What to Know About LinkedIn's New AI-Powered Job Search Tools

LinkedIn is unveiling several AI-powered tools to help job seekers find their next roles. Yet, many people are worries about using AI and the accuracy of such tools. On the latest episode of Get Hired with Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn Director of Product Management Rohan Rajiv discusses the new tools, the technology behind them and how he and his team ensure the features are accurate and helpful.

The new tools, which are available for LinkedIn Premium members, feature a revamped way to search for open positions and assistants for resumes and cover letters. Rohan and LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman discuss them on by one in the episode.

A transcript of the conversation is available below. You can listen to the conversation above or at Apple Podcasts by clicking here.

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TRANSCRIPT: What to Know About LinkedIn's New AI-Powered Job Search Tools

Andrew Seaman: Hey, everyone. Andrew here, popping into your feeds this Thursday with a special bonus episode of Get Hired. As I hope you know, I don't use this podcast as a commercial for LinkedIn, even though it's my employer. Yet, I sometimes need to talk about it because my whole job is to help you with your job search and careers. LinkedIn plays a big role in that for most people.?

Today, we're talking about a new suite of AI-powered job search tools that LinkedIn is debuting, including a new jobs page, a new way to search for roles, a way to review resumes, and something to help you write cover letters. The goal of today's show is to teach you a bit about these tools, how they work, and to introduce you to one of the key people behind them. So don't go away, we'll be right back after this break.

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs, and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn senior managing editor for jobs and career development. Bringing conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between. Joining me today is Rohan Rajiv, director of product management at LinkedIn. Rohan's been at the forefront of designing LinkedIn's new AI-powered job search tools. So, I wanted to sit down with him for a peek behind the curtain on how these tools work. Here's Rohan.

Rohan Rajiv: AI, in its ability as a matchmaker, has existed in various forms for the past, give it 10, 15 years. And so if you think about any marketplace, and LinkedIn obviously being one example, we are powered by AI and have been for a while. However, the difference here ever since the famous launch of ChatGPT, is we are in the age of generative AI. Generative AI has two very unique superpowers. The first is its ability to make sense of massive datasets of unstructured data. And then the second is something we're all aware of, but its ability to take all of that and converse with us in natural language. And that is nothing short of magical.

Andrew: It really is, especially when you see it in practice. And then, I guess that tees us up to talk about what you're announcing today. The first thing is AI-powered job search. How is that going to work?

Rohan: Yeah. Whenever you have a major technological breakthrough, it is a time for us to look at, how can we solve old problems in new ways? And so let's start with that framing, because we know we have this breakthrough with generative AI, that means we can take existing problems and solve them in new ways. And it isn't always apparent on day one exactly how that will manifest, but you've got to try and you've got to figure out what those core problems are and how you want to approach it. Keeping that in mind, if you think about navigating our careers, I think of it a lot like hiking a mountain. And if you think about the job search as an example of one specific hike we're taking, it can feel challenging, perhaps even insurmountable, especially if you're not familiar with the terrain. And you know in your heart of hearts, obviously reaching the top will be worth it, whatever that career milestone is.

But you also know, especially where job searching is concerned, it can be exhausting, it can be painful, and it's really difficult to know the best part in order to get there. Which is why we have folks like you who pull together such wonderful resources for job seekers, because there's that evergreen need. Now, if you think about LinkedIn, the way I've thought about this is that we have always provided the gear for that climb. With the warm jacket, the hiking poles, we've basically... And this is through the ability today to search for and find jobs, to connect with people, to tell recruiters you're open to work. But I think this is where I go back to that notion of, with this technology, we can solve all problems in new ways.

I think in addition to the gear on that hike, we are offering an experienced guide.A guide who will strategically advise you on the best way to get to your destination, and has all the insights to help you make this journey with a sense of confidence. And if you think about what great guides do, they'll take you on the best and most efficient path. And they have this ability to transform an experience that can be difficult, that can be frustrating, that can be lonely because only you can make the climb at the end of the day. But by making you feel empowered and supported, that whole thing enables you to essentially do something that you wouldn't have thought is possible. And I think that's the way we are thinking about this.

Andrew: And also, because LinkedIn, we're all about real-time information. So with AI we can, to stick to your analogy of climbing a mountain, view the entire mountain and say, "Oh, there's something happening over here. Let's take a new route."

Rohan: Yeah, 100%. This guide is essentially our new AI-powered job search. And we're rolling this out to every premium subscriber in English globally. And if you think about the problem, every day job seekers spend hours looking at job details pages attempting to guess the answers to a few questions. It's like, am I a good fit? They mentally map their resume, you mentally map your profile to the job, and then try to compute if you might be a good fit. If you think you're a good fit then you ask, "Hey, how can I position myself well? How can I make sure that I cover for any weaknesses?" All of that. And you think about the difficulty of this journey, this guesswork makes it extremely exhausting.

