As one of the top players in the recruitment industry, Manpower Switzerland’s main responsibility is to match candidates with jobs, while offering their clients the highest quality service. With 60 branch offices, 400 internal employees and 200,000 active candidates in their database, the matching process needs to be efficient.
“The recruitment industry is changing,” says Alexandre Grasset, Senior Project Manager at Manpower Switzerland. “Due to new technology, job boards and social networks, recruitment agencies need to provide a high quality service at high speed. While the human factor will always be important, big players like us, receiving over 4,000 CVs a week, need support from intelligent tools. That’s why we integrated Textkernel’s semantic technology.”
The project
After careful evaluation of the technology available in the market, Manpower Switzerland chose Textkernel’s intelligent technology to support their recruiters in their day-to-day work and help them make better, faster placements.
“Our project had two important factors,” says Mr. Grasset. “Firstly, we needed to find a solution that automatically processes incoming applications from various channels (from our website, via e-mail, and candidates handing in applications personally at one of our offices). Secondly, it is very important that our recruiters find and match the right candidate in our databases without any hassle.”
The importance of semantics in recruitment
With three official national languages, semantics (the understanding of the meaning behind words and sentences) play a key role in the Swiss recruitment process. A search engine that is solely based on a full text search is not sophisticated enough to produce qualitative results. Synonyms and translations need to be incorporated as well. So Manpower spoke to various semantics and ontology specialists and conducted market research on semantic matching technology to find a replacement for their current technology.
The decision to adopt Textkernel
Initially, 12 matching engine providers were selected for the project with Manpower; six of them were then given the opportunity to present their technology in person. Manpower chose three providers for benchmarking and testing, and in the end selected Textkernel for the project.
Alexandre Grasset explains. “We compared a range of criteria: the ontologies provided, the matching engine itself and the interface. Although the other two providers also offered a well-established ontology, their interface was not as well developed as Textkernel’s. Furthermore, the company itself was an important factor. We are looking to establish a long-lasting partnership. Textkernel’s personnel, interface, market position and project proposal all convinced us to select them as our partner.”
The advantage of Textkernel’s matching technology
Textkernel’s semantic searching and matching technology allows Manpower’s recruiters to quickly match candidates with jobs and vice versa. All incoming candidate profiles are automatically processed and gathered in Sourcebox, Textkernel’s document workflow application, which is connected to Manpowers’s systems. These profiles can be (automatically) matched to all available Manpower jobs, as well as all direct employer jobs in the Swiss market. At the same time, jobs can also be semantically matched to all profiles in the Manpower database.
The feedback
After an implementation and integration project and pilot phase, Manpower went live in May 2015. “The feedback has been really positive,” says Mr. Grasset. “Our recruiters have a user-friendly interface and can find and match relevant candidates who might have disappeared in our systems before. We have already arranged some new placements thanks to this new technology!”
Manpower uses Textkernel’s CV parsing software Extract!, its semantic search and sourcing software Search! and its semantic matching engine Match!.
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About Textkernel
Textkernel specialises in semantic recruitment technology providing multi-lingual CV parsing, job parsing, and semantic search, sourcing and matching software to help accelerate the process of matching supply and demand in the job market.
The company was founded in 2001 as a private commercial R&D spin-off of research in natural language processing and machine learning at the universities of Tilburg, Antwerp and Amsterdam. Textkernel now operates internationally as one of the market leaders in its segment.
www.textkernel.com
About Manpower Switzerland
Manpower Switzerland offers its customers 55 years of experience in the hiring of permanent and temporary staff. Its network of 60 subsidiaries, 20,000 temporary staff, 2,000 permanent placements and over 5,000 clients in all sectors of industry make Manpower one of Switzerland’s leading providers of workforce management solutions. Manpower Switzerland is a private owned ManpowerGroup™ franchise with headquarter in Geneva. ManpowerGroup™ (NYSE: MAN) has been the world’s workforce expert, creating innovative workforce solutions, for more than 65 years.
www.manpower.ch
