A novel approach for job matching and skill recommendation using transformers and the O*NET database

Abstract

Today we have tons of information posted on the web every day regarding job supply and demand which has heavily affected the job market. The online enrolling process has thus become efficient for applicants as it allows them to present their resumes using the Internet and, as such, simultaneously to numerous organizations. Online systems such as Monster.com, OfferZen, and LinkedIn contain millions of job offers and resumes of potential candidates leaving to companies with the hard task to face an enormous amount of data to manage to select the most suitable applicant. The task of assessing the resumes of candidates and providing automatic recommendations on which one suits a particular position best has, therefore, become essential to speed up the hiring process. Similarly, it is important to help applicants to quickly find a job appropriate to their skills and provide recommendations about what they need to master to become eligible for certain jobs. Our approach lies in this context and proposes a new method to identify skills from candidates' resumes and match resumes with job descriptions. We employed the O*NET database entities related to different skills and abilities required by different jobs; moreover, we leveraged deep learning technologies to compute the semantic similarity between O*NET entities and part of text extracted from candidates' resumes. The ultimate goal is to identify the most suitable job for a certain resume according to the information there contained. We have defined two scenarios: i) given a resume, identify the top O*NET occupations with the highest match with the resume, ii) given a candidate's resume and a set of job descriptions, identify which one of the input jobs is the most suitable for the candidate. The evaluation that has been carried out indicates that the proposed approach outperforms the baselines in the two scenarios. Finally, we provide a use case for candidates where it is possible to recommend courses with the goal to fill certain skills and make them qualified for a certain job.