News

LinkedIn Is Trying To Help You Apply For Fewer Jobs

The platform’s new AI-powered “Job Match” aims to guide users toward roles they’re qualified for and away from those they aren’t.

Published

2 years ago

January 16, 2025

Nour Nasir

linkedin is trying to help you apply for fewer jobs

If you’ve ever spoken to anyone hunting for a job lately, you’ve probably heard about how difficult it is to even secure an interview. According to LinkedIn, one of the reasons for this struggle is that too many people are applying for roles they aren’t qualified for, making it harder for strong candidates to get noticed.

To tackle this, LinkedIn is rolling out a new AI-powered tool called “Job Match” — a feature designed to bridge the gap between job seekers and recruiters by offering detailed summaries that help users understand how well they fit a particular role.

Unlike simple keyword matching tools, “Job Match” takes a more nuanced approach by using AI to analyze a candidate’s overall experience and compare it with the qualifications listed in a job description. The idea isn’t just to help users find roles they’re qualified for, but also to steer them away from applying to jobs where they might fall short.

The feature is accessible to all LinkedIn users, but those with LinkedIn Premium get extra perks, such as more detailed insights about their job match level. In the future, recruiters will also benefit, as the tool aims to surface more qualified candidates, reducing the chances of strong applicants being overlooked.

Also Read: Foundster Is Dubai’s New AI-Driven Company Setup Service

Whether this new approach will make life easier for job seekers is still up for debate. The last couple of years have been brutal for many industries, with massive layoffs still a regular occurrence at the start of 2025. All this means even fiercer competition for fewer openings — something no AI tool can ever hope to completely solve.

However, LinkedIn product manager Rohan Rajiv believes the lack of transparency in hiring is a big part of the issue, pointing out that early testing of “Job Match” showed that a “non-trivial chunk” of mismatches between candidates and jobs is easier to fix than people realize. “I think there’s a portion of this that will always be labor market dynamics, but I would argue that there’s a significant portion of this that is just pure lack of transparency,” he said.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 days ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.