If you’ve ever applied or thought of applying for a job via LinkedIn, you’ll know that the experience can be immediately disheartening: Openings that look interesting typically can see hundreds or thousands of applications in a matter of hours — data that LinkedIn, a social network for the world of work, proudly exposes in its own version of building up viral hype. But you may as well be throwing a penny into a giant fountain for luck to keep your application from drowning in that noise. 

Now LinkedIn has built an AI product to throw job seekers a lifeline, of sorts. A new Jobs Match tool will give its 1 billion users — who are currently applying for jobs on its platform at a rate of 9,000 applications per minute — immediate advice on whether a particular job opening is worth their time to apply. 

Alongside this, it’s launching a recruitment AI agent aimed at smaller businesses, a synthetic version of the recruitment managers and teams that larger businesses typically use to devise job applications, tap qualified candidates, and triage applications. Both are “free” to use — that is, you don’t have to be one of LinkedIn’s paying users to use it.

Notably, both products were built by LinkedIn on top of its own AI technology and its own first-party LinkedIn data — though, over time, it might incorporate other data sources, Rohan Rajiv, a director of product management, said in an interview with TechCrunch. This is in contrast to a number of launches in the last couple of years that have seen LinkedIn building by leaning hard on technology from OpenAI, the AI startup backed to the hilt by Microsoft, which also owns LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has a long history of building AI tools for its platform, but these have been focused on areas like algorithms and connection suggestions, as well as tools to manage and build its database. These predate the development of generative AI and the wave of consumer services that have sprung out of it.

A lot of what LinkedIn has launched on the AI front in the last couple of years has been around tapping generative AI to juice activity on the site: products to help people start conversations with each other; come up with “insightful” content for their feeds and profiles, help write ads, and more, all powered by OpenAI. 

The tools being launched today, which will give those filling jobs a better funnel of suitable applicants and help those looking for work better filter for jobs they are more likely to fit, also are meant to help with juicing activity, but in less public ways.

Rajiv noted that there are now 5 million people who have turned on “Open to Work” on their profiles, up 40% from a year ago, with 67 million users looking for jobs each week. On the small business side, some 2.5 million are using LinkedIn to fill roles. That’s to say nothing of the huge number of people who have lost their jobs as the economy continues to correct in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic — more than 152,000 in the tech sector alone were laid off in 2024, according to the Layoffs.fyi tracker.

Yet LinkedIn’s job seeking figures are relatively tiny considering the site has more than a billion registered users. Indeed, it runs the risk of losing momentum on its recruiting business because of how painful it is to use, both among those looking for jobs and those trying to fill them, said Rajiv. 

“[They’re] spending three to five hours a day sifting through applications, and finding that less than half of the job applications submitted are actually meeting the required criteria,” he said. “This is completely broken, and we know that.”

So while LinkedIn has built a number of products specifically for premium users, to encourage more people to pay for the service, now it’s swinging in the other direction. It’s taking two premium tools — respectively AI tools for looking for jobs and AI agents to help with recruitment — and making versions of them usable for everyone. 

It will be worth watching to see what the uptake is like, and whether it boosts the number of people using the platform to recruit (which is still a paid service) and look for work. At a time when the company is also being scrutinized over how it gathers and uses data, this gives LinkedIn an anchor to argue that it’s also providing some utility.