I spent a few days in New York City at LinkedIn Talent Connect, where I had the opportunity to cover the conference, participate in main stage programming, meet with LinkedIn’s leadership, and get a closer look at the company’s latest investments in AI for recruiting. Plus LinkedIn invited me out to their NYC Headquarters in the Empire State Building to see the people behind the product, where I ran into CEO, Dan Shapero.
Quick about me if you’re new here:
I’ve spent more than a decade working in recruiting for public, private-equity, and venture backed startups after getting my first corporate recruiting gig because I was a millennial who knew how to use Facebook and LinkedIn. (Skills based hiring anyone?)
I helped scale an AI-enabled executive search agency with an exited founder who sold a company to Greenhouse. I was the first People & Talent leader at TLDR - the most recognized tech newsletter in the world. I cut my teeth in frontline hiring in a public company, where I ran a newsletter with 1.3 million subscribers. I’ve worked for an ethical AI HR tech startup that got acquired when people were still learning about ChatGPT, and then spent the time since then dedicated to the HR tech industry, advising sourcing startups and building community. Much of my work today involves understanding how technology is changing the recruiting function by being a trend spotter and first mover, which is the through line in my career. And I do that through Building the Talent Machine, a creative studio and media company that covers the world of work. Which is where you’ve found yourself. So thanks for subscribing, I’m glad you’re here.
Okay back to what you came here for…my take on LinkedIn’s Future of Talent Report and Hiring Assistant 2 from my Talent Connect conference recap…
Events like Talent Connect offer an interesting perspective because you get to hear how vendors envision the future of recruiting in the same room with the practitioners responsible for operationalizing it. It’s a little weird even calling LinkedIn a “vendor” since they’re in a world of their own, but for the sake of LinkedIn Talent Solutions that powers recruiting for millions, I’m fine with it. And this year, Talent Connect at the Javits Center gave us plenty to consider.
A little history behind the venue:
The Javits Center is named after Jacob K. Javits, a former senator from New York who played an important role in shaping modern labor and civil rights legislation. He helped advance the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which established the EEOC and prohibited employment discrimination, and championed pension protections through ERISA and protections against age discrimination in employment. Javits was also a vocal advocate for workers’ rights, often breaking with his own party on social and economic issues.
Given how much of today’s employment landscape was shaped by legislation he supported, there’s something fitting about thousands of recruiting professionals gathering in a building bearing his name to discuss the future of work. And when I toured LinkedIn’s HQ and saw one of their values on the wall being Inclusion, it’s worth spending a few words sharing some of this context that expanded from wanting to pronounce the name of the building correctly. In spirit of this, it’s important recruiters focus on doing the next right thing in a time of, well…confusion. And that’s exactly what Brené Brown told me when I asked her for any advice she had for People & Talent leaders navigating the changing political landscape that’s impacting how companies hire.
The Conference:
LinkedIn announced Hiring Assistant 2, which is the evolution of what was announced in 2024, released its 2026 Future of Talent report, and outlined a broader vision for how AI will change the work recruiters do. For me the most interesting story coming out of Talent Connect was the expanding responsibility of the recruiting function itself, and there was a ton of messaging around becoming strategic talent advisors. Which is more than just a naming convention to feel better about ourselves amidst industry change. Lots of recruiters and mid-management have been squeezed out of the profession, so the only viable place to go from here is claiming a seat at the table through displaying strategic impact, while also being deeply involved enough in the tactical craft of full cycle recruitment to know exactly when and how to make a difference in this hiring landscape. If you’re unsure what that is, I’ll give you the answer. It’s working a req. That’s how you make a difference.
It’s rather obvious that as technology becomes more capable of completing administrative and transactional recruiting work, the expectations placed on recruiters are shifting. That shift has implications for how talent teams operate, how they’re measured, and the skills they’ll need to develop. Which is what I spent a few days talking about in NYC with analysts, product leaders, enterprise CHROs and VPs of talent, and of course, vendor partners.
