Job hunters, now might be a good time to make your page look better.
MSFT 1.26% is Microsoft. LinkedIn launched a new AI hiring tool on Tuesday that can make job requirements lists, look through profile pages, and suggest users to managers as possible “top candidates” for new job openings.
The technology, which is called Hiring Assistant, can tell recruiters about LinkedIn users based on their location, skills, and other qualities that the recruiter is looking for, officials said. More than one message can be sent to those people, and simple pre-screening questions can even be taken care of.
This means that if you have the right skills, a recruiter might see your picture even if you haven’t sent in an application.
Hiring Assistant is meant to do the boring jobs for recruiters so they can focus on more important parts of their job, according to Hari Srinivasan, vice president of product at LinkedIn. He said this in a virtual press briefing.
LinkedIn already had AI-powered hiring tools that hiring managers could use to sort through possible candidates before the new assistant came along.
However, the hiring helper can do other things: Executives at LinkedIn said that as candidates use the technology, the AI tool learns about what they like and makes its suggestions better.
LinkedIn’s new feature is the newest addition to a growing number of AI-powered hiring tools that are meant to make it easier for companies to match qualified people with open jobs. However, the results have been mixed.
Job hunters should make their personal pages look better.
How can people looking for work get ready for more managers to use the tool? The best thing you can do is fill out your LinkedIn page with lots of information.
As Hiring Assistant becomes more popular, Srinivasan said, “Just showing what you’ve done and being able to highlight those skills will be a very important thing.” He also said that the technology can “pick up on all kinds of nuance” in the details of a user’s work history.
MarketWatch spoke with Erran Berger, vice president of product engineering, who said that LinkedIn’s AI assistant suggests candidates based on the job requirements set by the employer. That could include things like area, skills, years of experience, or other needs.
In its privacy policy, LinkedIn says it can use users’ personal information to create and train AI models and learn new things with AI’s help, “so that our services can be more relevant and useful to you and others.”
According to the company, the Hiring Assistant software is only offered to a small group of clients that use LinkedIn’s recruiting platform right now. These clients include big companies like Canva, Siemens, and AMD, which makes semiconductors.
The AI tool will be sold as an add-on to LinkedIn’s current hiring clients, but the price hasn’t been set yet.
AI and the hire process cause worry
There are already a lot of companies that use automated tools to sort and rank job applicants. Some have even gone further, using AI to watch how an applicant does in a video interview or make games that test their personality or skills.
BourseWatch has heard from recruiters that AI hiring tools are even more important now that the job market is slowing down and there are fewer recruiters to go around. This is because hiring teams are getting too many applications.
Some people don’t like how artificial intelligence is being used in hiring because it’s not always clear how the tools are being used. They also think that the software could lead to biassed or unfair hiring choices.
Workers often don’t know that an AI tool is being used, let alone how it works or that it might be biassed against them’, Olga Akselrod, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, told BourseWatch earlier this autumn.
“Data from the past, or what has happened before, trains algorithmic tools to make decisions,” she said. “That data is going to bake in any biassed decisions and systems made by people.”
Some people have said that AI has failed in the past, like when Amazon got rid of a tool that was biassed against women and when a new paper showed that AI models used by companies to read text were biassed against people with disabilities.
Some politicians have already taken steps to limit how algorithms can be used to hire people. A law was passed in New York City that says employers who use “automated employment decision tools” must have them checked for bias by a third party once a year.
LinkedIn’s hiring tool is mostly meant to help recruiters find new employees; it’s not meant to help them make final hiring choices. Executives say that having a person oversee the Hiring Assistant is “critical.”
Berger told MarketWatch that the company is “very serious” about its promise to use AI in a responsible way. He said LinkedIn doesn’t have any search tools that let recruiters target specific groups of people, and it doesn’t let recruiters use biassed hiring prompts.
Berger said, “We are always working to make sure that our systems can find and get rid of any unintentional biases that might come up in the hiring or evaluation processes.” He said that includes any possible bias in the program that might change how people meet the requirements.
When asked directly if the company would send its AI Hiring Assistant for a third-party bias check, Berger did not answer.
He said, “If harmful biases are found, we work to get rid of them.”
