• Sorts and ranks candidates with the best matches first
• Understands the meaning of words including relevancy
• Displays candidates side-by-side for quick comparisons
• Provides flexibility to easily broaden or narrow search criteria
• Integrates with Monster’s candidate management tools

 

 

Monster’s New Resume Search Is a Winner When Monster bought Trovix in the summer of 2008, the blogosphere popped with wonder at how the job board would make use of Trovix’ job matching technology.

Forrester Research analyst Zach Thomas suggested that, "By making this acquisition, Monster is putting a real emphasis on search and they believe it will help them leap-frog the competition." Others were less generous.

The answer has been coming ever since Monster began beta testing Power Resume Search several months ago. A few weeks ago, confident that its $100 million investment was the homerun it expected, Monster turned Power Search live, premiering it during an analyst meeting that was also webcast over a marathon five hours or so.

Tuesday, the company demoed the new search for a group of recruitment consultants and bloggers. And the result was no mere home run; think grand slam.

In a word, Monster’s new Power Resume Search is stunning. Stunning in its simplicity. Stunning in its speed. Stunning in its ability to intuit skills from a title, and to rank and rerank the resulting candidates depending on what skills and other qualities you decide important. Stunning in its potential for changing the job board business.



If you haven’t tried it for yourself, go here and test it out. What you’ll discover is that you can source candidates (if you really want) simply by entering a job title. Look at the results. Add a specific skill or a degree or some other parameter and the ranking changes.

What makes Power Resume Search different — and better — than the typical keyword resume search is that it has the intelligence to cut through the duff. The examples the Monster folks used in the demo were searches for bankers and lawyers. But try your own search, for, say a bookkeeper. Instead of getting a list of hundreds of resumes with bookkeeper in the text, you get a few dozen candidates who are bookkeepers and are most likely to be looking for that kind of work.

Trovix built its job-matching capability around context and concepts. A bookkeeper doesn’t need an understanding of Sarbanes-Oxley; a CFO does. You know that. But unless you exclude candidates with that term in their resume in a standard keyword search, you’re going to get CFO candidates with bookkeeping in their backgrounds along with accountants and … you get the idea.

It’s "the world’s best search engine," said Monster’s Javid Muhammedali at the beginning of the demo. Google might take issue with the boast, but he is certainly on the mark when he says one of the virtues of Power Resume Search is that it is a search engine "that really helps you stop searching."

One incidental, yet valuable feature is how a search can unearth skills not listed in the job req, which could or should be. It helps drive the recruiting process forward by arming recruiters with information they can take back to the hiring manager, Muhammedali explained.



It has some other nice touches, including how it presents candidate information and the side-by-side comparison of candidates.

Power Resume Search has a counterpart for job seekers in Power Job Search.

I ran a few job searches on a variety of different titles and got great results, which, in my case, meant fewer, but more accurate results. Monster showed this off during the demo using "business development manager" for the search with the result that all nine listings were specific to the title.

Monster points out that this search has benefits for the employer: the ad visibility improves, as does the likelihood that the applicants will be of higher quality since an ad won’t just turn up in a search because it happens to contain the seeker’s keywords.

Before you go away thinking all your sourcing problems are solved, know that this is a premium service, for which Monster will charge $845 for a two-week access. Right now, it’s a bargain at $260 for three days of searching in an area.

It’s also better at sourcing some types of jobs than others. New job terminology has to be added by Monster, though you can search for a specific keyword in a resume. And it won’t store search histories for OFCCP auditing until early next year.

Even so, it’s a big step. For Monster, it’s a $100 million-plus step. The company spent $72.5 million to acquire Trovix and $30-$35 million more integrating it into the job board. Monster intends to get back its investment and then some.

Muhammedali and Louis Gagnon, SVP Global Products, said the new search opens the door to differential pricing for resume sourcing. It probably won’t be long before Monster puts a higher price on CFOs than on bookkeepers.

Why can’t they do that now? They probably could, but the technical management is a challenge, since the resumes of CFOs and bookkeepers may well be part of the search results in a standard keyword search. But the Trovix powered search is smart enough to know that when you’re looking for a CFO, you don’t want a bookkeeper who reports to a CFO.

