The 15th International Scientific Conference

eLearning and Software for Education

Bucharest, April 11-12, 2019
10.12753/2066-026X-19-000

NOVEL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNOLOGIES FOR ENHANCED

RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGNS USING SOCIAL MEDIA

George Suciu PhD., Adrian Pasat, Cristian Vasilescu

BEIA Consult International SRL, 12 Peroni, Bucharest, Romania
george@beia.ro, adrian.pasat@beia.ro, cristian.vasilescu@beia.ro

Abstract: The The recent digital development forced many market leaders to adopt advanced Artificial
Intelligence (AI) technologies to facilitate the transition from rigid processes to more flexible, outcome-
driven approaches. The use of AI presents numerous benefits. First of all, the AI technology helps
enable the analysis of unstructured data from a variety of sources across social media channels. Also,
AI allows companies not only to automate certain processes but also to reconfigure them to
complement and, more importantly, augment the skills and expertise of employees. The new era of
artificial intelligence-systems gather information, analyze, recommend, plan and more importantly,
learn. This paper presents an innovative approach to recruitment. According to recent studies, business
intelligence and analytics showed to be the most crucial area that AI can deliver results. We analyze
how software companies are more prone to integrate AI applications in marketing because of the new
market trend - digital marketing. Services companies, on the other hand, are more interested in the use
of AI in human resources. Our case study applies Sentiment Analysis (SA) techniques to improve the
recruitment processes aiming to increase the efficiency of internship campaigns by ensuring a better
match between the candidates' professional skills and the hiring company fields of activity. We
demonstrate that AI can improve the recruitment process and assist in hiring the right persons. Thus,
the HR staff has the opportunity to select the internship candidates based on their skills and determine
the right position where abilities of an individual candidate are most needed. This novel approach not
only increases the company productivity but also motivates candidates to improve their skills.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Sentiment analysis; Social media; Recruitment.

INTRODUCTION

Sentiment Analysis (SA), or Opinion Mining, is an area of Natural Language Processing

(NLP), that develops systems which aim to identify and extract beliefs/opinions within the text.
Frequently, aside from identifying the opinions, the systems select attributes of the expressions, such
as the subject, polarity, and opinion holder.
At present, sentiment analysis is one of the topics of high interest due to the fact that it has
many practical functions and applications. As the amount of available information over the Internet is
continually increasing, lots of texts where people or entities are expressing their opinions are available
in the form of forums, review sites, or blogs. Using SA systems, unstructured data could be
immediately converted into structured information of public opinions about brands, services, products,
or any other topics. Additionally, this input can be very useful for commercial applications, for
example: product reviews and feedback, marketing analysis, customer service or public relations.
Some of the advantages of sentiment analysis include:
 Scalability - SA allows data processing at scale in an efficient and cost-effective
manner;
 Real-time analysis - it can be used to identify critical information that allows
situational awareness during specific scenarios in real-time;
  Consistent criteria - using a centralized SA system inside companies helps diminish
errors and increase data consistency by applying the same criteria to all of their data.

Sentiment Analysis is used to improve recruitment for available positions in a company on

internship positions. for the testing of sentiment analysis tools, the following activities are carried out:
1. Identify the best way to analyze feelings through benchmarking provided by Stanford,
Google, or Azure;
2. Testing analysis for creating Digital Intelligence Data (DID);
3. Creating databases and processing them using clustering statistics.
The paper is organized is a follows: Section I analyzes related work, Section II details the
technologies for the recruitment use case, Section III presents the development of the platform, while
Section IV draws the conclusions and envisions future work.

I. RELATED WORK

Sentiment Analysis has become very important and popular at the same time on social
networking sites and helps companies analyze feelings in online posts to anticipate people's attitudes
and opinions in the future [19]. It is a research activity for the processing of natural language and is
also studied in data mining, web mining and text mining, which is applied in any business field where
views are the most important. It is also called "opinion mining" [14]. Social media data can be
collected in three ways: through application programming interfaces (APIs), data crawlers, or paid
services. APIs allow downloading of social media information [2].
In [19] is presented a system that analyzes feelings on the Twitter platform using hashtags,
phrases or words through the Twitter streaming API. This system is created on a micro-frame, called
Flask, using the Python programming platform.

Figure no. 1. System execution process.

