We Know Where You Should Work Next Summer: Job

Recommendations
Fabian Abel
XING AG
fabian.abel@xing.com

ABSTRACT

that is described in the job advertisement (e.g. similarity

of users skills and required skills). To better understand
appropriate next career steps, we mine the CVs of the users
and learn association rules that describe the typical career
paths. This information is also made publicly available via
FutureMe3 a tool that allows people to explore possible
career opportunities and identify professions that may be
interesting for them to work in.
One of the challenges when developing the job recommendation system is to collect explicit feedback and thus understanding (i) whether a recommended job was relevant for a
user and (ii) whether the user was a good candidate for the
job. We thus started to stronger involve users in providing
feedback and build a feedback cycle that allows the recommender system to automatically adapt to the feedback that
the crowd of users is providing. By displaying explanations
about why certain items were suggested, we furthermore aim
to increase transparency of how the recommender system
works.

Business-oriented social networks like LinkedIn1 or XING2

support people in discovering career opportunities. In this
talk, we will focus on the problem of recommending job offers to Millions of XING users. We will discuss challenges of
building a job recommendation system that has to satisfy the
demands of both job seekers who have certain wishes concerning their next career step and recruiters who aim to hire
the most appropriate candidate for a job. Based on insights
gained from a large-scale analysis of usage data and profile
data such as curriculum vitae, we will study features of the
recommendation algorithms that aim to solve the problem.
Job advertisements typically describe the job role that
the candidate will need to fill, required skills, the expected
educational background that candidates should have and the
company and environment in which candidates will be working. Users of professional social networks curate their profile
and curriculum vitae in which they describe their skills, interests and previous career steps. Recommending jobs to
users is however a non-trivial task for which pure contentbased features that would just match the aforementioned
properties are not sufficient. For example, we often observe
that there is a gap between what people specify in their
profiles and what they are actually interested in. Moreover,
profile and CV typically describe the past and current situation of a user but do not reflect enough the actual demands
that users have with respect to their next career step. Therefore, it is crucial to also analyze the behavior of the users
and exploit interaction data such as search queries, clicks on
jobs, bookmarks, clicks that similar users performed, etc.
Our job recommendation system exploits various features
in order to estimate whether a job posting is relevant for
a user or not. Some of these features rather reflect social
aspects (e.g. does the user have contacts that are living in
the city in which the job is offered?) while others capture
to what extent the user fulfills the requirements of the role
1
2

Categories and Subject Descriptors

H.3.3 [Information Systems]: Information Search and RetrievalInformation filtering

General Terms
Algorithms, Design

Keywords
recommender systems, social networks

Short Bio
Fabian Abel is a Data Science team lead at XING. He enjoys solving large-scale data mining problems and delivering data products that do something meaningful. Before he
joined XING in 2012, he was working as a postdoc at TU
Delft, the Netherlands, and as PhD student at L3S Research
Center in Hanover, Germany, researching user behavior and
personalized information retrieval on the Social Web.

http://linkedin.com
http://xing.com

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Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
RecSys15, September 1620, 2015, Vienna, Austria.
ACM 978-1-4503-3692-5/15/09.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2792838.2799496.

Acknowledgments
The work leading to these results has received funding from
the EUs Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)
under CrowdRec Grant Agreement no. 610594.
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http://futureme.xing.com