Critical selection: IMFD innovation supports Trabajando.com

An important area within artificial intelligence is that of recommender systems: given an immense number of options, how can we suggest items that are actually of interest to people, in a personalized way and taking into account users’ history?

In the specific field of job selection, the importance of this topic goes hand in hand with its complexity, and that is why a series of initiatives are being implemented to study the selection models used by web platforms to connect job seekers with companies looking for workers. The goal is to identify and answer vital questions: how can we verify that the selection is appropriate? That it does not discriminate against people based on where they live, their gender, or any reason other than their professional career?

Within this context lies the major challenge being taken on by the Innovation and Technology Transfer area of the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), through its alliance with Trabajando.com, one of the country’s leading online job search platforms.

“We are looking to push the boundary of what has been possible so far in terms of predictive recruitment and selection models, specifically candidate and job offer recommendation models, with broad coverage in terms of industries and job offers,” explains Rodrigo Gorostiza, Marketing and Customer Experience Manager at Trabajando.com. The project aims to develop an artificial intelligence model for recommending candidates for jobs and job offers.

Juan José Alegría, from IMFD Innovation, states that “we are working in stages: first, for this type of project, it is essential to understand and categorize the data we have, especially when working with natural language, as is the case here.” The work of the IMFD Innovation team on the project involves searching for, testing, and applying various data science tools that make it possible to recommend the best candidates for a job position, thereby making the search easier for recruiters and human resources staff at companies. “This data is entered in natural language, and there are large amounts of information that are difficult to handle because they are not homogeneous. What we do in Innovation is look for or create the best tools, tailored to the specific needs of each project,” he explains.

“To achieve our goals, it is essential that we be able to go beyond the obvious, that we can enrich the vast amount of data we have with variables built from identifying insights that emerge from exploring and analyzing the data together with an understanding of the business. We want to create a recommendation model that we can be proud of as a collaborative IMFD and Trabajando.com team, a tool that we will make available to millions of people, to make the challenging process of job searching easier and more effective for them,” highlights Rodrigo Gorostiza.

IMFD Innovation is the Innovation and Technology Transfer Division of the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data. “Our goal is to apply the most effective techniques, based on cutting-edge science and technology, to extract value from data, boosting the development of Chile and the region, and providing data-related solutions for industry, the public sector, and society,” says Jazmine Maldonado, Director of Innovation and Technology Transfer at IMFD.