See the Early Impact of LinkedIn’s AI Tools for Recruiters
Ask yourself: When does your recruiting team create the most value? It’s not when you’re bogged down in repetitive, administrative tasks — sifting through resumes, updating your ATS, or sending follow-up messages.
Your team adds the most value when you’re free to focus on the richer, more meaningful parts of your job: building connections with candidates, strategizing with hiring managers, and bringing your employer brand to life. In short, your time is best spent working with people. LinkedIn’s AI tools empower you to do just that.
That’s what we’re hearing from customers using LinkedIn’s new generative AI tools for recruiters, like AI-Assisted Messages, AI-Assisted Search and Projects, AI-Assisted Job Descriptions, with even more AI features on the horizon. (There’s also an exciting new AI-powered guidance feature within LinkedIn Learning — but we’ll stick to AI tools within LinkedIn Recruiter for this story.) All these products are in service of the same goal. It’s all about empowering your team to be more efficient, effective recruiters, free to focus on what you uniquely do best.
To understand the impact recruiters are seeing with LinkedIn’s AI tools, we surveyed charter customers, interviewed practitioners, and analyzed platform data — all to improve our offerings and amplify our customers’ successes. Today, we’re sharing some of these early results in terms of both speed (efficiency) and quality (effectiveness).
For instance, AI-Assisted Messages can help you write unique, personalized InMails more quickly — and job seekers tend to accept those InMails over 10% faster, compared with InMails written without AI assistance. But it’s not just a matter of faster speed and better efficiency; it’s just as important to see higher quality and greater effectiveness. Crucially, AI-assisted InMails also see a 40% higher InMail acceptance rate from job seekers — a massive increase in effectiveness.
“AI helps with the mundane parts of HR, which lets us use our time more effectively,” says Victoria Söderlind, senior recruitment specialist at Toyota Material Handling Europe and an early charter user of LinkedIn’s newest AI tools. “There’s more time to personally connect with candidates, more time to strategize with hiring managers — we’re really spending more time with people instead of spending time on things that could be automated.”
LinkedIn is committed to being a true partner: listening to our members, improving our products, and helping employers use AI responsibly. Thanks to our relationship with Microsoft, our decade of experience integrating AI into LinkedIn, and our grounding in responsible AI principles, you can be confident that you’re leveraging AI in a secure, compliant, and equitable way.
And along with using AI to support hiring, we’re also using it to support skill-building and rolling out new AI-powered LinkedIn Learning features today. LinkedIn Learning has also unlocked AI learning paths for leaders in both talent acquisition and talent development — making them free until June 22, 2024.
Read on for more about the impact customers are seeing with LinkedIn’s AI tools, from speed and efficiency to quality and effectiveness.
Efficiency: LinkedIn’s AI helps you do more in less time
Whether you need to reach candidates before your competitors, react to rapid changes in the market, or simply squeeze more value out of the workday, speed is absolutely vital to the art of recruiting. It’s also where LinkedIn’s AI tools can really help. In a survey of charter customers with early access to AI-Assisted Search and Projects, two out of three (66%) users say it saved them time.
“Our recruiters now don’t have to spend much time sourcing and screening resumes because the system does it for them,” says Nerissa Berba, the executive vice president and chief people officer at Security Bank. “Security Bank uses LinkedIn’s AI recruitment tools to make talent acquisition more efficient.”
Victoria at Toyota Material Handling Europe echoed those sentiments: “I was sitting with a couple colleagues who hadn’t seen AI-Assisted Search yet. I wrote a quick prompt for them, and they were amazed. From the time I started typing, it basically took me 30 seconds to provide a targeted list of over 65 candidate profiles. Before AI, it probably took us 10 to 15 minutes just to get started on that kind of search — now, it takes a couple minutes at most.
“It allows us to reach more candidates; the search is so much quicker, so you have the time to really read up on the individual candidates, instead of just scrolling through results,” she says. “It has also given me much more time to support our hiring managers. Instead of telling them I don’t have the time, now I can say, ‘OK, let’s do a quick search together.’”
And when it comes time to engage candidates, LinkedIn’s AI-Assisted Messages can speed up your outreach. Three out of four (74%) charter customers surveyed agreed that AI-Assisted Messages saved them time.
