“The job search is hard,” says Angela Payne, general manager at Monster Canada. “It’s difficult and nobody really loves the process. It can be very lonely, so it’s imperative that organizations like us can help make it as seamless as possible.”
For the past couple of years, at Monster Canada’s headquarters in Montreal, the company has been preparing for a massive technological change in the recruitment industry. As a result, artificial intelligence and algorithms now allow job seekers to apply for positions with a swipe of a finger.
With 7,900 jobs searched for and 2,900 positions viewed every minute on its worldwide network, Monster looked at where candidates go, how they search, and how social media is involved in the job-seeking process to help engineer its new technology.
When the global online job recruitment company was acquired two years ago by Randstad, a Dutch human resources firm, it signalled the start of a “new path” for the company, Ms. Payne says.
That involved boosting its search algorithms by harnessing semantic search capability, which looks not only at keywords but also at the contextual use of those words to hone in on more suitable openings. The company also utilized AI to build résumé assessment tools to help candidates understand the strength of their applications, as well as launching its smartphone application.
“Those things are all either enabled by AI or they’re things that as a tech organization we’ve had to pivot — just based on the rate of change in the market,” Ms. Payne says.
As a result of the new technology and mobile app, the company has seen a 20-per-cent increase in applications worldwide.
The launch of Google for Jobs in Canada last April hinted at an overhaul of the entire recruitment industry, using artificial intelligence and algorithms in conjunction with Google’s comprehensive search engine to present job seekers with a more tailored range of job postings.
While that rise will help companies fill job vacancies with the right kind of talent, for the candidates themselves, presenting their talents and skill sets in the best possible light is another vital part of the process. And that process is becoming ever more difficult with the increased use of applicant tracking systems to screen résumés and parse relevant keywords and alignment of skill sets with the job descriptions.
To help counter that, Monster’s résumé assessment tool relies on machine learning to give feedback on the content of the résumé .
As Ms. Payne says, it’s very hard to look at your own résumé and put yourself in the best light, adding it’s easier when another set of eyes can do that for you, even virtual ones.
“It’s really challenging to get through applicant tracking systems to get to the recruiter’s desk and ultimately get to the hiring manager amongst hundreds of candidates,” she says.
