Microsoft’s LinkedIn takes AI to the resume for jobseekers, recruiters

LinkedIn’s new AI features allow users to have their questions answered straight from the platform’s courses as well as write a profile summary for them.

LinkedIn “learn with AI” function in action.

LinkedIn is moving toward a future in which each user has their own AI jobs coach, which can help spruce up their profile, recommend new roles and provide insights into the jobs market.

The Microsoft-owned platform overnight introduced a number of new features which use artificial intelligence to improve productivity for not only jobseekers but recruiters who use its paid service.

Chief operating officer Dan Shapero told The Australian that LinkedIn was training its artificial intelligence engine on all of the platform’s online learning content – which he said was the largest online learning library – so that it could provide advice to users.

“The thing that we are working on now is that we think that every professional should have a personalised instructor,” he said.

“What this does is it leans on our knowledge that is inherent on LinkedIn and brings it into a personalised instructor experience which then points users to learning content where they can go much deeper.”

Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in generative AI has made its way to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft, has spent heavily on generative AI over the past 12 months, investing $14bn earlier this year into OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT.

Those investments appear to be surfacing on LinkedIn where a premium user can now use AI to scan over their profile and write a better summary.

The platform will soon provide an area called Learn with AI where a user can ask specific questions and answers would be pulled from LinkedIn Learning’s online library with the option to study the full course.

One of the newer AI features, exclusive to those who subscribe to its service for recruiters, was pre-writing outreach emails based on a person’s profile.

“Increasingly, we’re using it to help them write outreach emails so that they can speak in a language that’s attractive to the candidate and it’s going to get a response,” Mr Shapero said.

Asked whether LinkedIn was concerned the use of generative AI to write profile summaries could result in people having the same “about me” sections, Mr Shapero said that “authenticity” would help avoid that.

“I think the key is that their profile is authentic. The key is that when someone looks at a summary the goal of it is to summarise what this person has done and I think if people had accurate and well-represented summaries, it helps everyone,” he said.

Mr Shapero said LinkedIn had used artificial intelligence well over 10 years and the technology had been used for recommending job applicants among online learning courses.

AI will be used by LinkedIn to sharpen profiles and assist recruiters.

“We’ve been in a company rooted in AI for well over a decade. AI is sort of inherent in every product that we’ve built and we use AI for things like recommending candidates to recruiters that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise seen,” he said.

New data from the platform found the number of job postings on LinkedIn that mention AI or generative AI grew 2.2 times over the past two years. Since November last year, the number of job postings mentioning GPT or ChatGPT had grown 21 times.

Workers who add AI skills to their profile were nine times greater in June 2023 than in January 2016.

About 60 per cent of professional workers across the Asia Pacific are looking to use AI to seek career advice or solve issues at work. HR Professionals in particular see the use of the technology as beneficial, and about 80 per cent said they saw the technology as an “invisible teammate”.

LinkedIn’s biggest regional member base exists in the Asia Pacific, where there are more than 269 million members. Of those, 14 million are in Australia.

Mr Shapero said that AI provided a major opportunity to transform the jobs market and that was already visible on platforms such as LinkedIn.

“We think that AI has the opportunity to take the world through a talent transformation, the likes that perhaps we’ve never seen before,” he said.