LinkedIn Announces Hiring Assistant 2, its Next Generation Hiring Agent, to Help Recruiters Deliver Stronger Hiring Outcomes

The job market is being reshaped in real time and it’s creating an imbalance. AI created almost 2 million new jobs in the last three years, and the skills employers need are changing faster than people can keep up. With global hiring down 30% and applications per applicant up 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels, companies are struggling to cut through the noise to find real candidates with skills they can trust.

We’re announcing Hiring Assistant 2, the next generation of Hiring Assistant, LinkedIn’s AI agent for recruiters. With more advanced reasoning, memory and personalization, Hiring Assistant 2 can identify stronger candidates, bring more relevant context into the hiring process, and manage the entire talent pool in one place so recruiters don’t have to spend time switching between systems. The result: recruiters get more time back for strategic work that only they can do, like understanding what hiring managers really need from a role and building trust with candidates.

Why it matters

Even as hiring has slowed, AI has helped create entirely new roles and skill demands. In the past year alone, demand for forward-deployed experts has grown 226%, AI forensic analyst roles are up 169%, and AI safety roles have increased 91%. At the same time, the skills employers are looking for are changing 2x as fast as the skills workers are adding to their profiles on LinkedIn.

All this change is challenging for both hirers and job seekers, who have been increasingly applying to more and more jobs as they try to navigate these shifts. As AI makes it easier for job seekers to apply, talent acquisition professionals are not only overwhelmed by volume, but they’re finding it harder to know who actually has the skills for the job. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of talent acquisition professionals in the US say it’s becoming harder to know who to trust and what’s real when assessing candidates.

How LinkedIn Hiring Assistant 2 works

Deeper understanding of how recruiters hire: With advanced memory, reasoning and personalization, Hiring Assistant 2 has a deeper understanding of how recruiters hire, from role-level to recruiter-level intelligence, to deliver stronger, more personalized candidate recommendations.

Richer, more trusted signals into every decision: To help recruiters better understand their applicant pool, new and improved signals will now be brought together in one place, including if the candidate is verified, Applicant Tracking System (ATS) insights, pre-screening responses, and relevant work experience. And with connected apps, LinkedIn members can showcase their expertise and capabilities directly on their LinkedIn profile, helping hirers get a richer signal of who can actually do the work.

More capable and agentic workflows that move hiring forward: One-third (30%) of talent acquisition professionals cite speed as their top challenge, saying it takes too long to find the right talent, and almost 50% say they spend too much time switching between platforms during the hiring process. Giving recruiters back time to focus on high-value work, Hiring Assistant 2 can now help manage an entire talent pool in one place.

Looking ahead to the future of talent acquisition

Amidst all this change, recruiting is becoming more about talent strategy. On LinkedIn, demand for strategic talent acquisition roles is up, with Talent Intelligence and Strategic Talent Advisor roles growing rapidly year-over-year, and two-thirds (63%) of C-level executives say their talent acquisition leader has become more critical to their company’s business success.

Leading this shift are talent leaders at “AI frontier” companies – those who are in the AI optimization stage and have made AI core to their recruiting function – according to LinkedIn’s Future of Talent Report. These leaders are resourcing work more strategically, coordinating people, processes, data, and AI across their organization to make more informed and aligned workforce decisions for the business. AI-frontier talent leaders are also proactively anticipating future in-demand skills and making strategic hiring decisions centered on skills and capabilities rather than on job titles.

To learn more:

• LinkedIn Hiring Assistant 2
• Future of Talent Report
• New hiring data from LinkedIn

FAQs

When will Hiring Assistant 2 be available?

For global customers who currently use Hiring Assistant in English, it will begin to automatically update with new capabilities for free beginning in November. For more information, please visit https://business.linkedin.com/hire/hiring-assistant.

Who is using Hiring Assistant today?

In the first year of general availability, over 20,000 companies are using LinkedIn’s agentic hiring solutions, including AMD, Cisco, Ochsner Health, Palo Alto Networks, and Zillow.

What are the benefits of Hiring Assistant?

Hiring Assistant delivers stronger hiring outcomes with less effort, greater confidence in who deserves attention, and more time for the work only recruiters can do.

Quality candidates:

• Recruiters are 4x more likely to contact candidates sourced by Hiring Assistant than candidates sourced through traditional recruiting methods.
  
  
• Applicants rated as top matches are 2.6x more likely to be interviewed than those rated as lower matches.
  
  

Time savings:

• Hiring Assistant enables recruiters to find qualified candidate matches while reviewing 83% fewer profiles.
  
  
• With Hiring Assistant, recruiters find interview-quality applicants 33% faster.
  
  
• The prescreening process conducted by Hiring Assistant is completed in a median time of just 6 minutes – a large reduction compared to the 3.5 hours that it typically takes for a recruiter to provide their first response.
  
  

What are the top challenges facing recruiters today?

With hiring slowing, competition for roles high and AI making it easier for candidates to apply for jobs, recruiters are receiving more applications, making it harder for them to quickly identify qualified talent they can trust. Recruiter conversations on LinkedIn about trust have doubled year-over-year in the US, and more than one-third (39%) of talent acquisition professionals say their top challenge is not knowing if a candidate or their skills are real, making identity and skill verifications critical to the hiring process.

AI is creating a flood of applicants, how can job seekers stand out and how is LinkedIn helping hirers find the right candidate?

LinkedIn is helping people understand fit before they apply, so they can put more effort into the opportunities where their skills and experience are relevant. Job Match is used more than 1 million times per week by Premium subscribers, who submit fewer applications to low-match roles and more to high-match roles. And for hirers, LinkedIn has features like applicant evaluation and fit signals in Hiring Assistant that help them understand not just who matches the role, but who may be a strong fit for their company and why.

Methodology

Talent Acquisition / C-Suite Research: August 2026 research conducted by Censuswide on behalf of LinkedIn among 500 US recruiters/talent acquisition professionals and 500 US C-Suite executives (CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CCOs, CHROs) in companies with 200+ employees.

LinkedIn platform insights: Behavioral insights were derived from billions of data points generated by the 1.3 billion members, 14 million job posts and 5 million profile updates per minute on LinkedIn. For additional methodology details, see the Future of Talent Report.