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The advent of natural language search has encouraged people to change how they search for information, and LinkedIn, which has been working with numerous AI models over the past year, hopes this shift extends to job search.
LinkedIn’s AI-powered jobs search, now available to all LinkedIn users, uses distilled, fine-tuned models trained on the professional social media platform’s knowledge base to narrow potential job opportunities based on natural language.
“This new search experience lets members describe their goals in their own words and get results that truly reflect what they’re looking for,” said Erran Berger, vice president of product development at LinkedIn, told VentureBeat in an email. “This is the first step in a larger journey to make job-seeking more intuitive, inclusive, and empowering for everyone.”
LinkedIn previously stated in a blog post that a significant issue users faced when searching for jobs on the platform was an over-reliance on precise keyword queries. Often, users would type in a more generic job title and get positions that don’t exactly match. From personal experience, if I type in “reporter” on LinkedIn, I get search results for reporter jobs in media publications, along with court reporter openings, which are a totally different skill set.
LinkedIn vice president for engineering Wenjing Zhang told VentureBeat in a separate interview that they saw the need to improve how people could find jobs that fit them perfectly, and that began with a better understanding of what they are looking for.
“So in the past, when we’re using keywords, we’re essentially looking at a keyword and trying to find the exact match. And sometimes in the job description, the job description may say reporter, but they’re not really a reporter; we still retrieve that information, which is not ideal for the candidate,” Zhang said.
LinkedIn has improved its understanding of user queries and now allows people to use more than just keywords. Instead of searching for “software engineer,” they can ask, “Find software engineering jobs in Silicon Valley that were posted recently.”
How they built it
One of the first things LinkedIn had to do was overhaul its search function’s ability to understand.
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