LinkedIn adds free AI tools for job hunters and recruiters

If you’ve ever considered applying for a job through LinkedIn, you’ll know that the experience can be immediately frustrating: openings that look interesting can see hundreds or thousands of applications within hours — LinkedIn, a social for the working world The network proudly releases its own version of viral hype. But you might as well throw a penny into a giant fountain for luck so that your appeal doesn’t drown in that noise.

Now LinkedIn has created an AI product to throw job seekers a lifeline. A new Jobs Match tool will give its 1 billion users — who are currently applying for jobs on its platform at a rate of 9,000 applications per minute — instant advice on whether a particular job opening is a good time to apply for them.

In addition, it is launching a recruitment AI agent aimed at small businesses, a synthetic version of the hiring managers and teams that larger businesses typically use to create job applications, tap qualified candidates and triage applications. Both are “free” to use – that is, you don’t have to be a paying user of LinkedIn to use it.

Notably, both products were built by LinkedIn on top of its own AI technology and its own first-party LinkedIn data — though it may incorporate other data sources over time, director of product management Rohan Rajeev told TechCrunch in an interview. That’s in contrast to several launches over the past few years that have made LinkedIn lean heavily on technology from OpenAI, the AI ​​startup. Hilte is supported by Microsoftwhich also owns LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has a long history of building AI tools for its platform, but these have focused on algorithms and connection suggestions, as well as tools to manage and build its database. These predate the development of generative AI and the wave of consumer services emerging from it.

Much of what LinkedIn has launched on the AI ​​front in the past few years has tapped generative AI to juice activity on the site: products to help people. Start the conversation with each other; Coming up with “insightful” content for them Feeds and profileshelp Write the adAnd more, all powered by OpenAI.

The tools, launched today, will give filling jobs a better funnel of suitable applicants and those more likely to fit them, helping them find better filters for jobs, also to help with juicing activity, but in a less public way.

Rajeev noted that there are now 5 million people who have “open to work” on their profiles, up 40% from a year ago, with 67 million users looking for jobs every week. On the small business side, about 2.5 million are using LinkedIn to fill roles. That’s to say nothing of the huge number of people who have lost their jobs as the economy improves in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic – more than 152,000 people were laid off in the tech sector alone in 2024. Layoffs.fyi Tracker.

Yet LinkedIn’s job search statistics are relatively small because the site has more than a billion registered users. In fact, it runs the risk of losing momentum in its recruitment business because of how painful it is to use, both for those looking for jobs and those trying to fill them, Rajeev said.

“[They’re] Spending three to five hours a day reviewing applications, and less than half of the job applications submitted are actually meeting the required criteria,” he said. “It’s completely broken, and we know it.”

So while LinkedIn has built many products specifically for premium users, to encourage more people to pay for the service, now it’s swinging the other way. It is taking two premium tools – for AI tools respectively looking for job and AI agents to assist recruitment — and making versions of them available to everyone.

It will be interesting to see how the uptake is and if it increases the number of people using the platform to hire (which is still a paid service) and look for work. At a time when the company is also Checking On how it collects and uses data, it gives LinkedIn an anchor that it’s also providing some utility.