With the help of the Python-based text-blob library, the "#WaterCrisis" hashtag research has
been done around the world. The results showed the following values on the world map (Figure no. 2),
where the darker colors represent positive sentiments, and the open colors represent the negative
sentiments [19].
In the future, they want to be able to take the data from multiple social media platforms and at
the same time carry out these state and regional state-level research for more than one country except
the US [19].
[18] describes a study which sought to define students’ opinion regarding websites for college
activities. The approach was selected because it draws on the cumulative experience of a large group
of students and the researchers can analyse participants' sentiments based on their shared experiences.
The study based on the sentiment analysis has shown students' opinion in choosing a college. The
results have shown that if the students perceived the college's website in a certain way, based on their
opinion, they are more likely to select the college.
Sentiment analysis in marketing provides the opportunity to collect a huge amount of data
from customers [15].
Amazon is preferred for collecting data thanks to its accessibility to information. The main
advantage of the website is that it facilitates researchers to analyse consumers' sentiments and
behavior and it also allows the providers to control the effects of extraneous variables such as review
helpfulness, review volume, price, etc. [16].
In [20] is analysed the effects of neutral user-generated content automobile industry on
product sales data from YouTube and Facebook since these two websites are two important social
media websites with a huge amount of user-generated content. The study had shown that 57% of
automobile companies use YouTube and 92% use Facebook to collect and analyse users' opinion.
In [1] is conducted a Twitter-based research also, this time analyzing emotions based on
emoticons used, acronyms (for example, LOL meaning laughing out loud) and phrases that can be
replaced with different tags (for example: not, no, never, cannot with the “NOT” tag or “coooooooool”
in the “coool”).
Emoticon Polarity
:-) :) :o) :] :3 :c) Positive
:D C: Extremely-Positive
:-( :( :c :[ Negative
D8 D; D= DX v.v Extremely-Negative
:| Neutral
Table no. 1. Part of the dictionary of emoticons.

Acronym English expansion

gr8, gr8t great
lol laughing out loud
rotf rolling on the floor
bff best friend forever
Table no. 2. Example acronym and their expansion in the acronym dictionary

Qua-kit is web platform used in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for designing and
comparing exercises. The platform records all kinds of users' activities: design changes, submissions,
reviews, comments, and votes but in order to get an insight into users’ opinions and emotions, the
researchers used NLP techniques such as n-gram models, sequence labeling and evaluation [17].
Scalable Understanding of Multilingual Media (SUMMA) is an EU-funded open-source
platform for monitoring a huge amount of media broadcasts in parallel. It combines different NLP
technologies such as machine translation (MT), named entity (NE) and automatic speech recognition
(ASR) into a functional, scalable media processing pipeline which can detect and transcribe content
from several languages and support organizations in their daily work [3].

II. TECHNOLOGIES FOR RECRUITMENT USE CASE

2.1 Description of use cases

The main objective of the SoMeDi project is to improve the social business intelligence of the
companies. One example is in the case of recruitment where it has been researched that the younger
generation (whether students or not) do not have enough information about the internships or
programs that take place. Also, there are no national web resources to research participant's feedback
on internships or programs.
The following needs were identified, a system/platform that can:
 Give personalized recommendations, based on education, interests, and location of users;
  Generate positive and negative opinions about companies that offer
internship programs;
 Facilitate social presence for the companies that offer internship
programs;
 Can enable company to specialize.

SoMeDi proposes other thematic use cases, aiming to highlight various aspects of
technological evolution and innovation in using social media, linked to the recruitment use case.
The purpose of the use case regarding social media for marketing purposes is to develop and
boost the marketing efficiency of companies in two sectors: restaurants and e-commerce with social
media presence, including marketing campaigns and promotions. By means of Digital Interaction
Intelligence (DII) tool provided by SoMeDi, the monitoring of social networks or forums for checking
the impact of marketing campaigns will be carried out to generate recommendations and automatized
changes which can be used to increase sales volume and business impact.
This case study is based on four axes:
1. Competitor Analysis based on Social Media;
2. Brand monitoring (analyse the reputation of the brand);
3. Event detection with sentiment detection;
4. Marketing campaigns track and recommendations.

The final goal is to develop marketing strategies based on the insight collected and
continuously analysing the impact of marketing campaigns, testing these strategies within the context
of accelerating innovations.
Furthermore, ongoing e-commerce marketing solutions can be acquired as Software as a
Service (SaaS), then implemented into the e-commerce platform in order to present an overview of the
customer experience offered by e-commerce websites. The main objective in the e-commerce use case
is to collect valuable data about the customer and also provide such data to the customer, by
supervising various live triggers and analysing each of them independently by using advanced
algorithms set up in the e-commerce platform (figure 2), thus making possible to feed consistent
information to the customer by sending personalized messages adapted to the customer's needs.
These solutions [6], [7], [11], [12] can be enhanced through the DII tools integrated into the
SoMeDi platform.

