Hiring Assistant tops $450 million run-rate without automatic rejections
LinkedIn CEO Dan Shapero said applications per job seeker on the platform have risen about 30 percent since the pandemic, with many submissions now generated using artificial intelligence tools, leaving recruiters struggling to identify qualified candidates. “It’s gotten harder and harder for employers to know who can actually do the job anymore,” Shapero said in comments published Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal.
LinkedIn plans to announce a series of updates to its Hiring Assistant, an AI tool that helps recruiters sort through inbound applications and identify potential candidates on the platform. Since launching last year, the product has helped LinkedIn’s suite of agentic hiring tools surpass a $450 million annualized revenue run-rate, according to the company. The updates include better memory and advanced reasoning capabilities that allow the tool to interpret the intent behind recruiter searches — for example, flagging when a recruiter who specified a specific location expanded the search to include remote candidates. “So we can move from a search based on what you said to a search based on what you meant,” Shapero said.
While many job seekers have expressed skepticism and frustration about AI’s role in reviewing applications, LinkedIn confirmed the tool will never automatically reject anyone. Instead, the tool will surface the candidates that best match a recruiter’s requirements, according to Shapero.
Shapero, who became chief executive in April after 18 years at LinkedIn in various roles, most recently as chief operating officer, framed the labor-market challenge as both a problem and an opportunity for AI applications. He said recruiters often reviewed only a sampling of applications when the volume grew too high. “Now technology is helping employers give more people a proper assessment,” he said.
The developments come as a debate over AI safety has been raging across Silicon Valley over the past month, according to the Journal. OpenAI said it was scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing. The announcement came shortly before Nvidia Chief Jensen Huang took the stage at The Korea Society’s annual gala in New York on Monday evening.
Huang, who accepted the organization’s James A. Van Fleet Award at the event, said he does not buy into either AI doomerism or “AI Pollyannaism.” Instead, he said he believes in “responsible optimism.” Huang disputed the framing of AI safety and innovation as opposing forces, calling it a “false choice.” “Safety, trust, and innovation all should be thought of together, and we should be able to accelerate all of it at the same time,” Huang told reporters at the event.
Nvidia on Monday introduced the Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform, software designed to help developers test and deploy AI agents in secure environments. Huang’s comments come as leaders of four of the biggest AI companies — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk — have each agreed they needed to slow development of the technology. On the question of “pacing” AI development, advocated by Anthropic CEO Amodei and others, Huang said companies are free to slow their own work without external mandates. “They’re welcome to pace as much as they want to pace. No permission is necessary,” he said. “You don’t need some adult to tell you. All these companies, they’re already adults.”
Shapero, for his part, described his early months as chief executive as a period of listening to employees, platform members and creators. He said one of his biggest challenges was learning to see the company where he worked for nearly two decades “with a new set of eyes.” “I recognized that the risk I had was thinking I knew the business and that I knew the customer,” he said. Shapero said the conversations gave him a renewed appreciation for flexibility and agility in shaping strategy. “Things are evolving quickly,” he said. “And the idea of laying out a plan that’s going to last for multiple years feels like a thing of the past.”
He added that he now begins the company’s all-hands meetings every two weeks by explaining how his thinking on AI and business strategy has evolved, and that he participates directly in product prototyping. “The days of, ‘Can you go use that thing for me and tell me how it works?’ are over for a CEO,” he said. “You have to be hands on keyboard. And so whenever we’re building prototypes for our own products, I’m in the prototype, and I really want to see how it feels.”