Microsoft's Resume Assistant Brings LinkedIn Professional Information to Word

When Microsoft announced their $26.2 billion buy of LinkedIn in June 2016, many wondered about the logic of that expenditure. However, when you consider the amount of data that LinkedIn has about professionals from across the entire spectrum of business, enterprise, and freelance employees, and how that data can be incorporated into Microsoft's product lines, the buy makes a whole lot more sense.

The Redmond, Washington-based company has already integrated data from LinkedIn to Dynamics 365 and introduced of LinkedIn Profile Cards for Office 365 users. Today's announcement about the new Resume Assistant for Microsoft Word in Office 365 continues to expand that cross service functionality.

The Resume Assistant flips the tables on the discussion that Artificial Intelligence (AI) might someday play a role in replacing us mere mortals in our jobs: It uses machine learning to help you create the resume that could result in your next big career move.

According to Bryan Goode, General Manager for Office 365, this feature is going to be a natural part of Microsoft Word. The simple process of opening a resume in Word will automatically trigger the Resume Assistant to offer help, then connect you to the various public job descriptions and other job related information on LinkedIn.

The Resume Assistant brings together Microsoft Word and the LinkedIn Graph; it then accesses the data available from public profiles on LinkedIn to help you craft an optimum resume. As you know, sometimes working on your resume can be daunting and leave you looking for the perfect words to describe what it is you do each day. Since the pool of professional data from LinkedIn is so big, there is likely another person out there who has performed similar tasks as you have and their description of that work can inspire you for a new way to express your own experience.

Here are the key features of the new service, as outlined by Microsoft:

According to Goode, Resume Assistant will be available starting this Thursday for Office 365 Insiders and will continue to roll out to all platforms where Microsoft Word is available beginning in early 2018. You can learn more about Resume Assistant through this Office Support article and the Using Resume Assistant in Microsoft Word help article over on LinkedIn.

This brief YouTube video will give you a quick overview of the new service:

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