Figure no. 2. Use of live triggers – retargeting.biz SaaS

The SoMeDi Platform, with the functionality developed so far, can be accessed at [5]. The
platform is populated with information and test accounts for both business users and Apps (student)
users. The following figure illustrates the SoMeDi platform home page.
 Figure no. 3. Homepage of SoMeDi platform

The way the companies focus their marketing strategies consists in two fundamental
approaches: word of mouth and social media. Furthermore, when choosing a place to eat, customers
rely on the recommendations their family and friends give, but also on online reviews [4].
In this case study, the main intention is to integrate their social media strategy through the
SoMeDi platform to expand the incomes of the company and to improve the customer’s opinion. The
integrated system will supply feedback on the campaigns and promotions the impact, as well as impact
of specific locals’ reputation, comments, and opinions through opinion mining, etc.
Shortly, the SoMeDi tool will provide reports based on social impact information for helping
the business to improve their marketing campaign, to align it with clients’ needs, understand their
brand impact and performance and help them to increase their incomes and impact in society.
2.2 Social media driven platform for recruiting purposes
The main objective of this use case is to find new ways to improve the employment rate of
young adults using social media information. The focus will not be on the recruiting process but on
facilitating access of students to internship and to apprenticeship programs.
Using SoMeDi’s DII tool, the platform will generate:
 Personalized recommendations: based on their education, interests, location etc. the users of
the platform could receive personal recommendations in the form of events like meetups,
conferences and workshops; key companies/organizations.
 Positive and negative opinions regarding companies that offer internship and/or apprenticeship
programs.
 Social presence for the companies that offer internship.
 Internship position awareness in social media.
 Company profiling.

Also, considering the employers' appetite to verify the job candidate social media background,
the SoMeDi DII tool will assist candidates in consolidating their social profiles to highlight their
professional skills.
The sentiment analysis used in the SoMeDi platform is presented in the current stage as a
scalable, modular and reusable service; its architecture (figure 4) can integrate the use of the three
tested instruments for sentiment analysis of DID data: Google, MS Azure, and Stanford Core NLP.
 Figure no. 4. DID Data Analysis Services Architecture

The components and the flow of communications between them are described below:
 An call (microservice of sentiment analysis) is initially processed by the Load Balancer
component (part of the Docker);
 The request reaches one of the Docker containers and begins processing;
 The job is stored in a temporary key-value memory (KV-store). It will also contain the result
returned by the Sentiment Analysis tool (run by SA-microservice);
 The result is returned to the client either in the same application or later, along with job status;
 Job expires after a specific waiting period and is removed from KV-store memory.

The tool used for key-value cache is Redis [10]. Redis is used because it allows persistence
and, if necessary, it can be replicated on multiple nodes.
The SA-microservice component is implemented as a node.js [9] application. This application
is modular and can support the three Sentiment Analysis technologies. The interaction with each tool
is implemented as a class: GoogleSA.js, AzureSA.js, StanfordSA.js. The final version is using
GoogleSA.

III. PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT

For the use case of recruitment, the platform applies novel AI technologies such as SA to
improve the recruitment processes having the purpose to increase the efficiency of internship
programs by ensuring a better match between the candidates' professional skills and the hiring
company fields of activity.
For this stage, the main objectives and key Achievements are:
 High-level architecture of SoMeDi recruitment platform which are Front-end and Back-end
(matching services and SA);
 Experimental model for the DII tool (Standford CoreNLP);
 Tested the DII tool and compared with other solutions;
 Demonstrator for the reporting tools designed to be deployed in the SoMeDi platform;
 Designed the DII tool as a web application accessible online [5].

The front-end component is based on the October CMS platform which provides a friendly
interface between the SoMeDi platform and its users.
 ensures the management, authentication and authorization of users;
 as well as the definition and management of the elements.

The back-end component is the one that ensure the front-end component access to the
platform’s functionalities through a minimal API. This is also divided in two subcomponents:
 1. Back-end service for sentiment analysis (this service performs text analytics queries and
sentiment analysis over the content from application of candidates at the internship program);
2. Matching Service using artificial intelligence (this component performs immediate/batch
processing of information on the SoMeDi platform).

Figure no. 3. High Level Architecture – Front-end and back-end components

IV. CONCLUSIONS

In this article, we have presented the platform which integrates novel AI technologies such as
sentiment analysis in order to provide different solutions for recruiting using social media. We have
also analyzed platforms which use NLP techniques to facilitate different processes in digital
interactions such as recruitment. Furthermore, we presented the development of the SoMeDi platform
for enhanced recruitment campaign.
As future work, we plan to introduce new techniques for SoMeDi platform for increasing the
performance of the existing analysis. We are currently trying to adapt the existing NLP techniques, so
that every language can be recognized and automatically translated into English in order to perform
sentiment analysis on the text inputted by the users.

Acknowledgements
This work has been supported in part by UEFISCDI Romania and MCI through projects
SoMeDi, SOLOMON and PAPUD, funded in part by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation program under grant agreement No. 777996 (SealedGRID project) and No. 787002
(SAFECARE project). The authors are thankful to Ana-Maria Tudor, Raluca Iosu and Ioana Rogojanu
for editing the paper.

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