Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Google, Hire Recruiters in R&D for better results

After going through thousands of resume, I can confidently tell that we Recruiters understand text better. We can spot every spec of detail in the resume. Recruiters can also spot out misinformation & that too without much difficulty. In fact Recruiters can actually read and understand what is not there in a resume.

Recruiters have been working with text across their experience. Their Job is to understand text. They receive JDs (Job Descriptions) from employers/departments read them, understand them and then create a spec which will ensure better visibility amongst 1000’s of Jobs in Job boards. When they receive resume for the Job, they again read and understand the resume, identify fine prints (or those which are where!) and shortlist resume and move them to prospective employers.

Experienced recruiters need only a glance of the resume to see whether it fits into the requirement. How are they able to do this? In 15 to 20 seconds, the recruiter reads the resume, understands it, compares it with the requirement, check for fine prints, spots the gaps & decides whether the resume fits the requirement or not.

This knowledge and understanding of text information is what Google and other search engines should be most interested in.

Search Engines are constantly upgrading their search algorithms to enhance quality of search results. They work mainly with text information, crawling through websites, copying the text, indexing, stemming and clustering the text so that they could provide their excellent results.

How can recruiters help in R&D of a search engine, after all they only go through resume? There are 1000’s of other document types out there. Product catalogues of mining equipments, Services offered by a saloon, reviews of a critic, legal documents, blogs and comments… the list goes on.

How can a Recruiter help structure these documents?

By going through a resume, Recruiters not only understands the text, they analyze the person behind the resume. They understand the ability, adaptability, quality and knowledge of the Candidate. And then matches these with the requirement of the employers and the people in it. Now that gives the extra dimension to the Recruiter’s ability. And this ability to understand a person by going through a resume & requirements of an employer and the people in it through the Job description make a Recruiter what he is.

If Recruiters are able to put their experience, their perception, their understanding into structured query – you will have one of the most accurate search engines ever.

So Search Engines, get yourself a top notch Recruiter and help this world with better results.

Note: Google uses among various other parameters, a method called Page Rank, PR as it is popularly called. If you want to check the PR for your website – check it out here!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The most important things search engines use for search is meta tags or key words. Any resume should have a concept called Key words which highlights the ability of profile/ so do for Job postings. Also if the recruiters association creates a standard XML schema to upload resumes then the search engines will be more efficients. There are many things in this are which can be improved.

Unknown said...

A resume or candidate profile is the most unstructured data that is searched on the most. But it is surprising we do not have a standard for it. While there are HR XML and others bodies trying to do this, it has very less adoption. Which is why at SurgeForth Technologies, we've embarked on Predictive Analysis using Industry Specific Competency Models. Our portal http://www.career-weaver.com is in Alpha and is attracting IT Aspirants with an integrated Competency based learning and assessment. This will be combined with the Predictive Analytics on the resumes to provide a Right Fit score against the Competency Based Job Descriptions.
In short, we feel it is the evidences of competencies that need to be searched for rather than just the skills being searched as key words.

Shankar said...

Dear Madhav,
You are correct in pointing out that Search engine give maximum weightage for Keywords and Meta tags in their search & this is the reason we are unable to find better results. Micro sites & product based websites provide strong keywords and Meta tags. But when it comes to research & discussion forums, these are less relevant & in fact the keywords and Meta tags may actually reduce the quality of Search.

And yes, we would love to have a structured resume model with universal schemas for resume for resume mining & data search. HR-XML is working hard towards this. hResume, another format adopted by some of the major Networking sites is another attempt in standardizing resume.

Regards,
Shankar

Shankar said...

Dear Emma,

In a Resume, "competencies that need to be searched for rather than just the skills being searched as key words" - Well phrased.

Thanks for the input. And all the best for Career-Weaver.

Regards,
Shankar