Hiring for specialised roles used to be extremely difficult for Aurecon, a global design, engineering, and advisory services firm headquartered in Melbourne. Searching across a crowded and highly competitive talent pool, the company with around 8,000 employees in Australia, New Zealand and Asia knew it was time to rethink its strategy.

“Candidates often have multiple offers on the table, and we need to act fast while still providing a great candidate experience,” admitted Lucy McGhee, Senior Recruitment and Sourcing Consultant, Aurecon.

With traditional sourcing methods time-consuming and often yielding the wrong profiles, Aurecon’s objective was clear: snap up the right candidates before they get signed elsewhere.

Helping hand

For Aurecon, recruitment is not just about filling vacancies but also about understanding technical nuance, providing strategic business advice, and building trusted relationships with world-class talent. This was the reason why the company decided to partner with LinkedIn.

“The biggest pain point recruiters tell us about is time lost on repetitive tasks, posting roles,  running searches, and reviewing profiles that don’t fit,” noted Feon Ang, Managing Director LinkedIn APAC. 

Leveraging LinkedIn’s agentic AI solution Hiring Assistant, Aurecon hoped to cut significant time during the entire talent acquisition process.

“Pre-deployment, we worked closely with LinkedIn to map our recruitment workflows and identify the areas where Hiring Assistant could make the most impact,” McGhee said.

During deployment, Aurecon and LinkedIn ran pilots across real roles, tested different prompts, and laid out detailed feedback on usability and candidate quality.

Ang explained how their agentic AI tool works: “Recruiters can brief the agent in simple language and it will get to work. It can kick off and refine candidate searches, draft job posts and calibrate fit, shortlist likely matches, and prepare personalised outreach and follow-ups. However, the recruiter remains in control over the results that the agent brings back for review and approval.”

Internally, LinkedIn has been using Hiring Assistant within its own recruiting teams since the pilot stage, she added.

Tangible results

Within the first few months, recruiters were spending 30% less time on sourcing, which allowed Aurecon to focus on strategic conversations with hiring managers. 

“The quality of candidates also  improved as the AI learned from our feedback, and the recommendations became sharper over  time. It felt like having a hiring assistant working in the background, surfacing talent while we slept,” McGhee said.

Aurecon’s recruiters saw time savings on drafting communications, improved candidate engagement through personalised outreach, and greater productivity by freeing capacity for strategic conversations.

Additionally, recruiters rated the quality of AI-sourced candidates between 7 and 9 out of 10. The tool surfaced “unicorn” candidates that had previously gone unnoticed, even in niche markets.

“If the AI agent disappeared, going back to manual search would feel like stepping back in time,” McGhee said.

LinkedIn’s hiring assistant, Ang explained, can turn a job description into clear must-have and nice-to-have skills, search for candidates, shortlist likely matches with a simple “why this candidate” rationale, draft personalised outreach, and gather basic pre-screen details from the candidates (like location and willingness to relocate). 

“It also learns from a recruiter’s past searches and feedback, and with ATS integrations, brings candidates into one place,” she said.

Feedback loop

Post-deployment, LinkedIn refined features like tone customisation based on Aurecon’s feedback. For McGhee, leveraging the AI agent didn’t feel like a handover, but more of co-creating a tool that could really fit into how recruiters work. 

“I had my doubts early on, (because) it felt limited. But once the Hiring Assistant started adapting to feedback, everything changed. I brought my team back to the table to show them how powerful it had become. Now, I’m helping others see past those early impressions too,” she recalled.

Central to Hiring Assistant’s success is the access to LinkedIn’s data goldmine:  with 1.2 billion professionals, nearly 70 million companies and 42,000 skills listed, allowing the AI agent to go beyond job description keywords to read skills signals from profiles and roles.

“The agent can surface  adjacent and transferable skills, which widens the pool of candidates from non-traditional  backgrounds. And because each recommendation is evidence-led (which skills, from where), recruiters and hiring managers can align on decisions faster,” Ang said.

Future success

Beyond sourcing, Aurecon sees AI helping with job ad writing, tailoring candidate outreach, and even providing predictive insights into workforce trends.

“We’re also exploring AI in skills mapping and internal mobility, which is critical for helping people move fluidly across projects and service lines. For us, the focus is always on using technology to enhance the human side of recruitment, not replace it,” McGhee noted.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn is working to bolster its ATS integrations, the technology powering its sourcing and screening abilities.

“This remains a partnership. We’ll keep learning, and finding new ways to improve collaboration with hiring managers in the intake process,” Ang said.