Implicit skills extraction using document embedding and its use in job recommendation

Abstract

This paper presents a job recommender system to match resumes to job descriptions (JD), both of which are nonstandard and unstructured/semi-structured in form. First, the paper proposes a combination of natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the task of skill extraction. The performance of the combined techniques on an industrial scale dataset yielded a precision and recall of 0.78 and 0.88 respectively. The paper then introduces the concept of extracting implicit skills - the skills which are not explicitly mentioned in a JD but may be implicit in the context of geography, industry or role. To mine and infer implicit skills for a JD, we find the other JDs similar to this JD. This similarity match is done in the semantic space. A Doc2Vec model is trained on 1.1 Million JDs covering several domains crawled from the web, and all the JDs are projected onto this semantic space. The skills absent in the JD but present in similar JDs are obtained, and the obtained skills are weighted using several techniques to obtain the set of final implicit skills. Finally, several similarity measures are explored to match the skills extracted from a candidate's resume to explicit and implicit skills of JDs. Empirical results for matching resumes and JDs demonstrate that the proposed approach gives a mean reciprocal rank of 0.88, an improvement of 29.4% when compared to the performance of a baseline method that uses only explicit skills.