Field selection for job categorization and recommendation to social network users

Abstract

Nowadays, in the Web 2.0 reality, one of the most challenging task for companies that aim to manage and recommend job offers is to convey this enormous amount of information in a succinct and intelligent manner such to increase the performances of matching operations against users profiles/curricula and optimize the time/space complexity of these processes. With this goal, this paper presents a novel method to formalize the textual content of job offers that aims at identifying the most relevant information and fields expressed by them and leverage this compact formalization for job recommendation and profile matching in social network environments. This method has been then developed and tested in the industrial environment represented by Multiposting and Work4, world leaders in digital solutions of e-recruitment problems. In this study three classes of documents are considered: job offers, job categories and social network user profiles (as potential job candidates); each class contains several fields with textual information. The proposed representation method permits to dynamically identify those text fields, for each class, that could help a cross-matching strategy in order to preserve, from one hand, the matching/recommendation performances and, on the other hand, reduce the cost of these operations (due to a straightforward dimensionality reduction mechanism). We then evaluated and compared the presented approach showing significant improvements on both categorization and recommendation tasks by also drastically reducing their computational costs.