(2024-11-14) Procopio LinkedIn's Hostile Takeover Of The Job Market

Joe Procopio: LinkedIn's Hostile Takeover Of The Job Market. LinkedIn is going all in on [AI] for recruiters and job seekers, and it’s not good for anyone, except…

“LinkedIn launches its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters.”

This is not good. So not good.

This helps no one except LinkedIn, and they’re not doing a great job of jazz-handing that.

AI has done nothing but make the job search infinitely worse and it’s done that quickly — a cascade of unintended consequences that have been falling onto the heads of recruiters and job-seekers alike for months, if not years. Much more so on the job-seekers, especially lately.

The tech job market has rapidly become the most visible example of what I call the AI redundancy loop. This is when AI is used not to assist humans, nor to execute tasks in situations where humans can’t — both good use cases — but rather to replace humans in executing tasks that humans were already executing poorly.

Simple loop: Start using AI to screen candidates, which results in poorly matched candidates, which results in candidates having to apply to more jobs to get seen, which results in candidates using AI themselves to get past the AI screening, which results in an avalanche of completely mismatched candidates for every single posted job, none of which get filled.

The LinkedIn Hiring Assistant is being described as the one-stop-shop for all company hiring needs — job descriptions constructed from “ingesting scrappy notes and thoughts,” sourcing the candidates, and even “engaging” with said candidates.

That last one. That’s your nightmare, right?

not just customer support chat, but customer support chat that knows everything about how the product works.

The “product,” in this case, being you and your career.

Why This Will Succeed

this is not for you. This is not for the recruiters. This is for LinkedIn.

The clear comp is Google and the advertising market.

From what I’m told, there is a cabal of recruiters and HR people, a “type,” that are wholeheartedly embracing AI

Hiring Assistant, with its foray into AI agency, gives them a reason to tell unliked coworkers that they’re screwed.

I definitely laughed the hardest when they noted LinkedIn’s previous forays into AI resulting in some “surprisingly accurate connection recommendations.”

For a period of over a year, LinkedIn was recommending I connect with people who had the same name as people I was already connected to.

ultimately, what LinkedIn has done so far with AI — and this is in line with like 90 percent of current AI use cases and not coincidentally 100 percent the AI problem — has been firmly rooted in what I’m now calling the “Nobody Asked For This” AI use case.

Before tossing an enormous word salad, Hari Srinivasan, LinkedIn’s VP of product, said in an interview, “It’s designed to take on a recruiter’s most repetitive task so they can spend more time on the most impactful part of their jobs.”

Which part, exactly? If AI is writing the job description from “scrappy notes” and then “candidate sorting” (my quotes, for snark, can’t help myself) and then engaging with the candidates, which part is the recruiter supposed to make an impact with?

The companies that lean into this are not the kind of companies you want to work for. The candidates they hire will not be the caliber of candidates that will help them succeed.