Narrowing down results with high precision saves time. Lots of time. And gets better results. That’s worth something.

 

Monster.com's 6Sense Technology Fuels Innovation in Job Search Online job searching can be a daunting task. Keyword queries often return irrelevant results in with desired listings. On the recruiting side, sifting through hundreds or even thousands of candidates is not practical.

But Monster.com is working hard to make job search easier. They've been introducing some new innovations for job search - both on the job seeker side and on the recruiter side. Monster is using patented search technology they've dubbed 6Sense to fuel these new job search technologies.

When you visit Monster.com as a job seeker, notice that you now have two options for search. Standard search, Monster's traditional model, and PowerSearch, the new patented technology which is currently in BETA.





As you can see, in the Standard search, you've got one box for your keywords and another for location. With PowerSearch, you get to a box for searching job titles, another for skills, and one for location.

I tested out the search using terms and skills I used to help my husband search for a job two years ago. He's a software developer specializing in Autocad in Raleigh, NC. Power Search returned zero results - but that's a good thing. Because searching on other job sites - I couldn't find a job that meets that specific skill - but I had to scan hundreds of job listings to learn that. That's because traditional job search will pull up any job mentioning Autocad - including drafting positions.

I wanted to make sure, though that when a search is conducted on Power Search, the results are actually good. Not an easy task in this economy. So, I searched for my husband's new skill - iPhone development - and pretended we were looking for a job for him in New York. There was a nice list of 12 jobs to sift through.



I compared that to HotJobs, which not only made me sign into my Yahoo! account (annoying!), but returned listings for IT jobs, which weren't relevant.

"The 6Sense semantic search technology is an extension of our investment in many technology innovations we've delivered over the past two years," said Darko Dejanovic, executive vice president, Global CIO and head of product for Monster. "We've continued to invest significantly in technology, product and infrastructure to completely revamp the talent and job search experience."

For recruiters, the new Power Resume Search offers an insanely robust search that filters searches from having to scour thousands to sifting through a short list of truly qualified candidtes.

"I hear from our customers that their businesses have jobs that they desperately need to fill and yet don't have the resources to make that a reality. 6Sense technology changes all of this, facilitating the hiring process so that better matches are made more efficiently thereby getting people back to work more quickly," said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, president, and chief executive officer, Monster.

Last fall, Monster briefed me on the Power Resume Search technology and I must admit, it's very awesome. Recruiters can filter by location, skill, years of experience and many other factors. They can also decide which factors are most important.

Monster is really on to some great tech here. It's the kind of tech that needs to expand to other search verticals and search in general.

"This is an early example of what the online experience will look like in the coming decade, as we move from search as a separate tool to integrated online environments that guide us through an information task. Monster is a very early example in this search revolution," said Susan Feldman, Research Vice President for Search and Discovery Technologies, IDC.

Even if you're not looking for a job right now, go check out their new Power Search. It's what search can be and it's what search is right now for Monster.com.

Posted by Nathania Johnson on February 1, 2010 1:52 PM

 

Review: Monster 6Sense As I sat through the webinar/demo of Monster’s new search product, 6sense, I kept waiting for a little kid to say "I see dead people". That tag line, from the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense is the 44th most remembered quote from the movies (as recounted on AFI’s 100 Years .. 100 Movie Quotes). Alas, instead of an academy award performance (or joke) I got an hour’s worth of product pitch and screen shots. No Bruce Willis and no popcorn.

6Sense is the name Monster gives to the integration of Trovix into their product line. When I first reviewed Trovix two and a half years ago, I noticed:

"Without being too tutorial, Trovix uses web efficiencies to generate something like the "structured lexicons" that powered some of the earliest Resume databases and Applicant Tracking Systems. This approach allows the query writer to see results that a keyword query simply can not find. In a very real sense, by structuring the relationships and semantics, this approach reads resumes rather than indexing key words. In the old days, these structured lexicons had to be developed by people and were really expensive. No one ever doubted that they represented a better path, they were simply too expensive to execute."

