AI in Recruitment - Understanding Designations and Skills

Relevance of jobs for candidates and candidates for recruiters is the most important challenge for AI in recruitment. Whether it is an Application Tracking System or a job portal, recruiters want easy mechanism to identify the most relevant candidate. That said, only a recruiter knows what she wants. The AI Algorithm only knows the job description which she shares with the system (there still exists a gap between what she wants and what the description says).

Over the last few years, this has been area of major focus and attention for our team at Naukri.com. I will discuss here on some elements which are important in solving this challenge.

Challenge 1: Complexity of Indian Economy - No one sector or Industry dominates

India is a large country with several 100 industries and sectors with companies of varying size. Every organization has many unique roles and designations that employees carry. Even within the organized sector, we have more than few 1000 roles and may be more than 50,000 designations. AI Algorithm needs to understand what each of the designations stand for.

Challenge 2: Creative Designations

Every organization is creative with designations and often internal designations are created to balance the organization challenges and individual aspirations. In many companies, Software Developers carry the designations like Software Engineer, SSE -1, SSE -2, Member of Technical Staff. However, few companies call their Quality Engineers as Software Engineers.

Often designations are created to represent evolving role descriptions based on the unique organization requirements. For example, few years ago, Mid-Office was created as a designation to distinguish teams from Front Office and Back Office. Similarly, we have seen new age professions emerge, for example, Digital Marketing, SEO Specialist, Social Media Marketing Manager, Data Scientist and so on.

For a system to understand the requirement, AI Algorithm must first understand the designations and the similar designations or related designations which other companies may have.

Challenge 3: Some Designations carry no information about role

Often designations are devoid of specific domains and also, role information. Some jobseekers write designations as Vice President, Manager, Senior Manager, Officer etc.

Challenge 4: Skills, Regions, Divisions are part of Designations

Skills are also part of designations which are often used to differentiate employees in the same role with specialized focus skills or areas of responsibility. For example, Software Developer, C++ Developer, Java Developer, Senior Engineer- COBOL and so on. In Sales function, we may have designations like Sales Regional Manager, Territory Manager - Bhopal, Area Sales Manager- Mangalore, Regional Manager - Paints and Specialty Chemicals etc. As we can observe, Cities and business units have been appended to these designations to differentiate sales managers playing similar role with special focus areas.

The challenge to disambiguate designations is not trivial as new designations are created on an ongoing basis. Skills are often used by jobseekers to distinguish themselves vis-a-vis other jobseekers.

AI algorithm needs a library of Designations & Skills and their inter-relationships. Have we solved the matching problem with regards to designations and skill sets? May be to a large extent. Yet there is scope of improvement and our effort continues. There are many other elements which play an important role in identifying relevant candidates, which I intend to talk about in later articles.

- Vivek Jain

Note - The challenge of overstated or understated skills is a conundrum which can only be solved by assessments. In my view, most jobseekers still faithfully represent what they know and what they don't know. And those who don't, are typically eliminated through the assessment process. Often an expert recruiter will look at signals beyond the stated skills, for example, the educational institution from which the jobseeker graduated or the company the jobseeker is working in.

Also see my blog post on Story of Naukri Job Alerts.