An Enhanced Neural Network Approach to Person-Job Fit in Talent Recruitment

The widespread use of online recruitment services has led to an information explosion in the job market. As a result, recruiters have to seek intelligent ways for Person-Job Fit, which is the bridge for adapting the right candidates to the right positions. Existing studies on Person-Job Fit usually focus on measuring the matching degree between talent qualification and job requirements mainly based on the manual inspection of human resource experts, which could be easily misguided by the subjective, incomplete, and inefficient nature of human judgment. To that end, in this article, we propose a novel end-to-end Topic-based Ability-aware Person-Job Fit Neural Network (TAPJFNN) framework, which has a goal of reducing the dependence on manual labor and can provide better interpretability about the fitting results. The key idea is to exploit the rich information available in abundant historical job application data. Specifically, we propose a word-level semantic representation for both job requirements and job seekers’ experiences based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Along this line, two hierarchical topic-based ability-aware attention strategies are designed to measure the different importance of job requirements for semantic representation, as well as measure the different contribution of each job experience to a specific ability requirement. In addition, we design a refinement strategy for Person-Job Fit prediction based on historical recruitment records. Furthermore, we introduce how to exploit our TAPJFNN framework for enabling two specific applications in talent recruitment: talent sourcing and job recommendation. Particularly, in the application of job recommendation, a novel training mechanism is designed for addressing the challenge of biased negative labels. Finally, extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset clearly validate the effectiveness and interpretability of the TAPJFNN and its variants compared with several baselines.