Michigan turns to AI to spruce up its workforce development efforts
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The Economic Development Corporation is leveraging artificial intelligence to match job seekers with vacant positions across the state.
Michigan kicked off 2025 with more than 200,000 job openings to be filled, according to federal data. A revamped career portal hosted by the state’s Economic Development Corporation aims to fill those gaps and bring in workforce and economic development to Michigan.
The Michigan Economic Development Corporation, or MEDC, first debuted its Michigan Career Portal in 2023 as part of the state’s campaign to attract workers the same year. Now, MEDC has partnered with software provider SmartJobBoard to enhance the portal’s job matching capabilities with the help of artificial intelligence.
The AI helps to match people’s resume with potential job options semantically rather than by keyword, said Rodion Telpizov, the CEO of SmartJobBoard. For instance, the term developer could apply to a number of positions, so the portal uses AI capabilities to provide search results that more closely reflect what’s on the user’s resume.
The portal aims to link people inside and outside of Michigan to career opportunities that align with their skills, experience and location preference in the state, based on data they provide on themselves, said Spencer Lucker, talent solutions director of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.
It can also help reduce the time burden for users to find and research jobs manually, while improving the overall customer experience, Lucker said. The career portal “expedites that process, such that no one's getting annoyed by it taking too long, and they're actually getting excited about the matches that they're receiving, and they're able to focus on the actual jobs and whether they're a good fit,” he said.
Compared with other job boards, the Michigan portal has a higher rate of people clicking on a job posting and the application button. According to Telpizov, the average rate of application button clicks on the Michigan site is 15%, while other career sites see an average of 5%.
On the site, users can start their initial job hunt by searching for specific career titles and locations. The page also includes a section where people can select jobs by geographic region in the state, specific cities or by career categories. The site also provides blog posts where users can access resources like interview tips, resume building advice and information on local networking events.
A match score is also generated by a large language model to evaluate how well a person’s resume is matched to a particular job based on considerations like their education, skills and certifications.
To fully leverage the portal’s services, users are prompted to create a profile. Since the career portal’s initial launch in 2023, the site has seen more than 33,500 users as of March 2025, and there are more than 147,000 jobs listed in the portal currently.
“We scrape all jobs directly from employers’ websites in the state of Michigan, and we import these jobs to the portal,” Telpizov said. The portal is updated daily to add newly available job opportunities and remove old vacancies to ensure data remains current.
According to portal data, most out-of-state signups are from California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York and Texas. That information is helpful for officials to, for instance, target workforce development marketing efforts in those states, Lucker said.
Plus, data from the portal can help officials identify certain industries that users are most interested in to help attract businesses to the state. Lucker explained that these are “helpful insights to the employers that we’re working with so that we can show them these are the skills, experience or education levels of talent that we know [you’re] looking for in your industry.”
“We're really trying to put as much of the information that is helpful to the user at their disposal so that they can make those informed decisions,” Lucker said.