Prashanthi Padmanabhan, Vice President, LinkedIn Talent Solutions Engineering, believes artificial intelligence (AI) will reshape recruitment across industries, especially as enterprises struggle with the growing scale and complexity of hiring.

“You’re not handing over control to the agent entirely; you’re still in the driver’s seat, but able to do far more in the same amount of time,” said Padmanabhan.

Today, recruitment is one of the areas where AI is rapidly moving from an assistive tool to part of the workflow itself. Recruiters handle thousands of applications each day, and AI-powered solutions promise to reduce repetitive work, surface relevant candidates faster, and, most importantly, give hiring teams more time to focus on parts of recruitment that require human judgement.

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With its LinkedIn Hiring Assistant (LIHA), LinkedIn is betting on this shift. LIHA is the company’s agentic AI product designed to help recruiters at different stages of the hiring process. It essentially understands the recruiter’s intent, learns from feedback, and improves recommendations over time.

Padmanabhan sat down with indianexpress.com to discuss how AI is changing recruitment and the challenges of building AI-powered products for enterprises.

‘A new challenge to figure out’

Padmanabhan has been with LinkedIn for about seven years and has worked across three areas of the organisation – its ads business, Premium, which she describes as more of a consumer experience, and now Talent Solutions.

AI, she said, has been a constant thread throughout that journey. “AI has always been part of it, but getting it right for enterprises was a new challenge to figure out,” she said on the sidelines of the company’s media event in Bengaluru.

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Talking about the genesis of LIHA, Padmanabhan shared that it emerged from the belief that recruiting was particularly suited to an agentic AI experience. However, the product couldn’t be built simply by applying the technology to an existing workflow. According to her, understanding what recruiters and enterprises actually needed was paramount.

“Even with LIHA, the most interesting – and sometimes challenging, but rewarding – part was that we had a vision: we knew recruiting was ripe for an agentic experience, but we knew we couldn’t build it alone,” Padmanabhan said.

According to her, this meant speaking directly to customers, understanding their problems, developing prototypes and using feedback to improve the product. Padmanabhan said she expects this process to continue as LIHA evolves.

Why India is key to the story

When asked why India matters to LIHA, since a significant part of its development is happening in the country, Padmanabhan said that she sees the product as the work of a global team, rather than something that belongs to a particular geography.

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“I see my team as a global team – I have people in the US and here,” she said. “LIHA is a full-stack product with different parts to it: work on AI and intelligence happening in the Bay Area, and work happening here as well.”

However, for her, one of the biggest advantages of building in India is the access to an ever-expanding pool of AI-ready talent. “What I find amazing is the calibre of talent we’re able to hire here,” she said, adding that even new graduates and interns are increasingly “AI-primed and AI-native”.

This combination of AI skills and India’s existing strength in enterprise tech gives her confidence in scaling the product from the country.

According to LinkedIn, India is now its fastest-growing major market for Talent Solutions, which Padmanabhan attributes to both the scale of hiring in the country and Indian companies’ willingness to adopt AI.

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“The larger the scale of hiring complexity you’re dealing with, the clearer the ROI becomes when you bring in a product that creates that kind of efficiency,” she said.

She believes customers in India are quick to adopt AI across their organisational set-up, which in turn eases the burden of change management when rolling out new tools.

How is LIHA helping recruiters?

When it comes to the change LIHA brings, the most immediate and noteworthy is the reduction in repetitive work. Padmanabhan revealed that LIHA could reduce the number of profiles recruiters need to review by 80 per cent, while also contributing to a 66 per cent improvement in candidate acceptance rates.

The broader goal, however, is not to remove recruiters from the process, signalling the importance of retaining humans in the loop. “Through all of this, recruiters are still in the loop – they can do more with less time and channel their energy into more human-centric activities,” she said.

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With AI taking on more responsibilities in the hiring process, this distinction is vital. Padmanabhan argued that the ideal model is one where technology handles scale and repetitive tasks, while recruiters retain decision-making authority.

According to her, the objective here is also to improve the quality of candidate discovery. Instead of simply finding candidates who match obvious keywords, AI could likely help recruiters identify people they may otherwise have missed. The aim, she said, is “finding high-quality candidates faster, finding candidates you wouldn’t have found otherwise – the rare gems”.

Fostering trust amid AI-generated profiles

The rising prominence of AI in hiring has also raised questions about accuracy and reliability. This is because candidates can optimise resumes for ATS, while AI systems may make mistakes or produce false positives.

When asked about LinkedIn’s approach, Padmanabhan said that the platform is responding by expanding the sources of information used to assess the credibility of candidate profiles. “In general, we try to expand the sources of data we look at to validate the credibility of a profile or resume, and we’re adding more data sources over time to improve that.”

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Verified profiles are another part of this effort. Padmanabhan described authenticity verification as an important area of focus for both recruiters and candidates. “We’re putting a lot of focus into authenticity-verification hooks for both recruiters and candidates because trust works both ways.” At the same time, she acknowledged that this is an ongoing process rather than a problem with a single solution.

When asked what aspect of the hiring process AI will change the most in the next few years, Padmanabhan shared that she expects AI’s role in recruitment to expand beyond sourcing and profile screening. “Sourcing is already changing. Pre-screening is a mundane, repeatable workflow today that we should be able to smartly automate,” she said.

Interviews, however, are likely to remain more human. Instead of replacing interviewers, AI could help extract useful signals from conversations and use those insights to improve recommendations later in the hiring process.

She foresees LIHA eventually functioning almost like a tutor, especially for recruiters who are new to a particular hiring task. The system could help them understand qualifications, distinguish must-have requirements from nice-to-haves and improve their approach as they use it.

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“The combination of a recruiter’s experience and LIHA’s intelligence – one plus one should feel like 10,” Padmanabhan said. “That’s our dream: the product itself becomes the teacher.”

For job seekers, meanwhile, her advice is to focus less on titles and more on evidence of what they can actually do. Candidates should use the growing number of available tools to build projects, develop practical skills, and add those examples to their profiles and resumes.

“The best way to stand out is to demonstrate your skills regardless of your job title, build skills and share examples of them,” she said.