Here’s a deeper dive.
The evolution of the recruiter role:
LinkedIn CEO, Dan Shapero opened Talent Connect with a discussion about how AI is changing the talent landscape and the opportunities ahead for recruiters. As to be expected, it was a big production and great way to kick things off. Win the hearts. Then captivate the minds. Dan took it pretty corporate in his opening by anchoring to the LinkedIn mission and vision, but made it incredibly human. Maybe that’s a testament to his own personal brand and ability to captivate an audience. You’ve seen Dan’s walk and talks in your feed, right? Or perhaps because he’s been at LinkedIn for close to twenty years, which naturally commands a high level of trust for recruiters who have come to know and love LinkedIn and LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Yes, trust. You trust LinkedIn. We all do. Even those recruiters who are critical of the platform are obsessed with it. Quick Q: How many times a day you open LinkedIn?
Dan emphasized LinkedIn’s Members First principle and its vision statement: Creating Economic Opportunity, which I was previously unfamiliar. And I’m here for it. It holds up today. How do I know? Go ask anyone in recruiting if any economic opportunity they’ve received in their career can be attributed to LinkedIn. Free version, Premium, Talent Solutions, Sales Navigator, or other. Leaving “other” open to your creative interpretation. Plus recruiting as a whole is kind of all about the money. And I love getting folks paid.
Now onto some commentary on LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Let’s start with this…there’s two sides of the hiring transaction. Therefore recruiting vendors first build technology that makes recruiting more efficient for their buyer (solving pain), and then build technology that helps recruiters create better outcomes for the people they’re hiring (supporting goals). This can also be described as need-to-have and nice-to-have. (By now you should know which is which.) Now that recruiting has hit peak out-of-control, we’re seeing more non-LinkedIn vendors signal they’re interested in building for the candidate side of the equation, as some of the newer point solutions get siphoned into rollups.
In Dan’s presentation, he reported recruiters are seeing an increase of applications per role, because of AI. Which means improving the ability to identify relevant talent becomes increasingly important. The best way to hedge this? Sourcing. Not inbound applications. Hanging one’s hat on inbound applications is not strategic. It’s 2026, if you are a recruiter I shouldn’t have to be the one to tell you this, but if I must…your job is on the line. Don’t wait for people to apply. Go find them. There’s no better defensibility than being directly accountable for a hire. Every recruiter is a sourcer.
And that’s where LinkedIn Hiring Assistant 2 comes in.
LinkedIn shared some compelling early outcomes from Hiring Assistant, including an 83% reduction in profiles reviewed and 12% more hires per recruiter. Those are meaningful productivity signals. I’m not going to break down by role type and level, so it’s up to you to benchmark for your industry. And then go beat that benchmark. The variable this is solving for is time, so the question then becomes what organizations will do with the capacity they’re creating? If recruiters can spend less time navigating databases, manually reviewing profiles, and coordinating repetitive tasks, there’s an opportunity to redirect that time toward work requiring deeper expertise. Which brings me to one of the more interesting pieces of research LinkedIn released during the event…
What the heck is Talent Orchestration?
If you work anywhere near a tech company, you’ve probably heard the term by now. It’s tied into the good work of Talent Engineering, and Recruiting Operations which are roles in recruiting that may or may not be accountable to filling a position, depending who you ask. (We already have enough folks in HR trying to slice off a piece of credit for the work of Recruiting, so I’ll save deeper analysis of Talent Engineering by non-requisition-working headcount in the department for another day.)
LinkedIn’s defines Talent Orchestration as this: an expanding role for recruiters that involves coordinating people, processes, data, and AI across an organization to make more informed and aligned workforce decisions. If you’re deep in the work of recruiting, you can think of Talent Orchestration more tactically as the craft of automating a job requisition, mapped specifically to a curated candidate journey. (You are mapping your candidate journey already, aren’t you?) And Talent Orchestration is a compelling direction for the profession. For years, talent acquisition leaders have talked about becoming more strategic partners to the business. But the operating models, incentives, and metrics used to manage recruiting have remained centered on filling requisitions. Aka compensation governance and headcount substantiation.