Then, as now, the promise of the product is impressive. During the demo, the presenters navigated our attention through a series of sample searches and showed that real improvement is possible. 6sense takes a Google-like approach to data and tries to get at what the search means.

For instance, "Columbia School of Business", "Columbia Business School", "School of Business at Columbia" and "Columbia Biz School" all mean the same thing if they are in a credentials section and associated with the term "MBA", "Master’s in Business", "Masters in Business", "M.B.A." or a few others. If you want to pick up all of the resumes in a database using just Boolean logic, you have to specify all of the possibilities. 6sense, according to the presenters, solves just that kind of problem.

According to the presenters, "Boolean logic requires so much precision that great candidates are often missed." Essentially, 6sense is Monster’s direct response to the rapid growth of the sourcer industry rooted in access to Google and the shift to professionals who specialize in candidate discovery. The idea is that a semantic search platform makes precision less important in the query and move available in the result.

Even at its simplest, a tool that can help a searcher overlook increasingly common spelling mistakes and small mischaracterizations would allow better access to useful candidates. If you could get more useful candidates and less useless ones using a new search tool, the quality improvement would be astonishing. And, that’s just the beginning. The presenters inferred that the new search interface could make inferences about the relative meaning of things.

It’s a part of an ongoing overall restoration of job board identity. Slow to react at first, the job boards are realizing that their revenue is drifting towards the professionals in the sourcing industry. Tagged with allegations of shoddy quality and ‘fire hose’ problems with volume, the job boards have endured rumors of their impending death for years now. Whether or not the job boards are becoming obsolete, they have done little or nothing to effectively refute the claims of their competitors and critics. That, in itself, is the largest single symptom of rigor mortis.

Recently, Glen Cathey, the Boolean Blackbelt, reported an interesting feat in Boolean Search Conquers Impossible Google Position. Candidates for a Google job req that had been open for four months were discovered using Boolean Search on … the Monster Resume Database. According to Cathey,

Interestingly enough, the candidates this recruiter was able to find were not new candidates who just posted their resume – their resumes were over 3 months old, which tells me that they had been in Monster’s resume database ever since Google released their network performance testing positions. I specifically point this out because I love to continuously disprove the commonly held belief that if many recruiters have access to the same resume database that they will be able to find the same candidates, the best candidates, and all of the appropriately qualified candidates.

This is also a good example of how, contrary to popular belief, you actually CAN find extremely good candidates (Google is notoriously elitist, which I respect) on the job boards. I continue to see well-respected recruiting and staffing thought leaders comment on how the job boards have mostly "mediocre" and declining levels of talent.

It would be extremely interesting to see a sort of "Sourcing Olympics" Imagine Shally, Maureen Sharib, reps from job boards and proponents of new technologies all facing off in performance contests. It would be nice to try to quantify the various claims for quality, speed and precision in a real performance environment. Imagine a panel of recruiters who describe the requirements and then watch the sourcers hunt down their prey.

That sort of real performance information (and wildly entertaining opportunities for moments of humiliation and embarrassment) is always missing from the closed loop demo environment. Trying to develop a real sense of what works and what doesn’t isn’t really possible in a fixed demo.

The Monster folks promised to get me some time on the system to try it out for myself. I’m anxious to do that and will let you know what I discover.

Meanwhile, I can tell you that the inferred benefits of the product are powerful. If the tool performs as promised, it’s a significant differentiator. But, the proof is in the pudding.

The best news from the demo? Monster managed to gather real influencers from the online recruiting world for an hour’s demo. Their outreach is beginning to bear fruit. As it was in the first job board era, it looks like Monster might be setting the tempo for round two.

 

Monster Talks Up its New Search Technology Popular jobs site Monster.com has introduced a new semantic search technology called 6Sense, which it says delivers "precision matches" for job seekers and employers. The technology powers Monster's Power Resume Search, Candidate Spotlight and Seeker Job Search.

