings in one place, but people can end up overapplying, casting a wide net to roles that might not be the best fit.

That’s particularly true for some using LinkedIn’s Easy Apply feature or generative-AI tools that help them mass-apply. In a ZipRecruiter survey last year, 25% of respondents who had gotten new jobs said they used AI to help them. Following the peak of the pandemic, people were looking to quit and change jobs during the “Great Resignation” at the highest rates since the US Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the data in 2000. That means more people are entering this chaotic job market and dealing with the pain points over and over.

Job seekers and recruiters are caught in what feels like a never-ending loop.

All those hopeful (or half-assed) résumés also hit a wall of overwhelmed recruiters. Some use AI to try to reduce the noise. In a Society for Human Resource Management survey of companies that use AI in recruiting, nearly 65% of respondents said they used it for writing job descriptions, 34% said they used it to review and scan résumés, and 33% said they used it to communicate with applicants throughout the process. Other recruiters are wary of the tech because we still don’t know enough about how those tools make the decisions they do. And automated human-resources tech has a history of favoring men over women, as well as down-ranking résumés with Black-sounding names or those with employment gaps.

The fatigue has fully hit job seekers. This week, in a post that went viral on LinkedIn, Hayley Finegan, an HR professional, posted an “open but picky” banner on her LinkedIn profile, poking fun at the “open to work” LinkedIn banner, which some job seekers see as desperate and cringeworthy. “I’ve applied for exactly three jobs, and that’s because I’m holding out for the right one,” she wrote. “I’m not here to take just any job — I’m here for the right role.” Capturing the overworked-job-seeker mentality, the post quickly went viral. (Finegan did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this story.)

Job seekers and recruiters are caught in what feels like a never-ending loop. The two may seem pitted against one another, with applicants trying to figure out how to get past the recruiter and get paid, and recruiters working to suss out who’s fluffing up their résumé or even lying. Both are increasingly ghosting one another. In reality, they want the same thing: a good job match for the least amount of effort. There may be no perfect number of jobs to apply to: Indeed recommends people apply to about 15 jobs a week, or two to three each day. But the average recruiting time for a job is going up, hitting 44 days in early 2023, the human-capital advisory firm The Josh Bersin Co. found. And there’s not enough transparency in what’s driving the decision-making.

For people who haven’t updated their profiles, provided as many details about their skills, or posted to the feed, tools like LinkedIn’s may not work as well to fully show their qualifications. But Rajiv says the company’s AI tool will synthesize not just a person’s highlighted skills but other data, like posts they share to the feed, which can include other skills they have. LinkedIn is also shaking things up on the recruiter side. Starting Tuesday, some recruiters can use the company’s hiring assistant, a tool where they upload job descriptions and have generative AI synthesize qualifications for the role and build up a roster of candidates.

The best tool for job hunters is speed. They need to see jobs soon after they’re posted and apply, and that gives them a better chance than applying for hundreds or thousands of jobs. AI may help notify candidates when the right positions are posted. Find that perfect job quickly “can happen, and increasingly it will as these algorithms get smarter,” says Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist. ZipRecruiter also rolled out revamped AI tools to help job seekers find better matches this summer. And earlier this year, Indeed began offering an AI tool to better recommend job candidates to recruiters.

Some recruiters say that AI isn’t capturing the full picture of candidates. Millie Black, a principal technical recruiter at Techtrust, says she’s passionate about AI’s potential. But she says she’s found that tools like ChatGPT don’t “read between the lines” and overlook some skills that may make a candidate a great fit, even if they aren’t the ones directly listed. The same has happened for certain LinkedIn searches, she says. It’s something she could figure out because she has in-depth knowledge of the specialized tech jobs she recruits for. When searching for the one person on the planet who can do the role, recruiters still have to pore over résumés.

But Black also says she’s seen an uptick in fake candidates lately. At times, she’s had to ask candidates for identification documentation before even sending them through the process, or prescreen people on video calls “just to see a face,” she adds. As she’s recruiting for high-paying, US-based jobs that offer remote work, scammers are more common. “My whole job is to beat” down the fakers before they make their way to the hiring managers. She has also learned to add questions to try to weed out less serious applicants. “If you just throw a job up as Easy Apply and don’t add pre-screening questions, you get way too many people,” she says.

Canseco has not yet tried LinkedIn’s AI tools because she isn’t a premium user, but she could get access to them soon. When she applies for jobs, she often uses LinkedIn and tries to reach the company directly, to stand out. One recruiter at a job she recently applied to told her she was among 3,000 applicants they had received in that week.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.