The 14th International Scientific Conference

eLearning and Software for Education

Bucharest, April 19-20, 2018
10.12753/2066-026X-18-000

GEOLOCATION AND SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ENHANCED RECRUITMENT

CAMPAIGNS

George Suciu, Adrian Pasat, Robert Coanca, Alexandru Drosu

R&D Department, BEIA Consult International, Bucharest, Romania
george@beia.ro, adrian.pasat@beia.ro

Abstract: Recruiting is one of the main areas that embraced social media as a universally hiring tool,
with 92 percent of recruiters confirmed using it as part of their process. Recruiters perform social
screening due to several reasons: they search information that supports the candidate's skills for the
job, and, also referrals, what other people are posting about the applicants. Another important use
concerns the monitoring of hiring campaigns, namely collect viable data if the campaign has reached
the proper audience and other statistics. The usual options, such as people search engines are limited
in providing proper insight, therefore we propose in the current paper an innovative tool with data
analytics (including, for example, the number of the reviews or the percentage of tweets containing
sentiments information) and customized scanning capabilities depending on the social platform. Also,
we analyze the challenges of efficiently generating and using social media and digital interaction data
enabled intelligence including geolocation. With the help of advancements in artificial intelligence,
data analysis solutions, and algorithms integrated into automated learning processes, the proposed
solution provides insight into the ubiquitous interactions within the online social platforms, processing
an incomprehensible amount of interaction traces that provide information about preferences, interests,
and intentions. Furthermore, to understand the proper insight needed for successful recruiting
campaigns we performed an analysis of available tools for people search and location-based
monitoring tools. Once refined, these functionalities based on sentiment analysis and text mining
engines, are very helpful not only to recruiters, having the opportunity to analyze the customer views
can translate into a competitive advantage as a business retailer or service provider.

Keywords: recruitment; search engines; geolocation; sentiment analysis; text mining.

I. INTRODUCTION

The social media phenomenon has opened new paths of engagement and revolutionized the
exchange of information. While more people engage in social media, it is worth investigating its
relevance to the recruitment process. As nowadays almost everyone has their own electronic footprint,
being active on social media channels when choosing the right job candidate is essential. LinkedIn,
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can deliver significant information regarding the social profile of a
person.
Firstly, the most famous platform among recruiters seems to be LinkedIn [1]. This is because
it is perceived as a platform to highlight working skills and to enhance communication between
companies and candidates. On the other hand, social channels such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter
are best known as platforms for promoting products and for users to interact with family and friends.
Even so, there seems to be a strong correlation between these social profiles of a user. They can offer a
perspective view of what the candidate is interested in when speaking concerning technological
progress or working environment expectations.
Companies have to make sure their recruitment campaigns reach the possible candidates’
news feed. In order to do this, they promote their activities using as many channels as possible. A
good example is L’Oréal, the largest cosmetics company in the world [2]. It is constantly active with
multiple channels on different social platforms, which are related to branding campaigns, internships,
and worldwide workshops. Another example is Nestlé, which has a strong promoting strategy [3].
During the promoting activities, the company addresses directly to the possible job candidate, which
makes the interaction seem more natural and with a potential success.
Following the recent interest shown by various recuiting companies and corporation, SoMeDi
project proposes a new solution, a platform that can provide insight into how to increase the success of
recruitment campaigns, but also innovative screening procedures based on sentiment analysis tools.
The next section will present the related work focused on other research, focusing on the core
components on which the Somedi platform was designed. Section 3 will describe the components
architecture flow, and also a comparative analysis of language processing tools. In section 4 we
present our conclusions.

