How Semantic Search Benefits Talent Acquisition

Recruitment can be a tough job as any recruiter will tell you because with so many candidates applying for any particular position, recruiters can have a hard time finding the right candidate at the right time. Browsing through so many resumes creates the possibility that the right candidate might slip out while the candidates shortlisted might turn out to be a far cry from what the company was looking for. In such a scenario, what recruiters can immensely benefit from is a search platform that makes the process of browsing through resumes faster and more accurate.

In such a scenario, what the HR departments of leading enterprises are relying on is a semantic search tool like 3RDi Search or Coveo. Semantic technology is all about extracting the meaning of a given volume of data and then fetching relevant information from this data on the basis of the query put in by a user. It has a lot of potential and this has been well-established in the fields of enterprise search and even in the fields of scientific & biomedical research.

So, how can the use of semantic search technology benefit the recruitment department of an organization and can it really help to make it all easy for the recruiting personnel?

How Semantic Search Can Make a Difference

One of the current challenges that recruiters face today is the fact that the terms and phrases used by the candidates vary widely and differ from the standard set of terms and phrases that the recruiters might be using. So, a keyword based approach does little to help. The example below will help illustrate this further.

An Example:

Say a firm is looking for a Lead Software Developer: Java position. In such a scenario, all prospective people applying for the position might not have the exact words listed on their resumes and have some variations like ‘lead software programmer, Java’, ‘lead Java software engineer’, ‘lead Java developer’ and the likes. In such a scenario, the traditional keyword based approach fails to shortlist the prospective candidates because it only fetches the candidates whose resumes have the exact words as entered by the recruiter in the query.

However, with semantic search technology, which uses synonyms and fetches results on the basis of the meaning of the query and its context, it becomes possible to fetch all those resumes that don’t include the query term but include a synonym.

The Benefits Offered by Semantic Search Technology

After an overview of how semantic search technology can make a difference to the world of recruitment, here’s a quick look at the benefits that recruitment teams can expect when embracing this technology.

• Makes it easy for even less-experienced recruiters to reach the right candidates.
• The synonym search makes it easy to find candidates for positions that are generally referred to with multiple terms (such as the example of the Lead Software Developer that we saw above).
• Makes the process of finding the relevant candidates faster.
• Does not require recruiters to have in-depth knowledge on the industry to figure out all the terms used.
• Gives access to a larger pool of prospects.
• Makes it easy to look for relevant candidates in the database of the company.
• Makes sure no good or talented candidates are missed out just because they included a different term in their resume.

In spite of all the advantages that semantic search technology brings to the table, recruitment experts are of the opinion that effective recruitment still needs human intervention and that we still have a long way to go before we can rely on machines completely for the job. However, one cannot deny the importance of a technology that can be of great help to recruiters today to save time and reach the right candidates faster.