Leveraging social networks for corporate staffing and expert recommendation

Effective management of human resources is a significant challenge faced by most organizations. In this paper, we look at two problems that arise in large, globally distributed organizations: staffing projects with the required subject matter experts and connecting subject matter experts to other employees who can benefit from their expertise. Several approaches based on automated skill matching have been suggested in the past to solve these problems. However, we argue that social relationships play an important role in both of these functions, and better matches can be obtained by combining skill matching with rich social interaction data. We describe two systems that exploit social networking data to solve these problems and report the results of real life experiments performed using these systems. © 2009 IBM.