Gonzales Briones

Received: 8 March 2022 Revised: 4 August 2022 Accepted: 9 September 2022
DOI: 10.1111/exsy.13152
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Job offers recommender system based on virtual organizations
Alfonso González-Briones 1,2,3 | Pablo Chamoso 2,3 | n 1 |

Juan Pavo
Fernando De La Prieta 2 | Juan M. Corchado 2,3,4,5
1
Institute of Knowledge Technology,
Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Abstract
Spain
Human interaction has changed considerably with the emergence of the Internet.
2
Grupo de Investigacion BISITE,
Departamento de Informática y Automática, Today, a large percentage of daily communication takes place on instant messaging
Facultad de Ciencias, University of Salamanca, applications and social networks. In fact, there has been a considerable increase in
Salamanca, Spain
3
the use of social networks because new social networks are being created for specific
Air Institute, IoT Digital Innovation Hub
(Spain), Carbajosa de la Sagrada, Salamanca, purposes, such as the search for employment or tourism. When the amount of con-
Spain
tent on a social network is large, it is necessary to help users find content of their
4
Faculty of Bioengineering and Technology,
interest. In this regard, artificial intelligence techniques can greatly facilitate the task
Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Lock Bag,
Malaysia of searching for relevant content. This paper presents a recommender system for a
5
Department of Electronics, Osaka Institute of business and employment oriented social network, on which users are recommended
Technology, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan,
Osaka, Japan job offers and other user profiles to follow. The presented system is based on virtual
organizations of agents, and uses artificial neural networks to determine whether job
Correspondence
Alfonso González-Briones, Grupo de offers and users should be recommended or not. The system has been evaluated on
n BISITE, Departamento de
Investigacio a real social network; its recommendations regarding job offers and user profiles have
Informática y Automática, Facultad de
Ciencias, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, had a high acceptance rate.
Spain.
Email: alfonsogb@usal.es KEYWORDS
artificial neural networks, multi-agent systems, recommender system, social networks, virtual
Funding information
organizations
ERDF funds; spanish Ministry of Economy,
Indystry and Competitiveness; BeEMP -
n de la
Inteligencia social para la dinamizacio
empleabilidad, Grant/Award Number: RTC-
2016-5642-6
1 | I N T RO DU CT I O N
The Internet is a major driver of change in society. Communications and human relationships have been revolutionized by social networks. This is
due to the fast communication capacity offered by instant messaging. This new form of communication enables communication at any time and
with anyone, regardless of distance. These advances have had a profound impact on the social fabric at all levels, this includes entrepreneurial
activity and employment.
The social network boom has led to the emergence of social networks designated for specific purposes, among them are the social networks
that focus on the professional sphere and on expanding the user's network of professional contacts to facilitate the search for employment or for
an employee.
Abbreviations: ANN, artificial neural networks; MAS, multi-agent system; RS, recommender system; VO, virtual organization.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
© 2022 The Authors. Expert Systems published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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https://doi.org/10.1111/exsy.13152
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2 of 16 GONZÁLEZ-BRIONES ET AL.
In employment, this category of social networks has come to be viewed by HR recruiters as a very useful tool which opens the door to a
much greater number of potential employees. Social networks oriented to job search enable the recruiter to assess the candidates within the
social network. Moreover, it gives the candidates greater flexibility than the traditional recruitment process in which the jobseeker is constrained
by the selection process or an interview.
Currently, there are numerous employment-oriented social networks, among the most known examples are Monster, XING or LinkedIn, on
which there are large amounts of job offers from around the world. In addition to these global-scale networks, most developed countries have
many employment-oriented social networks at the local level. For example, in Spain, where this research has been performed, there is a social net-
work called beBee (beBee, 2018), although it operates internationally, the majority of its users are from Spain.
The beBee social network allows users to register as jobseekers or employers, so that they can either apply to job offers or post them. A valu-
able aspect of beBee is that it gives users the possibility to share content related to their employment sector, promoting the creation of synergies
between people and companies in the same sector. These synergies enable jobseekers to find out what profiles companies search for while com-
panies learn about the different types of profiles that stand out in the area. These relationships are very important as they help keep up with the
latest trends or establish new contacts on the job market.
Discovering these synergies, however, is not an easy task. As any other social network, beBee generates a large amount of content which in
this case consists of job offers or user posts. The volume of data is a major drawback when it comes to searching for and finding the most relevant
content. In the case of beBee, for example, there are more than 12 million registered users. Therefore, it is a necessity for such portals to have a
recommender system (RS) functionality.
The use of a RS on a social network ensures a positive user experience, offering the user what they need without them having to search for
it. These personalized services encourage new users to sign up to the social network. The more users the greater the amount of information; this
facilitates the personalized recommendation of website contents. To achieve this goal, it is necessary for the RS to have a large number of:
(i) offers to which the user registers in the case of job offer recommendations; and (ii) users who follow the recommendation they received.