“Using LinkedIn’s AI for InMails has significantly saved time for the RMIT University talent team,” says Tania Dowling, head of talent acquisition at RMIT. “It allows quick drafting and customization of InMails, enhancing our engagement with prospective candidates.”
And while it can clearly make writing an InMail faster, it also encourages faster responses. As mentioned, job seekers are over 10% faster to accept AI-assisted InMails, compared with messages that are not written with the help of AI.
Speed isn’t everything, and recruiters know that building relationships and bringing people together takes time. But that’s exactly why the efficiency of AI is so important: because it gives you more time to spend on the most worthwhile parts of your job — the people-centric parts.
Effectiveness: LinkedIn’s AI streamlines repetitive tasks without compromising quality
Speed without quality doesn’t count for much. Being the fastest recruiter in the world wouldn’t be terribly helpful if you were instantly finding the wrong people or writing irrelevant InMails at warp speed. To really provide value, speed has to be paired with quality.
Importantly, among LinkedIn customers who used some of the new AI features launched in the 2024 Recruiter Release, 80% agreed that the AI features either moderately or significantly enhanced the value of Recruiter.
AI-Assisted Search isn’t just about getting a faster list of candidates — it’s also designed to provide a better list of candidates. Instead of surfacing the same results you might find manually, AI-Assisted Search actively helps you refine and target your search to uncover hidden gems.
Paul Gaubert, a digital recruiter at the staffing firm Urban Linker, finds that AI helps him cast a wider net, surfacing candidates he may have otherwise missed. “I turn to AI-Assisted Search when I’m searching for new ideas and criteria to add to my candidate search in Recruiter,” Paul says. “Particularly when I’m feeling stuck and my traditional approach isn’t yielding the desired results, using AI generates new criteria that I may not have considered before. This allows me to see candidates that I may have missed during my manual search, ultimately helping me land on a more comprehensive talent pool.”
And once you’re ready to contact those candidates, LinkedIn’s AI-Assisted Messages will help you craft a quality InMail that is tailored to each candidate and their profile. As mentioned, messages written with the assistance of AI saw an overall 40% improvement in InMail acceptance rate, when compared with messages that weren’t touched by AI.
Notably, that improvement is even greater for recruiters in certain industries. For example, recruiters in the technology, information, and media sector saw a stunning 80% improvement in their InMail acceptance rates, while those in both the accommodation and food services industry and the transportation, logistics, supply chain, and storage industry saw a 55% improvement. Likewise, hospitals and health care improved their InMail acceptance rate by 49%, and the financial services sector improved by 48%.
Two out of three (65%) charter customers agreed that AI-Assisted Messages helps them increase engagement, and most (56%) agreed that the AI helps them build stronger connections. That’s because the tool pulls in real-time details from the candidate’s profile, ensuring a more personalized, compelling message.
“AI holds huge potential for the recruitment industry,” says Jo-Ann Feely, global managing director for innovation at talent solutions firm AMS. “Partnering with LinkedIn’s AI-Assisted Messaging to improve candidate engagement enables AMS teams to better source, attract, and engage the talent our clients need for business success. LinkedIn is by far the biggest tool for a recruiter, and we are excited to see how they continue to innovate.”
To further help recruitment professionals across the world, LinkedIn has begun rolling out AI-Assisted Messages (already available for global English customers) in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and will be rolling it out in all Recruiter-supported languages by next year.
Final thoughts
As talent leaders learn more about generative AI, their teams will increasingly use it to streamline the most mundane, repetitive parts of recruiting. Ironically, that means you’ll actually be spending less time with tech tools and spending more time with people.
In the end, it’s all about people — conversing with candidates, advising hiring managers, and building stronger relationships.
We’re excited about the early results and look forward to learning and growing together on this journey.
Methodologies
Platform insights based on global LinkedIn data. Messages written with AI-Assisted Messages saw an overall 40% improvement in InMail acceptance rate when compared to single, non-AI-Assisted Messages; Messages written with AI-Assisted Messages saw over 10% faster acceptances from candidates compared with single, non-AI Assisted Messages. Industry cuts of this insight are current as of May 2024. Improvement in InMail acceptance rate is calculated as a percentage increase for InMails written with AI-Assisted Messages compared with those that were not written with AI-Assisted Messages. Only those InMail acceptances that were received within 30 days are considered. Survey data is pulled from a collection of three recent charter customer surveys, fielded between January and May 2024.
