How the Social Media Contributes to the Recruitment Process?

Nowadays the Web represents a significant component of the recruitment and job search process as many Websites and social platforms allow recruiters to seek candidates for a specific job position while, on the other side, they enable candidates to find the job they are looking for. In such a scenario, one may wonder whether social media can support companies in recruiting good job candidates. This actually represents a challenging issue at both academic and industrial level. Indeed, social recruitment sites provide a huge mass of unstructured or semi-­‐structured heterogeneous data, which requires statistical and information extraction techniques to turn unstructured data into structured information suitable for being analysed. In this paper we analyse the job demand trends on the Web by exploiting a significant sample of job vacancies concerning the Italian labour market domain. Our work is aimed at improving the recruitment process by allowing the matching between job demand and supply. In particular, we investigate two research questions. First, how we can statistically analyse unstructured data retrieved from the Web? Second, what contribution can unstructured data give to the knowledge of a phenomenon that has been traditionally studied using statistics or analyzing administrative data?. In addressing the questions we defined a methodology to extract and manage information from unstructured texts (i.e. job vacancy descriptions on the Web) and to turn the descriptions into data useful to perform quantitative and qualitative analysis. One of the most valuable results of this research is the identification of the most required skill levels and professional competencies in the job vacancies. In fact, the skills represent the added value that Web data may provide to the knowledge discovery process in the Italian labour market domain. Their identification inside the recruitment Website contents may solve the qualitative skill mismatch issue and improve the job-­‐matching activity supported by social media.