LinkedIn's new AI-driven search moves beyond exact job titles. Prospecting now involves natural language queries, like finding founders in a specific industry who previously worked at a certain company. This allows for much more nuanced and effective lead generation for premium users.
Honeybook built a ChatGPT agent that logs into LinkedIn, searches for candidates based on a job description, and applies nuanced filters (e.g., tenure, location, activity). This automates a time-consuming, multi-step workflow, freeing up the hiring team for higher-value tasks.
LinkedIn is not a prospecting panacea that provides effortless inbound leads. Its true power is unlocked when it's integrated into a structured, multi-channel sequence, where it amplifies the impact of traditional outreach like phone calls and emails rather than replacing them.
Countering the idea that AI sacrifices quality for speed, Honeybook's recruiting agent found four net-new, high-quality candidates the team had missed manually. The fifth candidate it found was one the team was already pursuing, validating the AI's quality and ability to augment human efforts.
Leverage AI to conduct comprehensive research on a prospect's company, industry, and the specific individuals you're meeting. This allows you to bypass basic discovery questions and dive into more relevant, informed conversations, making the sales call more efficient and valuable for the customer.
Unlike static sales databases that quickly become stale, LinkedIn is a dynamic ecosystem where professionals update their own information. This makes it the most accurate and current source for list building and prospecting data, a core advantage over any other tool.
Your social media followers and email contacts represent a vast, untapped network. AI tools can analyze this data, enrich it with public information, and scan for context to identify high-value individuals—like investors or media—who are already in your orbit but whom you are unaware of.
OpenAI is launching an AI-powered jobs platform and a massive certification program. This move positions them as a direct competitor to LinkedIn, which is owned by their primary investor and partner, Microsoft, creating a fascinating and tense "coopetition" dynamic.
The paradigm is shifting from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). The content you post now on platforms like LinkedIn will be consumed by AI models to answer future user queries, making it a critical asset for long-term visibility and authority.
Simply using one-sentence AI queries is insufficient. The marketers who will excel are those who master 'prompt engineering'—the ability to provide AI tools with detailed context, examples, and specific instructions to generate high-quality, nuanced output.
Your most valuable future introduction may already be a follower on Instagram or LinkedIn. Use AI to analyze your existing network for hidden relationships with key targets (e.g., investors, partners), instead of only focusing on acquiring new connections.