Task recommender system using semantic clustering to identify the right personnel

Abstract

Purpose

Text mining is growing in importance proportionate to the growth of unstructured data and its applications are increasing day by day from knowledge management to social media analysis. Mapping skillset of a candidate and requirements of job profile is crucial for conducting new recruitment as well as for performing internal task allocation in the organization. The automation in the process of selecting the candidates is essential to avoid bias or subjectivity, which may occur while shuffling through thousands of resumes and other informative documents. The system takes skillset in the form of documents to build the semantic space and then takes appraisals or resumes as input and suggests the persons appropriate to complete a task or job position and employees needing additional training. The purpose of this study is to extend the term-document matrix and achieve refined clusters to produce an improved recommendation. The study also focuses on achieving consistency in cluster quality in spite of increasing size of data set, to solve scalability issues.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, a synset-based document matrix construction method is proposed where semantically similar terms are grouped to reduce the dimension curse. An automated Task Recommendation System is proposed comprising synset-based feature extraction, iterative semantic clustering and mapping based on semantic similarity.

Findings

The first step in knowledge extraction from the unstructured textual data is converting it into structured form either as Term frequency–Inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) matrix or synset-based TF-IDF. Once in structured form, a range of mining algorithms from classification to clustering can be applied. The algorithm gives a better feature vector representation and improved cluster quality. The synset-based grouping and feature extraction for resume data optimizes the candidate selection process by reducing entropy and error and by improving precision and scalability.

Research limitations/implications

The productivity of any organization gets enhanced by assigning tasks to employees with a right set of skills. Efficient recruitment and task allocation can not only improve productivity but also cater to satisfy employee aspiration and identifying training requirements.

Practical implications

Industries can use the approach to support different processes related to human resource management such as promotions, recruitment and training and, thus, manage the talent pool.

Social implications

The task recommender system creates knowledge by following the steps of the knowledge management cycle and this methodology can be adopted in other similar knowledge management applications.

Originality/value

The efficacy of the proposed approach and its enhancement is validated by carrying out experiments on the benchmarked dataset of resumes. The results are compared with existing techniques and show refined clusters. That is Absolute error is reduced by 30 per cent, precision is increased by 20 per cent and dimensions are lowered by 60 per cent than existing technique. Also, the proposed approach solves issue of scalability by producing improved recommendation for 1,000 resumes with reduced entropy.

Citation

Bafna, P., Shirwaikar, S. and Pramod, D. (2019), "Task recommender system using semantic clustering to identify the right personnel", VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, Vol. 49 No. 2, pp. 181-199. https://doi.org/10.1108/VJIKMS-08-2018-0068