How do you recognize a market leading searching and matching technology? According to Filip De Geijter, founder and CEO at Actonomy, there are four elements that make all the difference. After flexibility, transparency and accuracy, he now focuses on the fourth USP: completeness. Smart searching looks at more than just a CV and a job description.
More is better
The power of a good searching and matching technology heavily depends on the quality of the ontology laying behind: the set of interrelated words, terms, concepts. And the quality of such an ontology in turn greatly depends on its completeness. The more entries in your ontology, the more complete it is, and – hence – the better your searching and matching results will become.
Completeness is a ‘double side up’: it both considers the database of candidate profiles and the job profiles. When looking at candidate information, completeness means your system uses more than just the mere CV. After all, there is much more to be known about a candidate than what is written in his/her résumé.
Completeness means that your technology also considers other sources of information.
Think of video-interviews, chat sessions, and more. Thanks to speech recognition technology, the meaning of spoken input can be understood and added to the ontology, enriching the total amount of useful information you gather about a candidate. It could even use candidate information gathered from social media such as LinkedIn- and Facebook profiles, although GDPR-rules need to be followed. Essential in this respect is that the candidate should give consent to use information gathered on the Internet.
Completing candidate information by looking forward
Why is completeness such an important element in searching and matching technology? Actually, the answer is quite straightforward: because there is so much more to be known about candidates and jobs than what is found in résumés and job descriptions. Mostly, CV’s focus on the past of a candidate: his/her track record so far. Isn’t it a bit weird to only focus on the past when a candidate wants to move on by getting a new job? That is: looking into the future? This forward-looking information is more easy to be found in other source materials than just the CV.
Thanks to Actonomy’s xMP-technology, the importance of the future is shifted to the beginning of the recruitment process – i.e during the automatic matching process – rather than at the end (when the human recruiter is talking to the candidate about his job potential and interests).
To give an example. If someone mentions in his CV that he has been account manager at three different companies, it would be wise to assume that this candidate is looking for a different job title (such as ‘account director’) rather than for yet another job as account manager. When we at Actonomy speak to potential new customers in the recruiting world, it is precisely this forward looking capacities that are convincing them: it makes the searching and matching much more complete and – hence – gives better matches. Many of Actonomy’s competitors have the tendency to focus on what is in the CV only, leaving the future aside.
Mapping soft skills and culture to complete profiles
From the angle of the recruiting company, completeness also deals with so-called ‘soft skills’. There is more to be known about the company than what is written in the job description. How is the corporate culture? How is the atmosphere in the business unit? What kind of management style is in place? Is there a potential fit with the soft skills of the candidate? Actonomy is working together with Roularta, where a cultural matching technology is applied in its recruitment portal regiotalent.be. Once again, this information is contributing to the completeness of the searching and matching.
