Algorithms Play Matchmaker to Fight 7.7% U.S. Unemployment: Jobs
By Aki Ito - Apr 3, 2013 12:00 AM ET
When Monique Nyampong graduated from Long Island University last May, she wished she had a headhunter who knew of employers with openings that would be right for her.
She got the help she needed in the form of a patented computer algorithm developed by AfterCollege Inc. (0135042D), an online job board that analyzed 12 years’ worth of data it has stored about its users and business clients to find the best positions for her. A month after registering her profile on the service, she found a management-training opportunity with Consolidated Edison Inc. sitting in her inbox. She’ll start the job in June.
“I felt like it gave me specifically what I wanted, like it was catered to me,” Nyampong, 25, who lives in Queens, New York, said of the service.
Job-search services like AfterCollege are racing to develop software that thinks and acts like a human recruiter, examining what kinds of workers and companies are drawn to each other so a computer can recommend vacancies to job seekers and candidates to hiring managers. With unemployment at 7.7 percent, more than 12 million Americans are looking for work while almost 4 million openings go unfilled, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Targeted matches may help the labor market work better, according to Alvin Roth, an economist at Stanford University near Palo Alto, California.
“There are all kinds of inefficiencies that these firms are trying to solve,” said Roth, who shared last year’s Nobel Prize in economics for his research in matching markets. “It might be hard for me to know about the job that’s available. There might be some skill you’re looking for but you might not find me.”
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-03/algorithms-play-matchmaker-to-fight-7-7-u-s-unemployment-jobs.html
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