II. RELATED WORK

In this section we will present related work describing data mining, NLP solutions, some of
the core components proposed to be deployed within the SoMeDi platform.
Natural Language Processing refers to the interactions between human and computer
languages, and also to computer programming to process a large amount of natural language data. The
NLP (Natural Language Processing) includes the manipulation of text and speech using software and
other computational tools. The ELSE (Evaluation in Language and Speech Engineering) project
envisioned to develop a comparative study of NLP systems [5]. The idea referred to using the same
parameters and tasks for different systems. Also, there were set several evaluation criteria, such as:
 Basic Research Evaluation: simulating the impact and the improvement of a certain
technology used;
 Technology evaluation: taking into consideration the type of technology used (and
what it automatically implies) and the performance when dealing with a problem;
 Usage evaluation: system usability analysis for solving problems;
 Impact evaluation: analysis of both the social and economic consequences of the
technology used.
Natural Language Processing for Social Media is a complete study of technologies, tasks, and
techniques used for analyzing social media texts [5]. It refers to text pre-processing and normalizing
words and develops an evaluation of NLP and social media applications using data collected from
social media. In addition to this, the second part of the book presents the main applications which
benefit from social media texts processing and also presents how to obtain relevant data to study.
Data mining represents the practice of automatically searching for large amounts of data
which create trends beyond the simple data analysis. The notion of automatic search refers to
algorithms implemented for identifying trends in social media. Data mining has several important
characteristics, such as prediction (a model may predict different user data based on a known
parameter, such as education), or grouping (creating user groups based on a predicted parameter).
In this paper, the authors state that data mining requires good collaboration between different
entities, such as social analysts and computer scientists [6]. Also, one of the main challenges regarding
this topic is protecting user privacy in the long term, when doing data processing. In addition to this,
data mining provides valuable information to a variety of different domains: politics, marketing
research, business technology, and it represents a digital record of social behavior and interaction.
This paper offers a strong review of data mining research studies. It also develops an analysis
of both strong and weak point of data mining techniques and presents their main description. For
example, the SVM (Support Vector Machine) is presented as the most powerful technique to be
implemented for solving classification problems in data analysis [7]. This is because it has the best
performance on small datasets, although it has problems with sparse context links.
The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) describes the ability of computers to understand
natural aspects related to human life, to complete tasks which would normally require human effort.
The concept of AI is used by important companies, mostly for making their products relevant to users
[8]. At this moment, AI is very useful as a social media monitoring tool. Although it has not reached
the point of being similar to a human conversation, it provides useful data relevant for brands and
industry when improving online strategies [9].
This paper [10] presents the importance of AI in providing highly personalized content on
social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. In order to obtain this, a significant amount of
data is necessary, which can be purchased through AI algorithms. A strong example is represented by
the Facebook photo-tagging pattern, which is built based on data obtained through AI laboratory
algorithms.

III. PLATFORM COMPONENTS ARCHITECTURE FLOW

Platform SoMeDi enable end users (companies) to improve their social business intelligence:
giving tailored recommendation, development of new product or services from harvesting ideas,
improving customers’ retention for products, content and/or services. This platform allows young
people access to information, because they are not well informed about the existing internship or
apprenticeship programs. Also there are no national web resources where one can check the feedback
given by participants to internship or apprenticeship programs. This helped us to identify the following
needs for system/platform:
 gives personalized recommendations, based on some common features of users’ profile like
education, interests, and location.
 generate positive and negative opinions regarding companies that offer internship and/or
apprenticeship programs.
 facilitate social presence for the companies that offer internship or apprenticeship programs.
 enable company profiling.
In SoMeDi, in order to automate the process of understanding the social media data that is
usually done by human experts, we will use tools and algorithms on the Natural Language Processing
realm (henceforth NLP) that try to understand the language generated by users of the social networks
and then represents it in data formats that are useful for analysis by computers.
In the diagram presented below (figure 1) is displayed the process flow proposed to be
developed in the national project use case.
 Figure 1. SoMeDi platform architecture components flow

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is influencing a rapid acceptance of more intelligent

solutions in various end‐use applications based on artificial intelligence algorithms and driven by an
increased need to manage unstructured enterprise information along with structured data [11]. Natural
language processing is applied in a variety of industry segments like media, publishing, advertising,
healthcare, insurance and banking to improve essential enterprise activities:
 Social media monitoring represents an excellent opportunity for companies to know what their
clients are talking about on social media platforms, blogs and discover relevant information about
their business. By interacting directly with clients, companies can understand the customers’ needs
and improve the relationships with them.
 Formulating responses to questions - enterprise question answering tools leverage NLP
algorithms to develop customer experience and to improve administrative activities by allowing
users to ask questions about products, services or applications and receive immediate and accurate
answers.
 Text analytics - Many organizations use natural language processing to approach text problems
and to improve activities such as knowledge management and big data analytics. Morphological,
grammatical, syntactic and semantic analyses of language enable identification and extraction of
different types of key elements (topics, locations, people, companies, dates), and generate the
metadata that can be used to tag and categorize content in the most precise way.
The type of language processing (name of tools, developers, document classification,
clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text) is
presented in table 1.

