LinkedIn wants you to apply to fewer jobs

If you know anyone in the job market right now, you’ve probably heard stories about how difficult it is to get a job interview. Part of the problem, according to LinkedIn, is that too many people are applying for jobs they’re not actually qualified for, making it difficult for good candidates to stand out.

The company hopes its new AI-powered Job Match feature will help address some of this disconnect. The feature, which goes live today, uses artificial intelligence to provide detailed summaries along with job listings that let users see how qualified they actually are for a particular role.

LinkedIn’s product manager, Rohan Rajeev, says the AI-powered feature goes beyond the kind of simple keyword matching that job seekers may already rely on. Instead, it tries to understand the breadth of your experience and how it aligns with the qualifications outlined in the job description.

The goal, Rajeev tells Engadget, is to help highlight jobs for which a person is more qualified and discourage people from applying for jobs that are not for them. “When you are eligible, we will be able to help you, but also, when you are not eligible, we hope to find you other places where you are eligible,” Rajiv told Engadget.

While Job Match will be available to all LinkedIn users, there are some additional benefits for LinkedIn Premium subscribers, including more granular information about their job match level. Eventually, Rajeev says, LinkedIn will also be able to surface more qualified applicants from the recruiter as well, to reduce the possibility of good candidates being overlooked.

It is unclear whether any of this will actually ease the pain of potential job seekers. The technology industry lost From jobs to layoffs in 2024. So did I industry. He wasn’t faring much better either.

All of this would seemingly create more competition for the same job opportunities — which dynamic AI appears to be completely ill-equipped to handle. “I think part of this will always be labor market dynamics, but I would argue that a big part of this is just a complete lack of transparency,” says Rajeev. He notes that early tests of this feature indicated that the “non-trivial part” of the problem is “more solvable than we think.”

For their part, recruiters seem to be endorsing LinkedIn’s latest advice on applying for fewer jobs. The company’s blog post features testimonials from recruiters practically begging unqualified applicants to stop flooding their inboxes.