If you know anyone who is currently on the job market, you’ve probably heard stories about how difficult it can be to even get an interview. Part of the problem, according to LinkedIn, is that too many people are applying for jobs for which they are not qualified, making it difficult to distinguish between good candidates.
The company hopes that its new AI-powered Job Search feature will help partially solve this problem. The feature, which begins rolling out today, uses artificial intelligence to provide detailed resumes along with job listings so users know how qualified they are for a particular role.
LinkedIn product manager Rohan Rajiv says the AI feature goes beyond the simple keyword matching that job seekers have come to rely on. Instead, it tries to understand the breadth of your experience and how it aligns with the qualifications listed in the job description.
The goal, Rajeev tells Engadget, is to help identify the jobs for which a person is most qualified and discourage people from applying for roles for which they are not qualified. “If you’re qualified, we can help you, but also if you’re not qualified, we can hopefully find you other places where you’ll be qualified,” Rajv told Engadget.
While Job Search will be available to all LinkedIn users, there are some additional benefits for LinkedIn Premium subscribers, including more detailed information about their job match rate. Ultimately, Rajiv says, LinkedIn will also be able to show more qualified candidates to recruiters as well, to reduce the likelihood of good candidates being overlooked.
Whether all of this will actually ease the pain of potential job seekers remains to be seen. In 2024, the tech industry lost tens of thousands of jobs due to layoffs. So did the video game industry. The media and entertainment industry is not in a better position either.
All of this would seem to create even more competition for the same jobs, which dynamic artificial intelligence is not able to fully cope with. “I think some of it will always be related to labor market dynamics, but I would argue that a large part of it is just a lack of transparency,” says Rajiv. He notes that the first tests of the feature have shown that the “non-trivial part” of the problem is “more solvable than we think.”
For their part, recruiters seem to approve of LinkedIn’s latest advice on applying for fewer jobs. The company’s blog has featured feedback from recruiters who are practically begging unqualified applicants to stop flooding their inboxes.
