LinkedIn Talent Connect 2025 was built around one simple idea: truth.
How do we find signal through the noise in hiring, technology, and work?
That question kept surfacing across sessions, demos, and hallway conversations. Recruiters, analysts, and builders are all trying to navigate the same tension between what’s real and what’s marketing spin. Between what’s possible and what’s proven when it comes to AI. And LinkedIn’s product team had a strong showing.
This framing matters because as TA professionals we don’t just operate in hopes and hype. We need tangible tools, real conversations, and direct insights.
So this isn’t about spectacle. It’s about meaning, execution, and progress within the recruiting industry.
This time last year Hiring Assistant was announced, and there was a ton of enthusiasm built, and a ton of anticipation. If you’ve spent any time with recruiters on the platform in the last year, there’s also been some speculation because of the wait. But there’s rationale. And it’s demonstrative of a discerning product team. A team that wanted to get it right.
So I’ll be honest, they did. Hiring Assistant has been developed by being informed by feedback from more than 8,000 recruiters, 150,000 in-mails, and results showing 50% fewer candidates needed per match and 56 % higher response rates.
That’s very real data. I don’t know many ai sourcing tools that can claim that before bringing a product to market that has such a significant impact in our work, as hiring human beings. But what stood out more was how LinkedIn positioned the tool not as automation replacing recruiters, but as augmentation that helps teams focus on quality, compliance, and candidate experience.
It’s an important shift. The recruiters who thrive in the next few years will be those who experiment with purpose, not novelty. Just look around, recruiters are absolutely doing more with less, and the most fascinating use case for AI in hiring is research and time to pipeline. LLMs are fantastic at processing high volume of text, so what I’m seeing first hand in my own work and in talking with others is that AI has unlocked a velocity previously unseen for sourcing research (fka “Talent Intelligence”).
Another recurring idea at the conference is something I’ve been focusing on after spending the year on the road at conferences with Building the Talent Machine… discernment.
Job seekers are applying to more jobs than ever. AI interview coaches and automated matching exists to make things smoother, but they also add noise. Like a ton of it. We’re seeing qualified candidates fail interviews not because they lack skill but because they haven’t learned how to tell their story effectively. We’re seeing recruiters inboxes spammed with poor pitches. And requisitions flooded with unqualified applicants, increasing operational expense to process rejections, while conversion rates plummet to basis point percentages.
That’s the paradox of AI in recruiting. The tools promise fairness and scale, but they also make sameness easier. As John Vlastelica said, “It’s a needle in a stack of needles. Everyone looks above average.”
Oh yeah, John’s the guy who invented the Bar Raiser interview at Amazon. So if you’re ever said “bar raiser” in context of recruiting, you have John to thank. (No seriously, go thank him, he’s great.)
And our job as recruiters is to see through that. To spot signal and help people show up authentically, while advising hiring managers. And when it comes to advising hiring managers, recruiters are becoming more strategic and future pipelines will look a lot different than they have in the past because of AI. We’re going to see fewer candidates at the top of the funnel at recruiter screens because of alignment. Which will make hiring engines more efficient. Pass through rates will largely stay the same, those are fixed, but the volume of candidates at each will drop. Increasing recruiter efficiency (RE). This means if a recruiter worked 10 reqs a quarter last year, and now they’re able to work 15, we’ve replaced headcount of a recruiter through two more efficient recruiters. Yes, that means fewer recruiting roles. Think of this as a healthy market correction from the over hiring we saw during ZIRP. I don’t mind a little health pressure and neither should you. This is your time to perform. So stand up and step out. Recruiting was never supposed to be easy.
Across two days of sessions the tone shifted from hype to humility.
I had the opportunity to sit in on John Vlastelica’s workshop where he reminded us that “best practice” can belong in academia, not necessarily reality. We face pressure to hire senior talent, move fast, manage risk. Fraud detection, identity verification, complementary hiring (not merely affinity bias), that’s all now baseline.
His call was clear: we need smarter people in TA. Less commiseration, more critical thinking.
So we dove into Quality of Hire breakouts. One of my favorite points of discussion. While much of the conversation dissolved to tooling and “what’s your stack” conversing among TA leaders, one thing remained true as ever. Quality of Hire lacks a universal definition and no one knows how to operationalize it in a way that connects recruiter accountability to post-hire outcomes in an ethical, fair way. More on Quality of Hire later. But after battle testing my theories around its failures over the last year, I’m more energized than ever to replace this misguided headline. Time for QoH to go. Recruiters are more discerning than to adopt this concept just because people say it.
All in all, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned at the intersection of data, technology, and professional identity. The Hiring Assistant represents a move toward meritocratic matching, and it also reaffirms the need for recruiters who understand nuance.
The talent ecosystem is evolving. LinkedIn is testing at scale. And I’m excited to see how the product evolves in concert with LLMs becoming more advanced. Remember these are very nascent stages. And the future of hiring with AI may look a lot different than our current process. That’s a good thing.
And after reflecting on a week at LinkedIn Talent Connect, one question remains…How will you tell your story in this new hiring ecosystem?
Because amid the noise, storytelling remains a recruiter’s most powerful skill.
And that’s exactly what Building the Talent Machine is on a mission to do. Through sponsored content, custom video storytelling, and amazing brand partnerships. So if you want to tell your story, I’d love to hear from you.
And be sure to follow along and share with a friend what it is we’re building. It’d mean the world to me.
Happy Hiring ✌️
Brando
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