Document-based recommender system for job postings using dense representations

Abstract

Job boards and professional social networks heavily use recommender systems in order to better support users in exploring job advertisements. Detecting the similarity between job advertisements is important for job recommendation systems as it allows, for example, the application of item-to-item based recommendations. In this work, we research the usage of dense vector representations to enhance a large-scale job recommendation system and to rank German job advertisements regarding their similarity. We follow a two-folded evaluation scheme: (1) we exploit historic user interactions to automatically create a dataset of similar jobs that enables an offline evaluation. (2) In addition, we conduct an online A/B test and evaluate the best performing method on our platform reaching more than 1 million users. We achieve the best results by combining job titles with full-text job descriptions. In particular, this method builds dense document representation using words of the titles to weigh the importance of words of the full-text description. In the online evaluation, this approach allows us to increase the click-through rate on job recommendations for active users by 8.0%.