LinkedIn’s research suggests the boundaries around talent acquisition are beginning to expand more towards Talent Orchestration. The proof? Talent Intelligence roles grew 3.2 times year-over-year, and 36% of leaders at the frontier of AI adoption expect recruiters to become more involved in retention, internal mobility, and talent redeployment. These are the indicators of how organizations may begin redefining the recruiting function. And it’s something I discuss ad nauseam on the podcast with these very TA leaders.
When we think about the expansion of impact, recruiters have access to an enormous amount of information about the labor market, workforce supply, compensation expectations, skills, and the competitive landscape for talent. Historically, much of that information has been used to support individual hiring decisions. But organizations can apply that intelligence to a much broader set of workforce challenges. Consider a business evaluating whether to hire externally, develop existing employees, relocate a function, or redesign a role altogether. Those decisions require an understanding of talent availability, organizational capability, and business priorities. Recruiters are well-positioned to contribute to those conversations, provided they have the skills, tools, and organizational influence to do so. So Talent Intelligence is another reason why Recruiting is becoming more strategic.
Tl;dr - Recruiting has leapfrogged its HRBP counterparts, because of the value of this data, and my bet is that we will see more CHROs coming from Talent Acquisition tracks vs. the historic business partner/employee relations/learning and development tracks.
How we’ll measure Talent Orchestration
With the expansion of the impact recruiting is making, so too will the metrics used to measure efficacy and performance. So let’s start with my line in the sand…Time to Fill will always matter. Time to Hire will always matter. Percentage of positions filled on time will always matter. Regrettable 90/180/30 day attrition will always matter. Offer acceptance rate will always matter. (Spoiler alert, you don’t actually want 100%.) Candidate Net Promoter Score will always matter. Hiring Manager Satisfaction will always matter. (So long as they’re a first time hiring manager who has completed interview training and/or aren’t running double digit yield ratios from the Hiring Manager interview stage. Answer “no” to either one of those questions and the req gets shut down.)
But the 2026 Future of Talent Report also introduces the idea of evolving recruiting metrics beyond traditional measures:
1. Talent Value
2. Talent Lifecycle Health
As the recruiting function becomes more interconnected with broader workforce planning, its value proposition will need to extend beyond the speed and cost of filling an open position. And that evolution creates an interesting backdrop for LinkedIn’s biggest product announcement.
Hiring Assistant 2, a personalized extension of the team:
On day two, LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Dan Reid provided a deeper look at Hiring Assistant 2 and the company’s product roadmap. The first version of Hiring Assistant launched in 2025 and has since been used by more than 20,000 customers. Go ahead, name one of these emerging AI sourcing tools that has the customer data and signal LinkedIn owns. That adoption gives LinkedIn a substantial base of customer interactions and feedback to inform its next generation of product development. And what interested me most about Hiring Assistant 2 was the underlying evolution of the product LinkedIn is moving toward. They’ve built an AI assistant that understands how an organization hires, retains context, and can perform increasingly complex work across the recruiting process. They describe this as understanding what recruiters mean, not just what they say when they type into the natural language search.
During a private product briefing with Product Marketing Manager, Vicky Wolfrum, I got a closer look at how LinkedIn is approaching that challenge. One of the more important developments is the introduction of more sophisticated reasoning capabilities. And as we all know, recruiting is full of ambiguity. Hiring managers frequently struggle to articulate what they’re looking for, job descriptions are often incomplete representations of the work, and candidate qualifications rarely align perfectly with the terminology used in a requisition.
