As job market dynamics shift with generative AI and agentic AI, the go-to professional job dashboards like LinkedIn is also changing their job search engines.
While many companies are slashing their workforce and blaming AI technology, the job market is becoming increasingly focused on AI skills. How people search for jobs is also changing.
Over the past year, LinkedIn has responded to these shifts by moving its search engine from keyword matching to a focus on AI-powered, semantic search and natural language processing. With the new system, users can now search using conversational language, according to Caleb Johnson, principal staff software engineer at LinkedIn.
“People want to be able to speak not just with misspellings or things like that, but they want to speak in natural language,” Johnson said on the latest episode of the Targeting AI podcast from AI Business. “They want to be able to talk in voice, for example, and just give a paragraph. And then the system knows what to give them.”
He said that, by switching to this model, LinkedIn saw a change in how users interacted with its search engine. The switch also led to better matches and more transparent reasoning for users. Users not only see that a job isn't a good match, but also why it isn’t.
“This is allowing us not to send a bunch of jobs that are not relevant to the person, that they're not really what they're looking for, even if it does match a keyword,” Johnson said.
LinkedIn is not the only job platform to change its search engine. For example, last year, Indeed launched Indeed Career Scout, an AI agent that pushes a user’s resume to recruiters’ folders. Glassdoor also upgraded its search engine and now uses predictive models to help users determine whether a job is a good fit.
