And finally… here’s the third installment of my trilogy of posts on the information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals. The background to this (in case you missed the previous two) is that a few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we analyzed first was (cue drum roll)… recruitment professionals.
It’s a profession that information retrieval researchers haven’t traditionally given much thought to (myself included), but it turns out that they routinely create and execute some of the most complex search queries of any profession, and deal with challenges that most IR researchers would recognize as wholly within their compass, e.g. query expansion, optimization, and results evaluation.
What follows is the final post summarizing those results. In part 1, we focused on the research methodology and background to the study. In part 2, we discussed the search tasks that they perform, how they construct the search queries and the resources they use. Here, we focus on how recruiters assess and evaluate the results of their search, and their views on the features of an ideal search engine. The published paper can be downloaded from Sage journals (Russell-Rose, T and Chamberlain, J. “Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals”. Business Information Review, March 2016, vol. 33 no. 1 40-48).
As usual, comments and feedback are welcome – particularly so from the recruitment community who are best placed to interpret and contextualize these findings.
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