From amazing customer success stories to new product developments. From new research and development that pushes our technology forward to expanding our global footprint with the first Textkernel-branded US event presence. 2018 at Textkernel was another year filled with innovation and achievement! Let’s take a look at the highlight of a particularly brilliant 12 months.
Movers and Shakers
In our 17th year we grew the team with 17 new talents, and in January 2019 alone our team will welcome 5 more colleagues!
The first trimester was marked by the arrival of Maciej Hoch as CTO, and of Guus Meijer as COO. Their expertise boosted our senior management and helped accelerate our global growth plans.
GDPR was a massive task for all EU-based companies this year, and through the efforts of many different teams, we became compliant in May this year. Our Information Security Officer, Johan van der Zel, had some thoughts to share on the topic. Autumn saw almost the entire company busy with another edition of our Innovation Week. Teams from across all departments came together to work in innovative ideas focussed on “Customer Success” improving and anticipating the customer’s needs.
Do you know the right person for one of our open positions? We’d love to hear from him or her!
Success stories
To all of our customers and partners, both long term and those who have joined us in 2018, we say: thank you! Your continued trust, collaboration and feedback have made this an incredible year, and we hope to embrace more opportunity with you in 2019. Below are just a few of the many success stories we achieved together with you over the last 12 months:
Among our happy customers this year was Colas, who increased their candidate conversion rate by up to 440% using our “Apply-with” widget alongside Extract! resume parsing. This resulted in a significantly improved candidate experience where applicants can now complete an online application in seconds from their PC or mobile.
We celebrated new milestones with partners in 2018, including two new Jobfeed integrations. Carerix implemented Jobfeed to find vacancies that help place talent in your database quicker. 
Another integration saw Jobfeed made available on the Bullhorn marketplace, enabling better quality lead generation, competitive insight and labour market analytics without ever leaving the CRM.
Meanwhile, the number 1 job board in Western France, Ouest-France-Emploi, truly appreciated the simplicity and efficiency offered by our solutions, choosing Match! to facilitate the automatic selection of candidates registered on their site.
Cutting-edge R&D
Our 30-people strong R&D teams have spent 2018 working on the future of AI for matching people and jobs. We’ve invested time into Deep Learning architectures to further improve our resume and job parsing. On the matching side, we have finished the research on improved query formulation and expect to debut improvements for many customers in 2019.
The R&D team has been working hard on the next generation matching using semantic fingerprints: Deep Learning methods that convert CV or jobs to fingerprints that capture the content of these documents in fine detail. Lab results have already been really exciting!
Several Learning-to-Rank pilot projects are showing lots of potential for customizing our matching to user needs. Continuously improving our domain knowledge, we are exploring ways to go beyond professions and skills and get a deeper understanding of what people do in their jobs (e.g. work activities, results and competences).
We keep in close contact with academic research to identify the latest developments. Textkernel continued to sponsor major AI conferences like EMNLP, ECIR, as well as technical ones such as PyData. And our R&D engineers are actively participating and contributing via presentations at many other events.
Constant product improvements
Building on our 2017 R&D breakthrough when we released the first resume parsing powered by Deep Learning, this year we rolled out this new technology to many of our existing languages. All upgraded languages benefit from large accuracy improvements for parsing CV and jobs (15-50%), solidifying our position as market leader. The addition of Japanese vacancy and resume parsing to our portfolio has extended our global reach, and we improved the overall extraction speed of our Extract! parsing software for all languages. In addition, introduced the ability to output resume and vacancy parsing in JSON format.
Among the other products improvements that have punctuated the last 12 months at Textkernel, you will find the introduction of User Activity Reporting into our powerful semantic search. This feature allows users to dive deeper into user adoption on an individual level, helping you provide even better guidance to your team.
Jobfeed US customers can now gain even greater understanding of the supply side and demand side of the labour market. The new Insights tab offers users a visual representation of the jobs data to highlight the demand side of the market. Meanwhile, the enhanced EMSI Analytics tab provides data from the US census bureau and other sources on supply-side data such as regional and national earnings, the number of people hired per month versus the number of job postings per month and more.
Jobfeed’s coverage was also expanded, with releases in Spain and Canada bringing the number of countries covered to 10. Last but not least, together with Intelligence Group we have launched the European Recruitment Dashboard. This platform gives you 24/7 access to all recruitment information for more than 500 jobs in up to 28 countries in Europe!
Textkernel on the road
We’ve proudly showcased our AI-powered solutions throughout the year at a total of 26 events in 8 countries across the globe. Fairs and tradeshows are not only an opportunity to brainstorm on how we can shape the future of human resources, they also enabled us to take part in roundtables and presentations. On that note, Mihai Rotaru, our Head of R&D, and Ralph Dennes, our Head of Business Development, gave insight into the “black box” that powers semantic search at the Sourcing Summit Germany.
Over in London, Tijs van Tilburg, our Business Development Director for Staffing & Recruitment Solutions, 
presented an Ideas in Action showcase at the Staffing Industry Analysts Executive Forum in November. During the presentation, Tijs showed how your entire team can leverage the knowledge and understanding of your most experienced recruiter through the power of AI-powered solutions.
Across the pond in Boston, USA, our US General Manager, Vinnie Cholewa, presented a session on “why we shouldn’t fear tech-led innovation” at Bullhorn Engage. We also had the opportunity to sponsor SourceCon Atlanta, marking the first time we’ve attended a US event with Textkernel branding.
Many key dates are awaiting us down the road in 2019 and you can count on us to join. Stay updated via our events page and mark your calendars!
Thank you!
We would like to thank everyone that has been part of another amazing year. We wish you a happy holiday season and look forward to working together throughout a prosperous 2019!
The Textkernel team
