Yes, AI might take your job one day. But, TODAY, it’s already controlling whether you even get your next one | Part 1 |

And here's what you can do about it to regain some of your power.

SUMMARY

If we don’t, as women, overcome our cringe-avoidance on LinkedIn and prioritize building our Reputation Architecture^TM, we will quite simply get down-ranked or passed over by AI Agents embedded in the hiring process.

Only the loud, bold and hyper-engaged will survive.

I’ve been having this conversation a lot lately. And it usually plays out like this:

I’m at an event or talking to other women at school pickup… and someone invariably makes a joke about how “AI will take all our jobs one day”.

That’s when I pause and run the quick calculations in my head:

How badly do I want to ruin the mood? Should I burst everyone’s bubble by saying: AI will probably take your job one day but, today, it’s already controlling whether you even get your next job or board role.

Where I land on that mental calculation usually depends on a combination of how bad today’s news cycle has been and how much time I have until my kids turn into pumpkins.

I’ve taught workshops on what this new AI-era hiring process means for women in MBA University programs and Alumni groups and have taken on executives as clients.

And now, here on Power Stack, I’ll tell you everything I know, from the hours I spent poring through LinkedIn’s engineering papers and sales materials. I’ll also lay out a step by step guide on how to optimize what I call AI-Era Reputation Architecture^TM. If you, like me, are too impatient to wait for each article, you can dive in to everything via our Reputation Architecture^TM eBook download bundle.

Let me preface what I’m about to say with this: It’s not all doom and gloom. What is happening now in the hiring landscape absolutely has the potential for greater visibility and opportunity for women.

However.

Through my work building BOA Media, I’ve connected with many impressive, accomplished women and I’ve noticed two common themes about their presence on LinkedIn:

1. Their profiles are (mostly) pretty sparse. They have updated titles/companies but little to no descriptions for the roles. Mainly, I assume, because their titles speak for themselves.

2. Their posted content usually falls within two types of buckets: celebrating team accomplishments or congratulating colleagues on new milestones. Classic. Well-deserved!

These women are successful… and BUSY. And when I ask them about it, they almost always respond with

1) I know I need to do it but I don’t have time and

2) I hate posting about my accomplishments (the cringe-avoidance mindset is alive and well in this group).

And therein lies the problem.

If we don’t, as women, overcome our cringe-avoidance on LinkedIn and prioritize building our Reputation Architecture^TM, we will quite simply get down-ranked or passed over by AI Agents.

Only the loud, bold and hyper-engaged will survive.

Here’s my take on how AI is completely reshaping the process:

1. The first change is an important one: for recruitment purposes on LinkedIn, our profiles’ initial audience may no longer be humans but AI agents.

2. It no longer matters if we have applied for a role or not, we (as talent) are now floating in a pool of 1.3 BILLION candidates and we’re being parsed through, vetted, packaged and presented (or not!) to hiring teams by these AI agents without our knowledge.

3. The third change is the scariest to me. It’s happening already but we’ll see even more evidence of it over time: Because AI-agents can essentially parse through the entirety of LinkedIn as a candidate pool, the concept of public job postings becomes basically irrelevant. Outside of corporate policy or PR strategy, there will no longer be a purpose for posting a job publicly. My biggest worry is that this will slowly, over time, take the entire process “underground” and remove all visibility into what opportunities might be out there. That creates even more potential for bias from the human-in-the-loop when they decide who to reach out to and makes it nearly impossible for talent to proactively hunt for opportunities.

Whether it’s for an executive, board director or advisory role, it’s an entirely new playing field for us; One requiring a completely different strategy than what we had previously been taught about CV/resume writing, networking and job applications.

From my research, I’ve developed my own LinkedIn philosophy for BOA clients and workshop participants and it begins with the following.

Here is my take on the 3 types of signal categories LinkedIn’s AI-agents look for when discovering, vetting and repackaging us to recruiters.

1. Skills

2. Network Structure

3. Engagement

Skills are, in my opinion, the most heavily weighted piece of the pie and I’ll go into detail about how to tackle it over the next couple of articles. It’s the biggest mindset shift that’s required in building out a new strategy for yourself. We’ve been taught to list quantifiable results, accomplishments and responsibilities in our resumes. And don’t get me wrong, this advice is still relevant, especially for the human who (hopefully) will read your profile somewhere down the line.

But I would bet that rethinking your profile from a skills-perspective will get you further along in the process.

Pay attention to the emails or notifications you receive from LinkedIn, it’s almost always a not-so-subtle prompt to do something skills-related.

I, myself, just received a prompt from LinkedIn asking me if their AI-team could update my headline. Spoiler: The 3 headline options provided to me were each stuffed with skills. Trust me, now that you’ve read this, you won’t be able to un-see it.

There is an incredible volume of documentation out there that LinkedIn has published about Skills both in their marketing materials and engineering papers. And luckily for you, I’ve done the grunt work of poring through most of it. So bare with me here while I go over the big picture—because it’s important to understand how it all works.

In a nutshell, LinkedIn has developed what they call a Skills Graph “a common language around skills to help us all better understand the skills that power the global workforce. The Skills Graph does this by dynamically mapping the relationships between 41K skills, 1.2B members, 69M companies, and other organizations globally.”

After having read what feels like everything they have published about the Skills Graph and I’ve boiled everything down into subsets of skills that LinkedIn’s AI-agents parse through:

• Listed Skills

These are the most obvious: the skills that you have actively listed across your profile.

• Inferred Skills

Inferred skills were the most surprising subset to me during my research. Basically, LinkedIn has had years to analyze profiles, job descriptions and ultimately which candidates filled those roles and how their careers progressed, they have been able to build intelligence into the Skills Graph. The result? Their AI-agents can infer skills about candidates even without the skills being mentioned explicitly.

On one hand, that’s a huge, positive piece of news that hopefully is beneficial to candidates over the long run.

On the other hand.. (Note that I’m fully aware that I am an over-controlling brand strategist by profession), but I don’t love the idea of my brand attributes being inferred by an AI-agent. I’d much rather have more power in the matter.

• Endorsed Skills & Verified Skills

Endorsed Skills and Verified Skills are probably the most important. I’ve seen many hints across their papers that allude to the fact that verifying skills via 3rd party approval is extremely important (for obvious reasons).

WHAT TO DO NOW

My recommendation: Don’t feel the need to overhaul your entire profile today. First off, that’s way too overwhelming. But more importantly, regular updates will be more beneficial to you in the long run (more on that in a future article).

For now, I recommend starting with the low hanging fruit: 1. Add a skill or two to your headline and 2. Update your skills section and focus on your “Top 5 Skills” that will should show up in your About Section. TIP: Choose skills that would be relevant to your NEXT career goal.

And if you want to go even further:

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll go into more detail about how to optimize your profile from a skills perspective.