An AI That Helps You Get a Job?

Gyanda Sachdeva, LinkedIn’s VP of product management, spoke with Gizmodo for the latest installment of our “AI Unlocked” video series.

Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Germain: Everybody’s worried about AI stealing their job, but now LinkedIn has a new suite of tools that are going to help you find work. And today we’re talking to LinkedIn’s VP of product management about what the future of AI in the job search is going to look like.

TG: So is LinkedIn an AI company now? Can you tell me about the tools you guys have been working on?

Gyanda Sachdeva: Well, LinkedIn has always been an AI company in many ways. We have over a decade of experience building AI products, and they’ve always been behind the scenes in a lot of ways. But now we’re rolling out new features that are very much front and center, which members can experience directly and interact with. So that’s changing, but we’ve always been an AI first company.

TG: And what kinds of AI tools are we talking about here? Is it like chatbots or what’s that going to look like from the consumer perspective?

GS: So we’ve been rolling out a number of AI powered features for our premium customers and they help members do a number of different things, specifically unlocking new opportunities. So they could learn about a new topic, go deeper, or most importantly for many of our members, help them with their job seeking process, which we know can be very lonely, very overwhelming for almost anybody. In fact, if you think about the job search process, there are frankly two parts to it. One is your basic part where you go through the motions of looking at every job description, researching the company, seeing where there is a match, pushing your resume through, cover letter, et cetera. That’s what everyone has to do. And then there is the bonus part, which some job seekers do where they reach out to people at the company, identify who could be a good person to get advice from, reach out to mentors, send a thoughtful message to the hiring manager.

But ultimately, when you combine both of these bodies of work, job seeking can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. And our goal for many, many years has been to make it super easy for members to find the right fit for their careers. And with AI, we can take maybe a huge step forward in making that happen.

So the perfect example is the new features we are rolling out. When you’re on a job description page, oftentimes people spend a lot of time reading the details. What does the job actually look for? What are the skills required? What are the qualifications? Takes time. But now with one click and using AI, we can help you assess your fit for that job. So you get a quick report saying, “Hey, you are a good fit for this job.” Or, “You’re not a good fit for this job.” And it then breaks it down into why or why not. And then it helps you take appropriate actions. You might see there are a few skills that this job needs that actually I have. I just never put them on my profile. Let me go fix my profile or skills I don’t have and then I can go acquire them. So these are just some of the changes that we’re making that are a lot of good features related to this, but it’s all about making the job search process more efficient and more effective.

TG: So it’s helping surface relevant information and telling you what things you should be focusing on and helping you improve the way you’re presenting yourself?

GS: Yes. And actually the second part of what you just said, improving the way you present yourself is so important in these processes and often overlooked. And so a couple of ways, we are using AI to help you do that. When you identify skills that you actually have just not listed on your profile, we help you write that down. Many, many times people have sort of a writer’s block on when they go to their profile and they’re like, “I don’t know what to say in my headline. I don’t know how to write about my experience here. I don’t know what to write in my about section. I kind of want to see what other people do.” And here with the AI tool, we can give you that starting point. So you’re not starting from a blank canvas. We write something for you that we want you to edit and make your own.

And then the same thing with AI assisted messaging where let’s say you are on a job description page and you see the hiring manager is listed there and you want to reach out to them, but it can be very daunting to send that first message. “I just don’t know what to say, what would be appropriate in this moment.” So helping you write that and sort of infusing the company research that you have done into that first note can be really powerful. So it’s just not just helping you go through the motions of the transactional part of the job seeking, but also the bonus part of the job seeking, which can often be the harder one.

TG: So how do people access this thing? Is it free or do you have to pay for it? What’s the deal?

GS: Yeah, so it’s actually available to all our premium customers. It’s rolling out slowly. Some of these features are available globally to all premium members. Some of them are still ramping and it’s available at no additional cost to our customers. So whoever was a customer before is just getting these features in addition to everything else.

TG: What’s your favorite AI tool that LinkedIn has out right now?

GS: I have a few, but the one I will pick is the assessment tool. So when I go on a job page, I can quickly with one click, find out if I’m a good fit for this job or not. And not that I am job hunting, but when we were doing this research, it was really cool to see how quickly it came to the right conclusion. And it’s the kind of research that I don’t think anybody has time for to go deep on a company, on an industry, on the people you know at the company, your skills and having or watching AI do all of that in a split second and tell you that, “Hey, this is what the ultimate assessment looks like.” Was a huge time saver. So I really like that feature. And I know that’s also resonating with our members.

TG: Are you worried that if this thing works well enough, it’s going to get you a job at a company that’s not LinkedIn? Is it going to push you like, “Hey, we really think you might be good at Meta or Google or something?”

GS: It might try and then I will have to give it some credit, but I love LinkedIn.

TG: Of course you’re loyal to LinkedIn. You would never.

GS: Never. Not until we get this to a place where many, many of our members are finding that value that you just described. Because ultimately that’s the beauty of it, that you don’t even have to be job hunting. We proactively tell you, “Hey, something just came up that might be a better fit for you. Check it out.” And I think that’s the real unlock that will really help everyone, including myself.