Toward the end of last year, we started testing the AI powered job search guide to eliminate this guesswork. So on every job details page we started sharing responses to these questions. Am I a good fit? How can I position myself? And the principles we keep using for this guide is efficiency and quality. Efficiency means we want to give you personalized responses to these questions for every job based on what we know, so you don't have to go through that mental computation that we just talked about. And then quality, in that should enable you to focus on the jobs that you are a good fit for or where you have a chance, versus wasting your time on places where you wouldn't want to spend your time on.

And this is something, as I said, we've been testing over the past months. We've asked for feedback on this guidance, and over 90% of the responses are worded as helpful every week. We've got a lot of great feedback from job seekers and how this has changed how they search for roles, focusing on quality instead of quantity. So this is incredibly exciting.

Andrew: Yeah. And also, I think a lot of people are terrible judges of their own abilities. If you could have an impartial measurement, that can help you say like, "Hey, you are there," or "You can do this job."

Rohan: 100%. And I think this is where we do have a unique role to play. Because, you think about the role a good guide plays, is that you're not the first person that they're taking up a mountain or on a difficult hike. They've seen many, many folks like you. They know it's challenging, they have empathy, but they also have structure and experience and insights. And I think it's the same way. We obviously see a lot of matches taking place every day on our platform, and this guide gives us an ability to scale good guidance.

Andrew: The next feature is the jobs page, which I assume most people are familiar with. They go, they can plug in the role they want, where they want it. There are a lot of filters, but now it's going to be a little bit more intuitive, right?

Rohan: Yeah. Let's talk about this. One of the beauties about building product at a place like LinkedIn is that you have a lot of people using these products. And when that happens, you start seeing them do things that is not possible in the product today, but that gives you a sense of what they would like to do. We think of it as duct tape, where they use duct tape to push the product in different directions.

One of the cool things about launching this AI-powered experience is that we have this free text box and we see people sharing feedback and asking questions, and pushing the tool to do more than it does right now. And what we found was that members really want to search for jobs in the same manner they like to ask questions or would have a conversation with a friend or a guide. For example, instead of plugging in certain titles and locations and putting in filters, we saw queries like, "Find me digital marketing jobs that pay more than $100,000 in Seattle."?

And that's why we are excited to launch a new conversational experience where you can search in everyday language instead of working your way through the traditional search filters. You can basically conversationally add title, location, company, pay. We took some of the highest usage filters and we've just made it easy for people to just ask. But I'm sure as we launch this we're going to see more emergent use cases. And it's just day one, so we're going to have a lot of work to do.

Andrew: If someone says, "Hey, I would like to find accounting jobs in Omaha, Nebraska that pay at least 60,000," you could do that. But then what you could say is, actually what if I say I want to find accounting jobs that pay at least 60,000, but I want it to be remote? Can you have a back and forth with it?

Rohan: Yes, 100%.

Andrew: Oh, that’s great.

Rohan: You can have a back and forth and talk to it like you would talk to a guide.

Andrew: We'll be right back with Rohan Rajiv.

Andrew: And we're back with Rohan Rajiv, director of product management at LinkedIn.

The next thing I think we're rolling out is a resume review. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think everyone would love as much help with their resume as possible.

Rohan: Yeah. I think there are two pain points we've heard a lot here. The first is, as you move from quantity to quality, as we attempt to remove the guesswork, what we are hearing from our members is, yes, I'm focused on fewer applications. Now, ultimately it's your skills and experiences that are at the heart of this application. But a lot of people find hard is to communicate those skills and experiences in a way that resonates.?

And this is where the guide excels. It's personalized. These resume optimizations are personalized for the job you're applying to, with tailored recommendations to help you showcase your most relevant skills. Because for a lot of people, especially folks who've worked in different roles, there are a lot of experiences they have, and we want to make it a lot more easier and help them save time as they're going about doing this.

Andrew: That's really great, because I know a lot of the conversations I have with people it's about, what do I leave on? What do I take off? What do I emphasize? And a lot of times when people are applying to jobs, they don't understand necessarily how you tailor a resume from one job to the other. So it sounds like this might give you some pointers, right?

Rohan: It will definitely help. And that is the goal.

Andrew: And then, obviously the cousin of the resume is the cover letter. What are we doing with that?

Rohan: I think it's the same concept. I think it's this notion of it's hard to sometimes communicate your skills and experiences in a way that resonates, especially when you're thinking about multiple roles. Look, a lot of people are job searching at the end of a job, at the end of a long day, or between breaks, et cetera, et cetera. And writer's block is very real when you're staring at an empty screen. And we just want to make it easier, so we're going to help you take a first pass, you can converse with it, ask it to make it more casual, make it more formal, include something. And it'll just help give you a draft that would basically serve as a great starting point.