The technology was developed through Monster's acquisition of Trovix back in 2008. Monster says it utilizes intuitive, concept-based searching, with a "human-like understanding" of the recruiting process and hiring needs. It understands job titles, skills, experience level, industries, education, and the hierarchy of concepts. According to Monster, this helps it evaluate a candidate's work experience like a recruiter would in just a fraction of the time.

"While traditional keyword search engines are limited in their ability to distinguish concepts and meanings of words and cannot address things like recent vs. dated experience, the intelligence of the 6Sense technology contextually interprets the meaning behind words and concepts rather than relying on the narrow, literal meaning of keywords," Monster says.

"The 6Sense semantic search technology is an extension of our investment in many technology innovations we've delivered over the past two years," said Darko Dejanovic, executive vice president, Global CIO and head of product for Monster. "We've continued to invest significantly in technology, product and infrastructure to completely revamp the talent and job search experience. This investment has consistently delivered significant improvements and value to our customers, saving them time and money by simplifying the process of identifying and evaluating qualified candidates, thus allowing more informed hiring decisions."

Monster's new search technology comes at a time when a massive amount of people in the U.S. are desperate to find jobs. Monster.com gets over 40 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. according to data from Compete.

"Hiring is fundamental to the economic recovery. Technology can play a significant role in helping businesses mitigate the burdensome costs and resources associated with bringing on the people they need," said Monster Chairman, President and CEO Sal Iannuzzi. "I hear from our customers that their businesses have jobs that they desperately need to fill and yet don’t have the resources to make that a reality. 6Sense technology changes all of this, facilitating the hiring process so that better matches are made more efficiently thereby getting people back to work more quickly."

The technology is there for employers and job seekers alike. Monster claims it provides more relevant results because seekers don't have to type exact terms in the job title to match.

Monster says that in addition to its advances in search, it is also continuing to invest in advanced technologies such as semantic clustering algorithms and machine learning in "domain appropriate" ways.

 

Monster.com Employs Semantic Search to Speed and Enhance the Job-Candidate Matching Process I have written about semantic technology and its providers a good bit on this and other blogs (see for example: Is Semantic Technology Real?) so I was interested to see how Monster.com was applying it. I spoke with Javid Muhammedali, their Director of Product Management on their efforts.

Javid started with some of the problems with key word search in the recruitment field. All words are given equal weight, you need complex Boolean logic to narrow down results, the search engine cannot distinguish between recent and dated information,the search engine does not understand the meaning of words or their context, and you often have to sift through irrelevant results. This makes sense and I see it all the time in many contexts.

The literal nature of matches makes it necessary to look for many variations on a way to express something. Javid showed a three-part search that would need over 10,000 combinations to be fully covered.

Javid explained two ways that semantic search can help. First, it can understand the meaning of words and use the context to help determine meaning. Second, it understands the hierarchy of concepts in such areas as job titles, skills, industries, etc. The context allows it to understand the different uses of a word like, Washington, when used in an address, school, company, person, etc. This context comes from the immediately connected words (e.g., Ave., Mutual, University, and the location within a document (e.g., contact information, education).

The Monster semantic search engine can be used to search documents that are uploaded, as well as resumes created with their resume builder. The search engine is not taught literal rules but rather assigns weights to the various aspects being searched on based on past experience and customer feedback. As part of the process of fine tuning the search engine, they assign resumes to both the tool and to a panel of seasoned recruiters and made comparisons. Adjustments were made to the tool to better align with the expert human logic. For example, rare, but useful, skills were identified and given greater weighting than common skills.

Javid did some sample candidate searches. The results are rank ordered with the rationale clearly provided. It then distills the key points and allows you to compare candidates on these points. It also understands the connections between filters such as roles and companies and makes adjustments.

The goal is to narrow down a list of thousands or even hundreds of possible candidates to a few dozen that a person that easily sort through and make the final judgment on. The comparison feature comes in very handy once you get to this stage. While we looked at the candidate results for those with jobs, the same approach is available for job seekers.

The results have been promising so far. Monster has found a 65% time savings using the semantic Power Resume Search compared to keyword-based search engines. There has also been a 150% increase in the number of qualified candidates found. In this application, semantic search seems both real and useful.

