Before the mid-1990s people use to search for jobs by opening a newspaper, going to an unemployment office, talking with friends and associates or just walking into a company and asking if they were hiring. That process was still considered normal until the early 2000s, even though Monster.com, HotJobs.com, CareerBuilder.com and dozens of other job search engines came into existence.
For a few short years newspapers moved their classified jobs sections to their websites, but it became so cumbersome that even they turned over that work to the big job search websites. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a single large-scale newspaper who runs its own classified jobs section.
The advent of “powerful” job search functionality has been an amazing tool. Job seekers could whittle down their search into manageable chunks without having to sift through dozens (or hundreds) of jobs that didn’t fit their qualifications. The ability to search for jobs in a specific industry, within a specific geographic location and by a general salary range is now commonplace, but it’s still incredibly inefficient and frustrating – on ALL of the job search engines.
HR and hiring managers count on being able to search resumes by keywords, rather than having to read through dozens (or hundreds… or thousands) of applicants. There’s an entire industry dedicated to re-writing your resume just to get noticed during those automated searches. In this new environment, HR and hiring managers only ever READ a handful of actual resumes when they are filling a position.
So, here’s a new idea that isn’t currently out there…
An AI (artificial intelligence) job matching tool that tells the job seeker which jobs they should apply to, rather than just applying to everything, hoping someone will see their information.
The current system works like this:
- A company writes a job posting and puts it online.
- A job seeker finds dozens of postings within a search criteria.
- The job seeker tweaks their resume, then submits it, and usually never hears back from the company (mainly because that company got 2,853 resumes for that one position.)
- The job poster does a keyword search on the respondents and ends up with a few dozen resumes. They throw out the ones that aren’t formatted well or are difficult to understand at a glance. They get down to a handful of applicants and then reads those resumes.
bottomless pit
The issues:
- Job seekers spend an enormous amount of time customizing and responding to job postings, even though their submission will never been seen by a person.
- Job posters get far too many applicants to be able to give any time to all of them.
A possible solution:
- The job seeker creates an account and fills in some basic information, i.e. location desired, salary range (lower AND upper), job type (part-time, full-time, etc.)
- The job seeker uploads their resume to the AI website.
- The AI website:
- strips out all of the useless words (and, if, the, is, etc.).
- catalogs all of the words and phrases, building an index of the words and their proximity to each other.
- scores and ranks each word and phrase individually, as well as scoring and ranking the word proximities.
- The AI engine then queries it’s database of jobs based on the simplified “basic information” the job seeker entered AND on the overall score for that resume.
- The result is a list of very few job postings that the job seeker is qualified for, thus, more likely to be seen by a human being and reducing the amount of time the job seeker spends submitting resumes to jobs they won’t get. Plus, job seekers can upload different versions of their resume to be scored and for a different set of job results.
Obviously the database of positions is key.
Indeed.com is a large job search website that pulls in job posting from dozens of other job search websites. As an aggregator, they have tried to make it easy to search for “all” jobs on the web at once, rather than having to create an account on every job search website out there. The beauty is that Indeed.com has an API / web service for searching the jobs in their database.
The AI website can download each job posting from Indeed.com every day, scoring and ranking each post in the same way it does for uploaded resumes. This is how the proposed system now becomes a job matching tool, rather than a job search engine.
Job Matching IS the future. Whether the economy is good or bad, it always comes down to efficiency and money. People don’t want to spend hours and hours every day trying to find, then re-write their resumes to match a job, just to submit it and never get a reply. Just as companies don’t want to pay more people than they need to find candidates for open positions.
There’s a lot more to this idea, but this is plenty without posting an entire specification online. I’ve had this idea for a while, but I don’t have the money to execute, so someone else out there will have to do it. I predict that in the next five years, this will be a standard tool on all job search engines.