Understanding resumes and job ads, and finding the best matches among a great number of them is probably one of the most challenging tasks for machines today. The results and the precision of search and matching processes are dependent upon the scope and depth as well as the quality and comprehensiveness of the applied contextual and background knowledge.

Job postings are often worded in industry- and company-specific jargon that job seekers do not search for and would not use when writing their resumes. While resumes are often structured in a similar way, job postings can take pretty much any form and are often filled with information about the company and its culture rather than a specific list of requirements for the post to be filled. Furthermore, the labor market domain is inherently very complex to understand for machines. For example, data scientist is a profession and Hadoop is a technology that most data scientists need to know. Microsoft Excel and Powerpoint are both components of the MS Office Suite. A mechanic can work with cars or with industry machinery and an investigator can be a scientific researcher or someone investigating crime.

To understand the labor market domain thus, and to understand resumes and job ads, a lot of contextual and background is needed. Recruiters and job seekers already have this knowledge. Machines on the other hand need to be fed with this kind of knowledge so they can then apply it when parsing or matching job ads and resumes. The acquisition of such knowledge is beyond the scope of smart algorithms. Instead, semantic knowledge graphs are required, which represent this domain knowledge in digital form so it can be processed by a matching engine.

The idea that data not algorithms are crucial to developing human level artificial intelligence has been gaining momentum for some time. The use of knowledge graphs and ontologies in particular, has been referenced prominently when Google announced at the end of last year that they had built a knowledge graph of occupations and skills for powerful and precise job search and discovery with their Cloud Jobs API.

JANZZ’s semantic matching engine has the most comprehensive, multilingual knowledge graph in the area of occupations and skills at its disposal. Thus, when the matching engine JANZZsme! does a query expansion, searches or matches job ads and resumes, it accesses the ontology concepts, lexical terms and synonyms by which they may appear in CVs and vacancies in up to 40 languages, and the connections to related concepts. Thus, one of the essential parts in building a matching engine for the global labor market is building a knowledge base that covers the contextual knowledge required to understand the specificities of a labor market and its participants.

To find out more about the powerful application possibilities of our matching engine JANZZsme!, contact us for a demo anytime.