A professional competence measurement approach based on a modified pagerank algorithm

Abstract

Recruiting talents requires companies to accurately measure applicants’ professional competence. Traditionally hiring companies rely on applicants’ documentation and third-party recommendations, of which the validity, trustworthiness and effectiveness are often questionable. Nowadays, the social networking web sites which focus on professional profile can help hiring companies to find applicants’ information online which are under the scrutiny of the public audience, thus are more trustworthy and effective. This paper presents an approach to measure the professional competence of the job applicants by applying a modified PageRank algorithm on the user data mined from the social networking web sites. It discusses the technical details of this measurement approach and introduces a prototype system which implements the approach. The application of this measurement approach in real life shows its superiority in the measurement of applicants’ professional competence, compared with traditional hiring procedures.