(Bigstock Photo)

LinkedIn today unveiled several new features powered by to help companies better plan for, hire, and develop diverse and inclusive teams.

LinkedIn rolled out the new features across a variety of artificial intelligence-powered tools focused on gender diversity at its annual Talent Connect conference Wednesday. The announcements come as reports surfaced that Amazon previously scrapped an artificial intelligence-powered recruiting tool that showed bias against women.

Diversity continues to be a key issue within the tech community that is top of mind for many recruiters. LinkedIn’s recent Global Recruiting Trends study found that building diverse and inclusive teams is the top talent priority for human resources workers and recruiters.

These new tools are focused primarily on gender diversity. LinkedIn says its long-term vision calls for tools to help companies understand diversity issues across a variety of demographics.

“Diversity, of course, means far more than gender equality (though that would be a pretty awesome start),” LinkedIn Product Manager Rachel Kumar wrote in a blog post. “Our long-term vision at LinkedIn is to power clear and actionable diversity insights across many other demographics — veteran status, race, ethnicity, disability status — as well as diversity of skills, experience, and backgrounds.”

Gender diversity stats within Talent Insights. (LinkedIn Photo)

Here is a look at the latest diversity tools from LinkedIn:

  • Gender tab for Talent Insights: A private tab within the new Talent Insights tool shows gender representation of a company’s overall workforce and within various job functions. Users can compare their company’s gender stats against industry averages.
  • Identifying diverse workforces through Talent Pool: The Talent Pool feature within Talent Insights allows users to look at pockets of talent based on location and skillsets, among other things. LinkedIn has added real-time gender representation information for different areas across the U.S. to help recruiters figure out the best places to recruit diverse candidates for a variety of job functions.
  • Diverse representation in LinkedIn Recruiter: When doing a search for talent through LinkedIn Recruiter, each page will return results consistent with the gender make up of the available talent pool.
  • LinkedIn Learning courses on diversity: Free until the end of November, LinkedIn is launching a trio of classes focused on Confronting Bias, Managing Diversity, and Inclusive Leadership.
  • Creating more inclusive messages: LinkedIn will soon add insights into how job postings and messages perform across genders, which can help recruiters build more inclusive outreach.
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