If you’re a college student in 2024, I’m sure there are two tools you’re very aware of: AI and LinkedIn. I personally use both on a weekly basis, from consulting ChatGPT on what symbols mean in physics equations to casually scrolling through my classmates’ job updates on my LinkedIn feed, just to see what everyone’s up to. Now, these two tools are coming together, thanks to a big update from LinkedIn.
On June 13, 2024, LinkedIn announced multiple new features that rely on the use of AI to make the job search easier and faster, as well as help users expand their network and learn new career-related skills.
This is huge news for college students in particular, as LinkedIn and AI are crucial tools, especially when summer internship application season or the post-grad job search seasons roll around. In my experience, the process of finding and applying for jobs can be super tedious and frustrating. From job listing searches that seem to yield nothing, to rewriting what feels like the same exact cover letter hundreds of times, working on my career is not only time-consuming — it’s incredibly daunting. Now, however, LinkedIn-s new AI-powered features are here to (hopefully) change that.
These new updates range from AI-generated cover letter drafts to optimized job search features, and many more. And although this plethora of new features is enticing, it can feel overwhelming to learn about them all (I mean, there is a ton of new stuff), so here’s a breakdown of the most exciting new LinkedIn AI features that college students should pay attention to!
Personalized Resume Feedback Based On Job Descriptions
Curating a resume specific to every single job description can feel extremely tedious, especially when it feels like you’re just editing small details every single time in order to match a specific job’s buzzwords. But LinkedIn now aims to help solve this problem for its Premium users by incorporating a feature that provides personalized resume feedback to users based on the description of the job they are applying for. This feature allows users to utilize a LinkedIn AI assistant to tailor their resume to the exact job description for the role they’re applying to, such as highlighting certain features of the user’s experience in order to fit the description better, or even editing entire sections to create the best resume possible.
This process could really help by cutting down the time you spend creating a resume for each individual job application. And since time is one of our most valuable resources, this feature could really help to eliminate a lot of the stress that comes with the job search.
Customized Cover Letter Drafts
Sometimes the most frustrating aspect of the job search can be having to write a new cover letter for every single job application, as this can be extremely time-consuming. Not only that, but it can also just be plain hard if writing isn’t your strongest suit. In order to mitigate this issue for users, LinkedIn has developed a new feature that uses generative AI to create a cover letter draft based on the job description alongside the user’s profile and experiences.
This feature could provide users with a great starting point for the draft of their cover letter, eliminating so much of the time it takes to simply get words on a page. Of course,once LinkedIn provides you with a draft, you’ll want to spend some time editing it to incorporate your own voice and personality, but still, it will still help streamline the process in a big way, which would in turn really help make applying to jobs much quicker and easier.
Conversational Prompts For Job Searching
This is another feature I am personally super excited for. Sometimes searching for the exact roles that you’re looking for on LinkedIn can feel so frustrating, from wondering which keywords to include to remembering to set your location preferences. But now LinkedIn has launched a new job search feature that allows Premium users to use conversational sentences to search for jobs. For example, a new search could look like, “Find me a journalism role in Los Angeles with a salary of at least $60,000.” This is so much easier and more direct than the previous search method, and hopefully will yield more relevant results. But of course, this search method still relies on job postings that are actually available, so searching for “entry-level journalism role with a salary of at least $300,000” would still yield no results (no matter how much I might wish otherwise).
More Specific & Relevant Job Posting Info
Another big frustration I feel when searching for jobs is having to read what feels like endless text in order to simply find out the basics of a job description. But in another new feature for Premium users, LinkedIn’s generative AI assistant will compile all of the essential information from a job posting in order to streamline this process, highlighting whether the job matches your preferences and whether your experiences match what the role requires. I think this feature will help applicants quickly determine whether they’re applying for roles they’re really interested in and qualified for, instead of just applying to everything under the sun that matches their search.
Profile-Building Help
This feature will be incredibly helpful for those who do not already have a LinkedIn profile, or even users whose profiles need a big update. This feature allows you to upload your current resume to the platform, and then AI will auto-populate the sections of your LinkedIn profile for you, based on what is included in your resume. And this feature is available for all users, not just Premium!
Career Advice & Interactive Learning
Sometimes, finding career advice can be difficult, especially for college students, as we are just getting our feet wet in the career world and lack many of the resources to get helpful and personalized advice. But a new LinkedIn feature through LinkedIn Learning aims to solve this problem by providing Premium users access to AI instructors based on real-life career development experts, such as Alicia Reece and Anil Gupta. This feature will allow users to messages with the AI version of these instructors, and receive personalized responses and advice to career questions, such as, “How do I negotiate my salary?”
This feature could be super useful to students, because reaching out for advice can seem daunting, especially when you don’t have a mentor you are comfortable with. This feature could really help students with their career development by giving them a way to get advice quickly, whenever they need it.