Andrew: I guess the next part of this is a lot of times people, especially, they hear AI, they've seen a lot of headlines warning about AI, the accuracy of AI. Can you give us a little peek behind the curtains of how LinkedIn ensures these products work, that they're being fair, that they are working as expected?

Rohan: Yeah. I think there are two angles to this. The first is the fact that we work with AI for a very long time, and Microsoft has a set of responsible AI principles that ensures fairness and a whole bunch of table stakes, features that we've taken for granted, and that flows across all our AI systems. I think with generative AI specifically, if you think about where we spend our time, a disproportionate amount of time, is ensuring that we are able to get to better and better quality. It's always a journey, and that's why we pay a lot of attention to how many people are finding it helpful stat on a weekly basis. And I think it's just very encouraging when we see numbers above 90%. That means that we're hitting the mark more than nine times out of 10. Knowing that, of course, we are going to have to continue improving. And we'll continue striving for that 100% score. But I think that focus on quality is just critical with these products, and that's a big part of what we do every day.

Andrew: And for people, it sounds like they'll be able to provide feedback on these features too. If they do have feedback, they can offer that via LinkedIn then, right?

Rohan: Yeah, 100%. Every response actually has a feedback option.

Andrew: Great. So look for the thumbs up, thumbs down, right?

Rohan: 100%, yes.

Andrew: My last question then is, as someone who obviously has been working with AI and is figuring out how to implement it into products, how do you suggest people approach AI in their own careers? And how should they view AI? Because I think a lot of people have mixed feelings.

Rohan: I think the first step is acknowledging that we are going through a technology platform shift, and it's a big platform shift. We've seen similar shifts with technology, with consumer technology actually over the last 20 years. We saw computers come in probably 30, 40 years ago. Then we saw the internet, then we saw mobile phones. And you think about how these shifts played out, every one of these shifts is slightly different in nature. But I think what's super clear once you acknowledge it, and that gets us to step two, is knowing that you're going to have different tools to solve all problems.

If you think about folks who used to call a travel agent, and then the internet came around and they could do their own travel planning. It's just a new tool. And I think that's going to be the case with AI. We are still very early the equivalent of day 0, 1992 in the cusp of the internet revolution. Maybe we are playing around with the Palm Trios and the early BlackBerrys. The reason I say all of this is that I think it's going to take some time for us to play out. As you can see, every company is experimenting with these tools, so are we. And we're learning a ton. What is, again, unmistakable or what is hard to debate is the fact that these tools are there, they can be excellent. It is what you make of it. These tools are going to get better and it's going to help us to leverage them.

So step one, acknowledge. Step two, know that these tools can help us solve all problems in new ways, and we're going to have to experiment and learn. And that gets me to the third and final thing on the job search. The important thing here is that companies hire people, they don't hire AI tools. These tools are intended to be helpful, and we are in the business of creating tools that hopefully help people a lot. But ultimately, it is your skills and your experiences that are going to go land that next job. And it's just super important to keep sight of that and make sure that we are using these tools to help us get better starting points, to help improve our point of view, improve how we present ourselves. But ultimately, we have to drive, and that doesn't change.

Andrew: And also, to pick up on the one point you made, is that companies hire humans. Humans at those companies hire humans. Even though we're introducing a lot of these AI tools, it is to enable job seekers to communicate more readily and easily with the humans on the other side of LinkedIn.

Rohan: 100%. And I think if you think about the trajectory over time, good tools remove drudgery and help us do things that are more human. And I think these tools, as time plays out and as they get better, should do the same. If you take the job-seeking experience, hopefully we'll be able to remove the guesswork and the painful apply after apply, after apply process that we have today. To focus on fewer places, land them with quality, and hopefully spend time on the human things, which is actually getting to know the team and the company, and then making a decision. That's the future we'd like to build.

Andrew: That sounds great. Well, thank you so much, Rohan.

Rohan: Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew: That was Rohan Rajiv, director of product management at LinkedIn. If you're leaving today's conversation with a new learning to apply to your job search or career, I'd like to invite you to write about it in a review on Apple Podcast. Our team really enjoys reading what you learn from our shows, plus it helps other people discover our community.

Speaking of community, remember that we're always here backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me, Andrew Seaman, and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue the conversation. In fact, subscribe to my weekly newsletter that's called, you guessed it, Get Hired, to get even more information delivered to you every week. You can find those links in the show notes. And of course, don't forget to click the follow, subscribe, or whatever other button you find to get our podcast delivered to you every Wednesday, because we'll be continuing these conversations on the next episode, right here, wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This show is produced by Grace Rubin and Emily Reeves. Assaf Gidron engineered our show, Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is head of news production. Enrique Montalvo is our executive producer. Courtney Coupe is the head of original programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.

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