Salience and Market-aware Skill Extraction for Job Targeting

At LinkedIn, we want to create economic opportunity for everyone in the global workforce. To make this happen, LinkedIn offers a reactive Job Search system, and a proactive Jobs You May Be Interested In (JYMBII) system to match the best candidates with their dream jobs. One of the most challenging tasks for developing these systems is to properly extract important skill entities from job postings and then target members with matched attributes. In this work, we show that the commonly used text-based salience and market-agnostic skill extraction approach is sub-optimal because it only considers skill mention and ignores the salient level of a skill and its market dynamics, i.e., the market supply and demand influence on the importance of skills. To address the above drawbacks, we present Job2Skills, our deployed salience and market-aware skill extraction system. The proposed Job2Skills shows promising results in improving the online performance of job recommendation (JYMBII) (+1.92% job apply) and skill suggestions for job posters (-37% suggestion rejection rate). Lastly, we present case studies to show interesting insights that contrast traditional skill recognition method and the proposed Job2Skills from occupation, industry, country, and individual skill levels. Based on the above promising results, we deployed the Job2Skills online to extract job targeting skills for all 20M job postings served at LinkedIn.