OpenAI’s new Job Board isn’t what you think it is…

You may have heard of OpenAI’s new Hiring Platform, announced last month.

Designed to “use AI to help find the perfect matches between what companies need and what workers can offer”, this new platform is hailed as a new competitor to LinkedIn.

Expected to launch in 2026, this announcement has also raised questions about the impact it will have on current hiring practices and existing roles across recruitment, HR and Talent Acquisition.

Don’t fall for it. No matter how good this platform is, it will never replace the huge advantage of working with a skilled hiring professional. Here’s why:

1.      Driven Matching vs Human-Led Connections

The OpenAI Jobs platform will utilise advanced AI to match skills with job requirements – which is something LinkedIn is already doing, with versions being utilised across various online job boards.

Although CV selection and skills matching is a crucial step to finding the right candidate and undoubtedly important in the hiring process, a specialised and experienced recruiter will also consider their lived experience and interaction with the client, candidates and current market.

This means considering a candidate’s past employer(s), their interests outside of work, their personal motivations and characteristics, their values and morales – all the pieces that make them an individual and the right person to join your business.

“For leadership roles where soft skills are paramount and organisational fit is key, it’s hard to see where human assessment can be replaced at all”, states Gareth, Co-Founder of Trace Recruitment.

“Hiring your next finance leader is certainly about competence, experience and calibre but it is also about EQ, team fit and ‘feel’ and we’re yet to see a technology that can assess this better another human can.”

 2.      Transparency via Certification

OpenAI plans to integrate a credential system through OpenAI Certifications.
This gives both candidates and employers an advantage – with candidates upskilling easily and effectively proving readiness for roles, which can then be accessed easily and objectively by hiring managers.

Although there is no standardised certification that hiring managers work with specifically, professionals that work in specific sectors will understand the different types of qualifications- knowing the differences between them and the nuisance that may make one certification more relevant or beneficial than another, alongside any updates that can impact the value of a certification.

3. Scale, Speed & Inclusion

It’s a well-known fact that shifting through CVs is a time-consuming task for any recruiter.

AI is an excellent tool for helping identify and match candidates quickly and effectively, and the new platform is undoubtedly going to work faster than a human recruiter or HR professional could.

However, it has been noted that although helpful, his advancement doesn’t always provide. For example, at our recent HR roundtable event, Talent & HR professionals across various businesses reported that their teams regularly re-accessed CV submissions - shortlisting, interviewing and even hiring professionals that the AI-powered platform had rejected.

“We’re already seeing how AI can play a supporting role in what we do but it’s not advanced enough, and not without it’s failings”, advises Gareth. Mining’ CV’s, via keywords for example, is great, but it misses the nuances and will miss candidates that are perfectly viable for a particular role…

We’re also seeing candidates that are loading their CV’s with keywords in the hope that they will be captured by the AI and automatically included automatically in the shortlist.  This just creates a lot more candidates that unsuitable for a given role and can lead to a lot of wasted time later down the track.” he adds.

The need for confidence in the shortlist of candidates is essential. This is especially true for Executive Search and/or niche roles, where the supply for demand is already reduced and subtly is vital. It’s clear, in these moments, that talent professionals can be supported by AI but not replaced.

4. Privacy is paramount

OpenAI privacy settings mean that, unless opted out, any data inputted into these programmes, will be used to further “inform” and “improve” the AI services, meaning that any information inputted into the platform will not necessarily be private.

This, combined with well-publicised hacking of platforms such as LinkedIn and Workday, highlight how working with smaller, more private organisations such as expert recruiters, can be safer and more secure than large-scale platforms.

We’ll continue our deep dive into OpenAI’s new platform next week. If you want to be part of the conversation, we’d love to hear from you:

Follow us on LinkedIn, register your interest for our in-person events here and online professional workshops here.