A system that relies exclusively on matching explicit keywords or rigid search criteria will inevitably miss relevant context. Yes, semantic search has been part of Google Search since the BERT update, but LinkedIn’s approach to Hiring Assistant 2 is designed to better interpret the intent behind hiring requirements for users on the platform. The product incorporates reasoning capabilities, personalized memory, and tools for carrying out more complex actions. Like interpreting job requirements, applying company-specific hiring preferences, and refining candidate recommendations using natural-language feedback.
Tl;dr - Hiring Assistant 2 has made it easier for recruiters to type in what they say want and the search to return what they actually mean by understanding what their company historically considers a good candidate.
But what about the signal through noise problem?
Right, we mentioned that earlier. Not just solving the math of more efficient funnels, but the quality of that speed. This is where Fit Signals comes in, alongside verification capabilities intended to help recruiters evaluate candidate information with greater confidence. Verifications that include: identity, employment, education. These actually matter, like a lot, and quite frankly, should have been moved higher up the candidate funnel by now, but the market was a bit wild during ZIRP, so companies reduced friction to hire at scale with speed. Now we don’t have that problem. Skills are abundant in the market. So now recruiting teams are adding more friction into the process, and indexing on stronger signal, sooner. Aka - better quality with speed.
Fit Signals and verification stop gaps are particularly relevant given the growing concerns around candidate identity, application authenticity, and the reliability of information available throughout the hiring process. So it’s nice to see LinkedIn leading for verifying the nonnegotiable variables in the hiring conversation - that the person interviewing for the job is who they say they are.
Overall, LinkedIn Talent Solutions is investing in a recruiting experience where the technology can interpret requirements, retain organizational context, and execute more of the work that traditionally required recruiters to navigate multiple interfaces.
More proof:
Customers using Hiring Assistant have seen a 33% faster path to interviewing qualified applicants.
What I’m particularly interested in watching is how this changes the relationship between recruiters and the technology they use. For years, recruiting software has largely required users to learn how to operate the system. We’ve seen this through job descriptions of recruiter roles requiring certain applicant tracking systems as preferred or mandatory requirements. Which makes sense, this is following suit of the Salesforce Admin model. But ask actual recruiters and they’ll stare at you blankly… of course they can learn an ATS. And as AI capabilities mature, we’re beginning to see systems designed to adapt more directly to the people and processes using them. Which is why MCP in an ATS that so many companies ask for specific experience in might actually be the great equalizer. We just had to get through those couple years of believing specialized systems experience is more important than sourcing, submitting, and closing the candidate with efficiency. This all has the potential to change how recruiting teams are structured and where they spend their time. Which might just be the platform they’re logging into every day. (No for real, how many times a day do you open LinkedIn?)
Where we go from here.
I think the two major stories from Talent Connect are closely connected.
LinkedIn’s Future of Talent research describes an expanding mandate for recruiters, while Hiring Assistant 2 represents an investment in the technology that could help create capacity for that evolution. And no one is better positioned to lead than LinkedIn.
The challenge is that technology adoption and organizational transformation rarely happen at the same pace. Hiring isn’t one size fits all. And if there are corporate recruiting leaders out there getting by just fine with processing inbound applications, more power to you. But you might just want to question how necessary that role even is if relying on skimming off the top .5% of the inbound stack and calling it good enough 43 days later is how you currently define being a strategic advisor to the business.
Nor does giving recruiters more sophisticated AI tools or hiring a Talent Engineer automatically make them Strategic Talent Advisors. Organizations still need to determine how responsibilities should change, how the humans in the loop manage their relationships with humanity and define loops, and how in-house recruiting teams really think they’re going to develop the capabilities of their ICs required for a broader talent mandate. And this should all happen before their top-performing recruiters leave to launch solo agencies of their own, with, you guessed it, AI and agents orchestrating the work they once relied on their underperforming teammates or those not carrying requisitions to handle.
