Why does Eightfold PCS pull up jobs even if the search keyword does not appear in the job title or job description?

Unlike traditional job boards and career sites, Eightfold’s matching algorithm goes beyond job description and job titles. We take into account over 100 different fields to surface the most relevant jobs on PCS. We include all the data from Calibration - skills, ideal candidates, related titles, industry, education - as part of our matching on PCS. We also use data from previous hires. Hence the product allows candidates to apply to the jobs they are most likely a good match even if the job description is not complete. PCS also helps surface jobs where a candidate could learn new skills based on what they already know today and what other candidates have learnt over time. This approach not only results in a much better candidate experience but also a much improved diversity conversion on your PCS.

How is seniority defined on the Advanced filter on PCS?

Seniority is categorized in 4 buckets - Intern, Entry, Mid/Senior, Director/Executive (four levels (0, 1, 2, 3)). Eightfold categorizes jobs in these categories based on smart algorithms. It takes into account job description, Title of the role, calibration parameters (e.g. Title of ideal candidates, their seniority level, similar candidates etc) and publicly available data on seniority standards. Some of the jobs might be tagged within 2 seniority buckets. 

When you type ‘Director’, why do 62 jobs show up whereas when you select the ‘Director/Executive’ Seniority option, only 15 jobs show up?

As mentioned above, the seniority filter is strictly fetching jobs that correspond to that associated level, which is Level 3 / Director in this case. On the other hand, the query word search is not as restrictive. Refer to point 1 above. One example where we can see this in effect is a job by the name of ‘Sr. Designer’. If you search ‘Director’, the ‘Sr. Designer’ job is returned as part of the results. However, the actual level of the ‘Sr. Designer’ job is ‘Senior (2)’ so it would not be returned by the Director Seniority Advanced Option. The reason it is returned in the query search is because the job titles of previous hires contain ‘Director of Design’.

This is why you see 61 jobs when you search ‘Director’ even if there are only 15 jobs in the ‘Director/Executive’ seniority category. The reason being that there are some jobs returned in the ‘Director’ query search that are not necessarily in the ‘Director/Executive’ level but perhaps have been filled by Directors in the past. 

In other words, the ‘Seniority’ advanced option serves more as a filter and will explicitly show jobs that meet that filter criteria. On the other hand, the search query is more flexible and nuanced and will fetch jobs across different filters based on how relevant that job is deemed to the search query by the algorithm under the hood.

Why do experience required roles populate when you select ‘Entry’ level in the Seniority Advanced Options?

This is because when each position is indexed into its category (Intern, Entry, Mid/Senior, Director/Executive), many different factors such as the job title, job description, no. of years of experience that the ideal candidate for that role had, and more are used. The rationale for this behavior is that a more nuanced and intelligent categorization of positions into their seniority levels can be done. This is to avoid the situation that a position that requires 2+ years of experience be immediately categorized into the ‘Senior’ level when in fact the position itself does not require the abilities or responsibilities of a ‘Senior’. In addition, when a position is being categorized into the level, its underlying requirements and description is used as a comparison point to positions in other levels. Therefore, many entry level positions are shown despite them having more than 0 years of experience required because those positions were more closely suited to ‘Entry’ than they were to the next level up of ‘Senior’. 

Why do 62 jobs show up when ‘Director’ is searched but only 57 jobs show up when ‘Director, Public Relations’ is searched?

The search system that displays the jobs on PCS is very nuanced and complicated so that the best jobs are displayed for each candidate query. This system goes beyond ‘AND’ or ‘OR’ operations of the keywords in the search query itself. 

At a high level, what happens under the hood, is that the search query e.g ‘Director’ is taken and all the jobs in the system are used to compute a relevance score to see how relevant each job is to that query. The jobs that are displayed back to the user are ones that exceed a certain threshold for relevance. This is done so that jobs that are vaguely relevant are not shown. Some of the factors that are used to calculate the relevance include: title of the job, job description, skill/title/experience of previous hires and more. So in our situation, there were 62 jobs that exceeded the relevance threshold for the ‘Director’ search.

The reason that you see a fewer number of jobs and a slightly different set of jobs for when the query is ‘Director, Public Relations’ is that the relevance scores for all the jobs are again recomputed now with a different query. Only the jobs with their new relevance scores that exceed the threshold are displayed. 

The key point to remember is that the relevance score for each job is tied directly to the query. Therefore the relevance score of Job A to the ‘Director’ query will be different to the relevance score of the same Job A to the ‘Director, Public Relations’ query. 

Why is that the case?

This is because when more words are added to the query, the weight of each word changes. That means the weight/importance that the singular word ‘Director’ out of ‘Director, Public Relations’ is given when computing the relevance scores is lower when compared to the weight/importance when ‘Director’ is the only word in the query. Therefore, when the weights of the query words change, this directly affects the computation of the relevance scores which thus explains why the scores for the same job will be different across various unique queries.

We see a smaller number and a different set of jobs for ‘Director, Public Relations’ because some jobs that are closely related to ‘Public Relations’ are displayed and only the ‘Director’ jobs that are relevant enough to the query are displayed. 

Not all the jobs from the ‘Director’ search will appear in the ‘Director, Public Relations’ search because some jobs from the ‘Director’ search will just not be relevant enough and will not meet the threshold for the ‘Director, Public Relations’ query.

One example of such a job that appears in the ‘Director’ query but not the ‘Director, Public Relations’ query is a job titled: ‘Director, Financial Planning and Analysis’. This is likely because when computing the relevance score, this job did not have enough overlap to the ‘Public Relations’. This makes sense because the job is more focused on Financial Planning & Analysis which is a very different field.