Customer stories

JANZZ customers at the cutting edge of talent and labor market technologies

From smart data to smart applications – discover how businesses and government organizations worldwide use JANZZ technologies to build a thriving, resilient workforce.

StepStone

A highly complex challenge and a solution that surpassed all expectations

Discover how JANZZ.technology helped a leading AI recruitment platform provide enhanced candidate experience to all of their clients by automating a complex manual task.

Challenge

Automating enhanced candidate experience
On StepStone’s job board in Germany, stepstone.de, all job ads posted for their clients follow a standardized structure, which StepStone calls Liquid Design. Information such as duties, requirements, benefits and contact information is located in separate sections, in the same order for each job ad. By ensuring the same type of content can always be found in the same place, StepStone enhances the candidate experience: job seekers find the information they are looking for quickly and efficiently. So they can focus their time on generating great applications for the jobs that fit best.

However, StepStone found that not all their clients’ systems support Liquid Design, especially in the context of automated job posting. Since StepStone wants to offer all their clients the same features, they needed to adapt a vast number of job ads to their Liquid Design before publishing. StepStone initially had a team doing this by hand. But by now dealing with thousands of job postings on any given day, this approach was simply not sustainable.

Our customer needed a powerful automated solution that could reliably analyze and reorganize the contents of job ads into their reader-friendly layout quickly and efficiently whilst preserving original html formatting such as highlighting and bulleting.

Setback

StepStone first tried to use common web methods to translate the job offers into the desired format. However, despite a team of highly competent developers, the technical uncertainties of this rule-based approach could not be eliminated, and the results were often unsatisfactory. So StepStone decided to look for a more innovative solution.

Search

StepStone tested the solutions of various providers. But none delivered the accuracy they were looking for. When they approached JANZZ.technology, they were immediately impressed by our team’s knowledge of abstract labor market data and clear understanding of StepStone’s requirements, as well as by the speed and precision in every step from a convincing prototype to a highly satisfactory final product.

Solution – The whole nine yards

Based on the clear and concise specifications laid out by the customer, we developed a tailored tool, the Sectionizer, combining components of our parsing and classification technologies with entirely new deep learning models trained on hand-selected gold standard data by our in-house curators. We also developed a highly reliable html embedding component from scratch thanks to our team’s deep technical understanding of html.

In addition to the core features around automated Liquid Design, the tool parses and classifies the contents of the job postings according to StepStone’s in-house classification system. This is essential for their website’s faceted search feature that allows users to easily narrow down their job searches to the most relevant results. After mapping StepStone’s private classification system into our ontology, and carefully annotating more gold standard data, we trained the Sectionizer for this task. One of the categories, industry, was implemented by using third-party services to look up the industry of the hiring company.

Another feature that StepStone offers to job seekers is salary ranges for jobs. The biggest challenge in this task was to map the complex remuneration system in the public service across all 16 federated states of Germany and within the federal government into our system and train the tool.

Despite multiple challenges, both technological and in terms of data selection and processing, we developed within just a few months a highly performant and reliable solution that far exceeded StepStone’s expectations.

The solution is currently deployed in German and English on StepStone’s German website. More languages and countries will follow soon, as these adaptations and extensions are relatively simple in terms of scaling and training. We are also developing other tools and APIs for future implementation within the StepStone space.

Highlights

StepStone had anticipated a slow and difficult implementation. After all, analyzing content and source code based on meaning and arranging it semantically for Liquid Design is a highly complex task. According to StepStone, we surpassed their expectations in every respect – not only in how quickly and accurately we implemented their requirements, but also with our proactive suggestions for features based on their API specifications. For instance, the salary ranges for jobs and the classifications for their faceted search. Along with a best-in-class solution, we thus delivered outstanding service, gaining another highly satisfied customer.

A word from StepStone

“We are deeply impressed by the solution that JANZZ.technology delivered. The results from the Sectionizer are indistinguishable from our hand-processed job ads. Thanks to its exceptional performance, our people are free to focus on much more satisfying and productive tasks.”

Luka Pilic, Marketplace Tech Lead at StepStone

The product

We decided this tool is so useful that we added a standardized, customizable version of it, SECclassifier!, to our product family JANZZclassifier!. The SECclassifier! restructures job ads for consistent layout, preserving html elements where necessary. This is not just a great tool for job boards like stepstone.de, it can also be used to significantly improve parsing results.

If you want to learn more about how the SECclassifier! or our other outstanding products can help you, or what HR tech we can develop to improve your business processes, feel free to contact us.

Get in touch

About StepStone

With over 3,700 employees in more than 20 countries, StepStone is one of the world’s leading next generation recruitment platforms. Through AI-powered hiring platform and smart autonomous matching technologies at the heart of over 40 job boards, they share JANZZ.technology’s mission to unite the best talent with the best jobs to help businesses and communities thrive.