LinkedIn launches the Italian Intelligent Agent to recruit new talent
Since 2022, the number of applications for each role has doubled, but 66 per cent of recruiters say it has become more difficult to find the right people
As far as applications are concerned, they are certainly there, according to the latest figures analysed by LinkedIn. Since 2022, the leading professional social network estimates that the number of applications per vacancy has practically doubled globally. In Italia, in the first half of 2026, according to data from the report on the mismatch between labour supply and demand, produced by CNEL and Unioncamere in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies, Istat and the Guglielmo Tagliacarne Research Centre, companies planned to make 2,869,000 new hires, but in 44.8 per cent of cases they anticipate difficulties in finding the necessary staff. Consequently, despite the volume of applications, nearly one in two hires proves difficult. According to LinkedIn data, 66 per cent of recruiters explain that, paradoxically, it has become more difficult to place the right people in the right roles and they are increasingly in need of support: 52 per cent say that finding qualified talent has been more challenging over the past year, and 63 per cent feel unprepared to cope with the pressures of their role and the growing expectations of organisations.
The introduction of agentic AI into the world of recruitment in Italia looks set to be the necessary leap forward for the sector. The most time-consuming and repetitive tasks involved in the selection process – understanding requirements, searching for talent that consistently meets them, analysing applications and profiles, and contacting potential candidates – are all tasks that LinkedIn will entrust to the ‘hiring assistant’, the intelligent recruitment assistant that draws on real-time signals from a network of over 1.4 billion members. Its Italian version is being launched at a time of increasing pressure on those involved in recruitment.
Marcello Albergoni, country manager for LinkedIn Italia, explains that “in an increasingly complex labour market, the value lies not only in recruiting more quickly, but also in improving the quality of the match between people and opportunities”. Artificial intelligence is transforming the role of recruiters, helping them to identify talent and skills that traditional processes might otherwise overlook. “The results are already measurable,” Albergoni points out, “companies using hiring assistants are seeing an 11 per cent increase in high-quality hires and are recruiting 18 per cent more highly sought-after professionals. This is how the recruiter’s role is evolving: technology can enhance their ability to identify the right people, leaving them more scope for what remains deeply human.”
The Hiring Assistant has been launched globally in English and is already being used by 80 Italian companies. Its availability in Italian will ensure that this tool aligns even more closely with the way recruiters communicate and work, enabling them to go beyond traditional keyword searches and identify highly specialised profiles, whilst drawing on real-time insights from the social network platform. This will free up time from more routine tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on building relationships with candidates: it is not intended to replace the recruiter’s judgement, but to leave the responsibility of selecting people to the people themselves.
In recent days, a story reported by the Wall Street Journal caused quite a stir: that of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic – the leading AI company with a valuation approaching one trillion dollars – who resigned, explaining that the company ‘is racing towards a self-improving superintelligence and is playing with our lives’. Coxon is part of the group of researchers who, in 2021, decided to leave OpenAI due to a lack of focus on safety and in order to develop software in a controlled manner and for the good of humanity. The software developed by LinkedIn has created the first agent for recruiters, clearly defining its role and limitations. Hiring Assistant can search, analyse and make recommendations, but it cannot make independent hiring decisions, let alone exclude candidates from the process or move a person through the selection pipeline. Control always remains in the hands of the human recruiter, who sets the objectives, establishes the criteria, can amend them during the process and makes the final decisions. It is this balance between the potential of AI and human judgement that marks a new phase in the evolution of recruitment, promoting career opportunities based on people’s skills and abilities.
