So the promise that semantic search technologies provide is easier, faster, more accurate search for "free". Sounds too good to be true? Well, in some cases the promises are more hot air from tech companies' marketing departments, but there are a group of technologies which, when correctly applied, can give significant improvements to the search experience, both in ease of generating queries, and in terms of ease of learning/training. This article by Daxtra CTO Steve Finch, seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the cluster of technologies which together form "Semantic Search".
Ever since computers have been applied to processing data for tens and hundreds of thousands of candidates, the problem of finding particular candidates onthe basis of their skills, knowledge and experience has been of primary concern.
Coded Search
Early attempts to address this problem involved coding candidates with their skills and experience, and most first-generation recruitment management systems supported allowing recruiters to code their candidates from a list of skills which is stored in the system. Although done well this is a very powerful search tool, the main problem with this is that manual coding of candidates is very rarely done well.
The reasons for this are not hard to find:
The end result of all this is a large set of very sketchily coded candidates that results in an inefficient search process with many relevant candidates being missed, and also it being hard or impossible to find candidates with any skill that is not in the skills library.
This is not to say that when it's done well coded search is not a very useful tool for any CRM system, but rather that it is very rarely done well in our experience with hundreds of agencies here at Daxtra.
Full Text Search
Coded search has the drawback that the codes have to be created and associated with candidates by recruiters, but another technology has no such drawbacks. Full Text Search systems allow users to construct complex queries so search of the words that are actually in the text that the candidates themselves have written in their resumes. This has the advantage that since computers can automatically index resume text without any action from recruiters, it is available for searching whenever a candidate's resume is loaded onto the CRM.
Using Full Text Search, recruiters can craft queries which in theory pull back candidates which they want to see simply by finding candidates who write certain words in their CV or resumes. However, although this is a very powerful tool, it is notoriously difficult to learn the complex Boolean syntax that is required to craft accurate queries, and even when this has been learned , queries which are both accurate and comprehensive require a great deal of time and experience to get right. Indeed crafting Boolean queries is more of an art than a science, and they have a tendency to return huge numbers of candidates (most of which are irrelevant to the task at hand and need to be laboriously filtered out) or very few (missing many relevant candidates).
Some of the problems of full text search are:
These difficulties are not insurmountable, and a skilled and experienced recruiter can craft queries which return large numbers of relevant results, as well as knowing what he or she can't encode in Boolean queries and will therefore have to be ascertained manually.
However reaching such a level of skill takes a lot of time and experience, and recruiters often do not have the time or inclination to learn to excel in this task. So something easier is required:
Ranked Retrieval
A variant of full text search is Natural Language Search. This is similar to Full Text Search, but rather than requiring the learning of the complex Boolean query syntax, a computer analyse a plain text query a user writes into a query box and attempts to construct a query automatically.
Since this is very difficult to do well, the computer will usually err on the side of returning too many results, but will attempt to rank these results in order of relevance to the query. It does this by paying attention to the context in which terms appear in documents, the number of times they appear, how rare a term is (rare terms being more informative than common ones, all other things being equal).
Ranked Retrieval systems have been around for many years, and form the basis of the well-known web search engines Bing and Google, as well as being embedded in all modern recruitment CRM systems.
Although Ranked Retrieval systems do not require users to learn the complex Boolean syntax of Full Text Search systems, they do sacrifice some of the power that Boolean queries provide, and consequently relevant candidates can be missed either by not being returned at all, or by being so far down the list of returned candidates that they are not looked at.
The shortcomings of existing search technologies leave us grasping for a better way of searching. And into this fertile field has come a set of technologies that I shall broadly and informally describe as "Semantic Search Technologies". These technologies claim to address some of the shortcomings detailed above of Full Text Search and Coded Search, the goal being to make it easier to write more powerful queries which return all and only the relevant candidates in your database that you want to see.
"Semantic" means "of or relating to meaning", according to the dictionary. Now defining "meaning" is a very large subject area indeed, being the subject of study of philosophers from Socrates to the present day, and unsurprisingly we are a ways off where semantic search technologies solve the problem of identifying what we really mean in general. But there are a bunch of distinct technologies which can help us get a little closer to finding what we want a little more accurately, a little faster, and with a little less learning required.
The main thing to take away from this analysis is that there are a number of different types of technology available which can improve the user's search experience. These types of technology are not perfect, and incorrectly applied some approaches (especially term expansion) can harm search usability and experience as often as it helps. But if these technologies are correctly combined into a single search system, then you can get search tools that ease the process of constructing queries and navigating through results sets to find the best matches for your query. However, none of this is a search panacea, and although these technologies are an aid for search, under the hood they still construct complex Boolean queries, and the underlying technology of search systems (being the inverted index) has not changed in principle for 40 years.
Daxtra's European Head of Sales, Stephen Blackmore, will deliver a seminar on how to raise the profile of in-house talent teams during the 4th "Future of recruitment" event taking place in Barcelona on the 12th & 13th of March.
Since in-house recruiters are under internal pressure from stakeholders to find the best talent in the marketplace and are often faced with agency competition, Blackmore will discuss the pitfalls of the current processes practised within the in-house sourcing vertical and the role that technology has in process improvement.
You want to know more about our solutions for in-house recruiters? Click here
Next 25-26 of february, DaXtra will be exhibiting at RecruitmentAgency Expo, the main recruitment industry eventin UK that will take place in London Olympia.
Meet us at booth 163 and our team will show you thenew features and speed improvements of one of the most accurate multilingualCV parsing systems in the market.
Do you want to know more about the products and services wewill be showcasing during the event? Click here!
Due to the success of previous editions, DaXtra isagain showcasing at this year’s SIA EXECUTIVE FORUM held in San Diego (March 18-21).
The Staffing Industry Analyst is organising this event which has become the most prominent annual meeting for CEOs, ownersand senior level executives from all sectors and segments of the staffingindustry.
This event not only provides access to the top industry leadersand innovators, including this year’s renowned guest speaker: Guy Kawasaki,but also an unparalleled opportunity for informal networking as well asmore formal commercial discussions.
Meet us at booth 101 and our experts will help you to findthe best way to make the most of your software investment.
Click here to schedule some time with us.
Do you want to know more about the products and services we will be showcasing during the event? Click here!
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