LinkedIn has announced a significant upgrade of its recruitment tools, aimed at streamlining the hiring process and providing more relevant candidate matches.

As explained by LinkedIn:

"Recruiters have told us they’re often frustrated by the need to jump from tool to tool. We’ve heard you. So we’ve put all of our core tools - Jobs, Recruiter, and Pipeline Builder - on a single platform. Once you create a project, you will be able to see the results from all your active sourcing channels - search results, job applicants, media leads - under the Talent Pool tab, and you can manage candidates from there."

And while merging its various recruitment tools is a key aim, the most interesting change in LinkedIn's system may well be the addition of new AI sorting tools to help find better-suited candidates, based on previous usage trends and platform data. 

As outlined on the LinkedIn Engineering Blog, the new candidate matching algorithm will provide more advanced capacity, learning from your personal interests. 

"Based on how you interact with candidates, our algorithm learns your preferences and delivers increasingly relevant candidates across the Jobs product. If you’re consistently interested in candidates who are, say, accountants with leadership skills, or project managers who are adept at social media, we’ll send you more of those. And this all happens online in real time so that your feedback is taken instantly into account."

The process is a good step for LinkedIn, which holds an unmatched database of career development and related data points. The new system is also providing better results - LinkedIn says that its new algorithm is already performing nearly 20% better than the previous version in generating relevant recommendations.

In addition to this, LinkedIn's also adding new calls to action, which will enable any employee to share open positions at a company (LinkedIn says that 70% of the people who've changed jobs using LinkedIn were hired at a company where they knew someone), along with an improved process to send rejection notes to unsuccessful applicants and a new shared messaging system which displays your entire communications stream with each candidate in one place.

The update will no doubt be welcomed by those who regularly use LinkedIn's recruiter tools, but they also point to the platform's future potential with career matching, using, as noted, its unmatched database. If LinkedIn can continue to add in new ways to utilize its sources, it could become the recruitment tool, able to highlight increasingly relevant staffing choices, while also helping individuals get better insights about their ideal career paths. 

There's huge potential here - LinkedIn showcased, some years ago, how its data could be used to map a person's career based on their personality traits and interests. Given the platform is now up to 610 million members, that insight capacity continues to increase, and the more ways that LinkedIn can find to tap into such, the better its future prospects look.