‘You’re still in the driver’s seat’: LinkedIn’s Prashanthi Padmanabhan on AI-powered hiring

Prashanthi Padmanabhan, Vice President of LinkedIn Talent Solutions Engineering, sees artificial intelligence revolutionizing recruitment across industries, particularly as businesses grapple with the increasing complexity of hiring. She emphasized that while AI will not replace recruiters entirely, it will enable them to accomplish more within the same timeframe.

Recruiters currently manage thousands of applications daily, and AI-driven solutions aim to alleviate repetitive tasks, identify candidates more efficiently, and free up time for recruiters to focus on aspects requiring human judgment. To achieve this shift, LinkedIn introduced its AI-powered Hiring Assistant (LIHA), an agentic AI product that assists recruiters throughout the hiring process.

It comprehends the recruiter's intent, learns from feedback, and enhances recommendations over time. During an interview with indianexpress.com, Padmanabhan discussed the impact of AI on recruitment and the challenges of creating AI-powered products for enterprises. Padmanabhan has held various roles at LinkedIn for seven years, including working on ads, Premium, and Talent Solutions.

She noted that AI has been an integral part of her tenure, but building AI for enterprises presented new challenges. The creation of LIHA stemmed from the belief that recruiting was well-suited for an agentic AI experience. However, it couldn't be built by merely applying the technology to an existing workflow. Instead, the product needed to be developed by understanding the needs of recruiters and enterprises through direct engagement, prototype development, and continuous improvement based on feedback.

Building LIHA required the company to engage closely with customers to grasp their needs and develop a product that caters to those requirements. India plays a crucial role in the development of LIHA, as a substantial part of its creation occurs within the country. Padmanabhan emphasized that the team is global, with members in both the US and India.

She highlighted India's advantage in accessing a vast pool of AI-ready talent, with graduates and interns increasingly possessing AI skills. This combination of AI expertise and India's thriving enterprise technology sector gives her confidence in scaling the product within the country. India is now LinkedIn's fastest-growing major market for Talent Solutions, attributed to the scale of hiring and the willingness of Indian companies to adopt AI.

With the growing complexity of hiring, the ROI of AI-powered solutions becomes evident. Padmanabhan believes Indian customers are swift to adopt AI tools, which simplifies change management when deploying new technologies. LIHA enhances recruiters' workflow by significantly reducing repetitive tasks. It can screen 80% fewer profiles while improving candidate acceptance rates by 66%.

However, recruiters remain integral to the process, leveraging the technology's efficiency to focus on more human-centric activities. By handling scale and repetitive tasks, AI empowers recruiters to make better decisions and discover high-quality candidates more effectively. To ensure trust in AI-generated profiles, LinkedIn is expanding the sources of information used to validate the credibility of candidates.

This approach aims to mitigate concerns about accuracy and reliability, ensuring that AI complements rather than replaces human judgment in the hiring process.