Textkernel introduced support for the recently launched ESCO skill and job title taxonomy as part of its new CV parsing release. ESCO is the multilingual classification of European Skills, Competences/Qualifications and Occupations. It provides a skills-centred common language for jobs and candidate profiles in IT systems. ESCO makes semantic resources available for the labour market in the official languages of the EU.
The first public version of the ESCO taxonomy was officially launched on 23-24 October 2013 by the European Commission. “Although this is just the first version of ESCO and it’s quite early in the ESCO project, we strongly believe in the potential of semantic tools for the EU labour market. We are giving full support to this initiative of the EU “, says Jakub Zavrel, CEO of Textkernel. Textkernel is the first HR technology vendor to embrace the ESCO framework in a standard product for semantic recruitment technology.
What does Textkernel do?
Textkernel has developed CV parsing in 15 languages to automatically extract semantic information from a CV and is able to map this information to the customer’s taxonomy. Textkernel now also offers standard extraction and mapping to the ESCO taxonomy. This enriches CV and job data with skills and competences, which is the basis for good search and match applications, and makes European exchanges of such data work.
Why use a standard taxonomy?
Companies and job boards often use their own classification systems for occupations and skills. This requires a large maintenance effort, especially when multiple languages are involved. “Using a standard like ESCO not only reduces the maintenance effort, it also makes it much easier to exchange semantically coded data with other parties and systems”, Jakub Zavrel explains. ESCO is a very advanced standard that goes beyond a taxonomy of occupations and skills. It makes the relation between skills, occupations, and in the near future qualifications, available for its users. The first version of ESCO contains around 4800 occupations and more than 5000 skills & competences.
Multilingual interoperability for the EU labour market
Realising that development of such a standard is key to a well functioning EU labour market and national governments are not able to coordinate such an effort, the European Commission started the ESCO project for all EU languages. The first phase of the project will run until 2017. ESCO is expected to become the backbone of the EU-wide exchange of labour market information.
One of the main goals of ESCO is the semantic interoperability of the national Public Employment Services. In the future, public employment services in the EU (like the Dutch UWV, the German Bundesagentur für Arbeit and the French Pôle Emploi) will deliver their job vacancies and CVs to the EURES portal in the ESCO classification. ESCO should also fuel better online matching of people to jobs. Ultimately the goal is to get more people into jobs throughout Europe.
Contact Textkernel for more information on CV parsing and how Textkernel can help you with the use of the ESCO taxonomy.
About Textkernel
Textkernel specialises in semantic recruitment technology providing recruiting tools to accelerate the process of matching demand and supply in the job market: multilingual resume parsing, job parsing and semantic searching, sourcing and matching software.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.