There’s also a question of whether the productivity gains created by AI will translate into more strategic work or simply higher expectations for recruiting output. Both outcomes are plausible, and the decisions made by talent leaders will have an enormous influence on which direction their organizations take. My bet it just on higher output. There’s only so much strategy to be strategying. Sometimes as a recruiter you just have to pick up the phone and cold call 20 candidates to get 10 into an interview to have one to offer and a backup.
Worth noting, the future of recruiting will vary considerably depending on the hiring environment. A high-volume frontline recruiting team, a specialized executive search function, and an early-stage technology company have fundamentally different operating requirements. Again, no one-size-fits-all approach to recruiting. But if you use LinkedIn Recruiter, your life is getting easier with Hiring Assistant 2. Worth the price tag any day if you ask me. To that point, part of being a strategic operator in a business is advocating for budget. Software costs money. Every other VP in the org is advocating for software budget spend, and here’s a secret….their department’s costs more that Recruiting. So go be strategic, and get more money for the tools that help the business achieve their number one priority and largest percentage of OpEx…its people.
My advice to TA leaders:
Take a look in the mirror. Ask yourself why you’re in recruiting. And quite literally, what you’ve done lately. If you can’t answer that, take a vacation. Come back to the mirror when you’re ready. You owe it to your team and candidates. This is not the time to be burnt out. This is the time to rise to the occasion. There has never been a better time to be in recruiting. When you know why you’re still here, go audit how your reqs get filled. Identify the activities that consume the most recruiter capacity, the friction points, where the data is telling a deeper story, and the points where your processes depend on individual heroics to function. That dashboard that’s sent out every week is not an insight. Find a better story to tell. Here’s a hint: the human one is a great place to start. Go work the hardest to fill requisition in your organization so you understand why that’s the case. Then make it better.
Evaluate where AI can meaningfully improve those workflows. And before deploying increasingly autonomous systems, establish clear expectations around data quality, governance, accountability, and the circumstances that require human intervention. Another hint: AI can do a lot, but should never disposition candidates. That’s table stakes understanding right now. And that’s what you will tell your recruiters, your compliance department, your candidates, and your auditors. Because that’s how you will design your process and automate your systems. Despite changing legislation, your CEO has determined Recruiting’s mandate is the same as everyone else’s in the company: deploy AI and be more efficient.
I’d also encourage leaders to think critically about how they’re measuring the value created by these investments. Time savings and productivity improvements are useful indicators, but they should be considered alongside hiring outcomes, candidate experience, and the effectiveness of the broader recruiting process. When in doubt, talk to your counterparts in other areas of the business like Sales and Marketing and learn how they’re getting more flexibility out of their [more expensive] systems, and getting breathing room from the Board, as we figure out the ROI of AI together.
Oh yeah, this last bit is pretty obvious and never goes out of style…invest in developing the business acumen and technical fluency of your recruiters. If the future of talent acquisition involves more workforce intelligence, internal mobility, and strategic advisory work, recruiters will need opportunities to build those capabilities. Recruiting is already a fast track to advanced business acumen because they learn how every role in the business is identified, assessed, and compensated. I’m a big fan of the internal rotational program, or a Major/Minor remit. (Ask me about that one.)
Advice to IC Recruiters:
Sup friends? How are you? Like for real? When was the last time a candidate conversation made you smile? The only correct answer is today. If you didn’t talk to a candidate today or have a candidate call scheduled for today, stop reading, and go source.
Okay still here? Back with a smile on your face? My biggest recommendation for anyone in recruiting is to become more technically curious about how your work gets done. You don’t need to become a software engineer to understand how automation, data, and AI can improve your recruiting workflows. But go read the Future of Talent Report, talk to peers at more technical organizations, wrap your head around candidate journey mapping, and understand how your ATS actually automates stage pass-throughs and what it takes to be the orchestrator. You should understand the systems you use, the limitations of the information they produce, and how to evaluate whether an automated recommendation is actually useful.
