LinkedIn and Microsoft Will Now Write Your Resume For You

Finding the right words to describe your last job no longer needs to be a thesaurus-combing ordeal. Microsoft and LinkedIn can automatically do it for you.

The software company and social-networking service—the former of which acquired the latter in 2016 for $26 billion—together have launched Resume Assistant, a Word-integrated tool that will help spruce up your CV-writing by suggesting work experience descriptions pulled from similar LinkedIn profiles and requirements from real job postings. The feature is available to Microsoft Office 365 subscribers, but one does not need a LinkedIn account to use it.

What’s more, when you’re done, Resume Assistant promises to “surface relevant job opportunities for you directly within Microsoft Word.”

The tool is the newest product to come out of Microsoft’s takeover of LinkedIn, the high price of which raised more questions than it answered. Industry analysts speculated that Microsoft might have more up its sleeve than just trying to snag more users—offering companies an entire hiring, learning, and training package, perhaps.

“Microsoft can drive the evolution of the competency marketplace in ways LinkedIn as a standalone company couldn’t,” Ryan Craig, managing director of private equity fund University Ventures, which focuses on the higher education sector, told Quartz when Microsoft first made its bid for the professional social network. “They can offer a complete HR solution.”

A compete HR solution, Resume Assistant—on its own—is not. But surely there is more along these career-helping lines to come from the collaboration. And at the least, Microsoft’s new tool is a vast improvement over its oft-mocked old paperclip assistant, Clippy.