Name of the tool Developers Written in OS Type License

NLTK NLTK- Python Cross- Text classification/NLP Apache 2.0

Developers and platform framework
contributors

Weka University of Java Cross- Text classification/ Data GPL

Waikato platform mining

Mallet Andrew Java Cross- Topic modeling/ Text Common

McCallum, platform classification Public
graduate students License 1.0
and staff

MEAD University of Perl: requires XML- Cross- Text summarization GPL

Michigan related modules and platform
external software
package

Wikipedia Miner University of Java Cross- Entity Linking GPL v2

Waikato platform

Illinois Wikifier University of N/A Cross- Entity Linking GPL

Illinois platform

OpenNLP Apache Software Java Cross- Entity Recognition/ LGPL v2

Foundation platform Coreference resolution/ Parsing

Stanford NLP Stanford Java 1.6 or later for the Cross- Entity Linking/ Co-reference GPL v2
university last version platform resolution

GATE GATE research Java Cross- Entity Recognition LGPL

team, Dept. platform
Computer
Science,
 University of
Sheffield

Table 1.Type of language processing

Natural language processing represents artificial intelligence helps computers read and
respond by simulating the human ability to understand everyday language. Many organizations use
NLP techniques to optimize customer support, improve the efficiency of text analytics by quickly
finding the data they need, and increase social media. Such organization like banks could implement
NLP algorithms to optimize customer support. A large consumer products brand might combine
natural language processing and semantic analysis to improve their knowledge management strategies
and social media monitoring.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Online social media has become a necessary tool for recruiting participants since it has the
potential to be both efficient and cost-effective. Social media has that unique ability transcending
barriers to study recruitment such as physical distance, transportation, limited time and financial
resources. It also affords users the added benefits of privacy and anonymity, which may enhance the
effects of perceived stigma while trying to reach populations.
Moreover, non-financial stimulus in the form of trivia is a viable alternative to monetary
incentives that yields high rates of retention while minimizing the chances of duplicate and fraudulent
responses. Facilitating this process using online data collection software can further reduce cost and
time associated with data collection. To sum it up, since Internet-based research tools have become
more practical, researchers must embrace these methods not only to maximize efficiency but also to
enhance the scientific validity and generalizability of their findings. As such, online social media,
alternative types of incentives, and Web-based survey software are well poised to become staple
methods of recruitment and engagement in research.

Reference Text and Citations

[1] Robert, W., Social Media in the recruitment process, www.robertwalters.co.uk
[2] Link Human, How L’Oreal Uses Social Media for Recruitment, https://linkhumans.com
[3] Link Human, How Nestlé Uses Social Media for Recruitment, https://linkhumans.com
[4] Martin, R., 2000. ELSE - Evaluation of Language and Speech engineering, https://lia.epfl.ch/Research/else.html
[5] Atefeh F., Diana I., 2015. Natural Language Processing for Social Media, Synthesis Lectures on Human Language
Technologies, no. 2 , Pages 1-166
[6] Geoffrey, B., 2000. Data mining in social media, Social network data analytics, Springer Science+Business Media
[7] MohammadNoor, I., Fadi, S., 2016. Data mining techniques in social media: A survey, Neurocomputing, pages
645-670
[8] Daniel, K., 3 Ways to Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence in Social Media, www.oktopost.com
[9] How artificial intelligence can help us understand social media, www.clickatell.com
[10] Aristea, P., 2016. The Future of Communication Artificial Intelligence and Social Networks, Media &
Communication Studies ∙ Malmö University
[11] Examples of Natural Language Processing, http://www.expertsystem.com