NLP-Based Bi-Directional Recommendation System: Towards Recommending Jobs to Job Seekers and Resumes to Recruiters

For more than ten years, online job boards have provided their services to both job seekers and employers who want to hire potential candidates. The provided services are generally based on traditional information retrieval techniques, which may not be appropriate for both job seekers and employers. The reason is that the number of produced results for job seekers may be enormous. Therefore, they are required to spend time reading and reviewing their finding criteria. Reciprocally, recruitment is a crucial process for every organization. Identifying potential candidates and matching them with job offers requires a wide range of expertise and knowledge. This article proposes a reciprocal recommendation based on bi-directional correspondence as a way to support both recruiters’ and job seekers’ work. Recruiters can find the best-fit candidates for every job position in their job postings, and job seekers can find the best-match jobs to match their resumes. We show how machine learning can solve problems in natural language processing of text content and similarity scores depending on job offers in major Saudi cities scraped from Indeed. For bi-directional matching, a similarity calculation based on the integration of explicit and implicit job information from two sides (recruiters and job seekers) has been used. The proposed system is evaluated using a resume/job offer dataset. The performance of generated recommendations is evaluated using decision support measures. Obtained results confirm that the proposed system can not only solve the problem of bi-directional recommendation, but also improve the prediction accuracy.