Regardless of your company and industry, you have the opportunity to know exactly how the business operates and makes money through demonstrating expertise in an understanding of the roles you’re filling and the labor markets you support. As technology becomes more capable of finding and organizing information, your ability to interpret that information and apply professional judgment becomes increasingly valuable. But not as valuable as your ability to understand human motivation and influence outcomes.
Which is where communicating with data comes in. Start reading. A ton. Learn how to translate labor market intelligence into recommendations that hiring managers and business leaders can act on. Even if it’s just a Slack message to your hiring manager outside of req pipeline updates. Demonstrate an interest in their area of the business, the greater economy, and don’t be afraid to ask for advice. Example: “Hey {hiring manager}, I saw this article, tell me if I’m wrong about this, but this is how I think it impacts our recruiting efforts.”
This is how the senior leaders you support as hiring managers will begin to develop your skills and take interest in you being an extension of their team. Which they should. You’re sourcing, engaging, and providing a curated experience to their future team members. If this seems obvious, it should be. The opportunity to become a more influential talent advisor will increasingly depend on your ability to connect recruiting decisions to business outcomes through curiosity. And the best recruiters are insatiably curious.
Most importantly, take charge of your own career development. No one is going to do it for you. Get involved in the conversations on LinkedIn, send messages to other recruiters, introduce yourself to some of the recognizable industry speakers, presenters, and TA leaders who you see with large audiences and their own media channels. I guarantee you’ll be caught off guard by their spirit of generosity. They are eager to pass the torch. Are you ready to take it?
And remember…the next great candidate is always one call away.
Closing: A few personal highlights from my trip to New York City
Beyond the announcements and research, Talent Connect was a pretty memorable experience for me personally. I had the opportunity to participate in the main stage programming, meet LinkedIn CEO, Dan Shapero, and spend time with CMO, Jessica Jensen. I also got a private tour of LinkedIn’s headquarters in the Empire State Building, where we met some of the people building the products shaping the future of our industry. And in a private fireside chat, I was fortunate to ask Brené Brown a question about how leaders can navigate uncertainty amid political change.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, particularly as HR and talent leaders find themselves responding to changing policies, organizational expectations, and public discourse. Her perspective reinforced the importance of how leaders communicate, create clarity, and support people through circumstances they can’t necessarily control. Since you weren’t in the room, I specifically asked her to “Please give us some motivation. Give us that Brené sauce.” After she and the audience laughed, she replied, “I don’t have any Brené sauce today. I have Brené outrage.” So if you’re a bit outraged, too, you have reason to be. And the whole industry is standing beside you as we navigate it together.
The private briefing on Hiring Assistant 2 with Vicky Wolfrum was another highlight.
I always appreciate the opportunity to get beyond the keynote announcements and ask more detailed questions about how the technology actually works. I didn’t expect myself to be in analyst briefings, but here we are. In service of my mission: to uplift and upskill the recruiting industry.
The biggest highlight of all, is really quite simple. And it’s the reason for which all of us should be in recruiting: the people. It was great spending time with fellow creators Kristi, Bonnie, Amy, and Madeline, reconnecting with Dina, and catching up with so many familiar faces from across the recruiting industry.
A special thank you to Jen Gronski, Kris Kitto, and Alyssa Merwin for helping make the experience possible and for including me in the main stage programming. Filming with you was amazing! Lucas, you crushed it, dude.
I came away from Talent Connect encouraged by the conversations happening around the future of recruiting. There’s still a considerable amount of work ahead but I’m optimistic [as always] that with the right process, technology, we can find more clarity and confidence in our work as recruiters.
And that’s what makes this such an interesting time to be part of the industry. The role of the recruiter is evolving, and the people who understand how to combine technology, expertise, and sound judgment will have an important role in shaping what comes next. Together.
Watch more coverage of Dan’s Presentation and Hiring Assistant 2 at Talent Connect and my take on the Future of Talent Report.
Read the full 2026 Future of Talent Report and check out Hiring Assistant 2 for Yourself.