Monster is also attempting to have more user input through social media type features. You can rate candidates as a user such like many travel sites. Javid said that the take-up on this has been slow. A challenge for him in the coming year is to figure out how to increase the engagement with these ratings. This is a useful goal and I would suggest looking at what other successful social media efforts have done.

 

Monster.com’s 6Sense Technology: I See Employed People! PART 1 OF A TWO PART POST:

The 6th Sense. Our senses, they help us see, hear, speak, smell, and touch. Now, with the advent of Monster.com’s semantic 6Sense technology we can seek candidates in new and innovative ways. Never before have I seen such research, forethought, and planning go into a new process.

As a recruiter, it cuts down the sourcing time exponentially. As a candidate, you search with a far greater focus. In February, I had the opportunity to take part in a conference call/webinar where this new technology was demonstrated to industry leaders.

The call was lead by Javid Muhammedali, Director of Product Management, for Monster.com Eric Weingardner, VP of Client Adoption was the moderator. Also in attendence was Kathy O’Reily, Director of Social Media Relations, Monster.com, Matt Charney, Social Media Engagement Manager, Monster.com, John Sumser, HR Examiner, Sarah White Chief Strategy Officer, HRM Direct, Sioux Logan, President, RedStream Technologies, Mr. Steven Choi, CEO & President, Innovative Pharma Solutions, and I.

By now, everyone knows that Monster acquired HotJobs on February 3, 2010. The presentation, was also in February, and I waited until March to offer my two part report. Primarily, I wanted to see the impact of what the acquisition would have on the industry, and to see how much of a difference it would make. I am extremely impressed by the time and research Monster.com has invested in 6Sense, and power resume search technology. There’s a reason Monster.com is considered the leader in the industry, it’s because they work so hard to maintain gold standard quality . What I respect most about what I’ve observed is that they keep raising the bar higher and higher.

"Upon the closing of the acquisition, Monster will become Yahoo!'s provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! homepage in the U.S. and Canada," according to Javid Muhammedali.

This positions Monster as one of the largest providers of talent in the recruiting industry. Conversely, it opens more access to jobs for candidates.

It’s only been a month since acquisition, and our conference call, but the results are already being tabulated. I needed time to investigate the technology, confer with my colleagues before reporting back to you. The new product was available to search firms in October of 2009, but it wasn’t rolled out to candidates publicly until this year.

Here’s the statement Monster released: "Finding the "best" resume in a pool of candidates has long been a major challenge for the human capital industry. With Power Resume Search, powered by 6Sense, recruiters can now quickly, and precisely find and target candidates who meet their hiring needs. With the size of the resume databases growing from thousands to tens of millions, 6Sense is perfectly-suited for the challenges facing businesses today – especially since the need to expeditiously fill openings is a top priority for employers. For job seekers, 6Sense powered search provides relevant job search results, precisely matching people with opportunities better than ever before."

While 6Sense search technology is still in its beta-phase it is filled with promise, and I was impressed with the potential it holds for our industry. Because the material in the presentation is dense with data, I will go into greater detail in my next post. What I found most compelling was the discussion about context verses concept searching. The ingenuity, and level of innovation is astounding. Even the Boolean Blackbelt himself applauded Monster.com in a recent post. He remarked that as he was helping a recruiter in a recent training course to find candidates for their client, who happened to be "Google," he formed a massive boolean string. Guess where he found the candidate? Monster. Far too often, recruiters criticize the job boards as being "too vague," or "too large," or that they can find everything they need on linkedin or through a google search. Glen Cathey suggests that those who complain the most may not be using the technology properly. The new technology on the horizon is going to change the game. It is my hope that recruiters, managers and executives will begin to see these new tools in a higher light.

The people at Monster.com have been more than gracious in providing me with all the information I need. They are going to be my guests on Compassionate HR April 5, where we will discuss the importance of Corporate Philanthropy.

In my next post, I will drill down the comparative details of the rest of the presentation, and my thoughts now that some time has passed. In addition I will post technical information that recruiters and job seekers will find interesting. Stay tuned for part 2.