Current RSs rely on a series of artificial intelligence techniques to personalize and adapt product or service recommendations to the user on
the basis of the user's interaction and experience on the platform (Haruna et al., 2017; Pan et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2019). Personalisation aims
to increase the number of sales or purchases of these products or services. A social network, being a system that generates large amounts of
information with a more limited validity time than platforms focused on the sale of products, requires a RS based on a hybrid approach which
combines collaborative systems, RSs and computational models such as neural networks. Agent-based systems are a widely used approach in the
area of artificial intelligence (González-Briones et al., 2018), as well as artificial neural networks (ANNs) (Covington et al., 2016; Paradarami
et al., 2017) which have learning capabilities.
Thanks to the application of agent-based systems, it is possible to obtain better precision when making personalized recommendations, as
this type of system allows for the agile creation of agents designated for specific tasks. Considering the role of the agent system in the proposed
recommender, agile agent creation plays a crucial role in recommendation-making.
Another technology that intervenes in the making of recommendations is a subset of machine learning called ANNs. These neural networks
are widely used in the literature, as in Wu et al. (2020) or Mishra and Patti (2021), mainly due to their capacity to learn automatically from the
actions carried out by users. Thus, this system can learn to recommend two types of relationships; user–offer and user–user.
The aim of this research is, therefore, to propose a RS that effectively manages the high volume of information on social networks so that the
recommended profiles' characteristics match as closely as possible. Solving this problem requires the development of a solution adapted to the
context and based on the most suitable technologies to achieve the proposed objectives, such as agent-based systems and ANNs. To evaluate
whether the functionality of the proposed system is suitable for incorporation into the beBee social network, a case study has been designed
involving the users of this social network. For the purposes of the evaluation, the two types of recommendations have been considered sepa-
rately, user–offer on the one hand and user–user on the other hand.
The main contribution of this article is the development of a RS based on an architecture of virtual organizations (VOs) of agents, in charge of
collecting, preprocessing and analysing information to be used by RS to make job recommendations to the most suitable candidates.
The section that follows provides context for the proposal, analysing the technologies used in the development of RSs. Section 3 presents
the proposed system and describes it in detail. Section 4 outlines the results of the conducted case study. Finally, conclusions are drawn on the
performance of the proposed system and future work is discussed in Section 5.
2 | B A CKG R O U N D
This section provides context to the proposal that is presented further on in this paper. An overview is presented of the developments undergone
by the technologies that have been used in the proposed RS. Firstly, the history of RSs is briefly outlined, followed by an analysis of the use of
ANN in RSs. Then, VOs of agents are reviewed.
GONZÁLEZ-BRIONES ET AL. 3 of 16
2.1 | Recommender systems
Although they have been in existence since the 1980s (Salton & McGill, 1983), RSs have gained a special interest in the last decade due to the
growing popularity of online services. The amount of information available today is too large for the end user to process on their own, making RSs
that filter information a necessity.
In this regard, the Internet is the main source of both information and users. The majority of Internet users utilize social media on a daily basis.
Every day, vast numbers of users generate a considerable volume of content.
The use of RSs on the Internet depends on the scenario in which they are applied, and it is of particular relevance for service providers. The
first recommendation systems were designed to search for simple documents on the Internet (Mladenic, 1999). This has changed in the last
decades as much progress has been made in technological development and the possibilities have expanded. For example, it has been proven that
in online shops an optimal, adapted RS can increase sales up to 35% (Lee & Hosanagar, 2014), even leading users to buy products that they were
not willing to buy before (Ying et al., 2018). In other types of services, having a good RS can be a determining factor when it comes to the user
choosing one company over another.
RSs are often built to take into account the users' preferences when searching for items from a vast array of accessible data (Çano &
Morisio, 2017). RSs are becoming more essential in a variety of fields as the Internet has become a completely integrated part of our culture (Park
et al., 2012). RSs, for example, play a key role in online stores by highlighting or giving a better positioning to articles that may be more interesting
to the user (Sivapalan et al., 2014; Wang & Zhang, 2013), fully personalized online advertising for users (Chamoso et al., 2020; Smith, 2019), multi-
media content suggestions (Park et al., 2017), content rating sites for tourism, film, research, and many other sectors (Adomavicius &
Tuzhilin, 2015), and social networks. As RSs are being used in so many different sectors, a variety of techniques for implementing recommenda-
tions have been presented in Lee and Brusilovsky (2017) and in Liu and Aberer (2013). This review concentrates on proposals involving the use of
RSs on social networks, as they are closely related to the proposal presented in our research.
The goal of social network-oriented RSs is to help users manage their information overload. This is accomplished by providing the user with
the information they need without requiring them to search for it; this helps users to save time that would otherwise be spent on an inefficient,
time-consuming search. Social recommendation systems utilize approaches that adapt to the requirements and interests of individual users or a
group of users (Jannach et al., 2010), recommending a portion of the social network's material to other individuals (Wang et al., 2015) or groups
(Chen et al., 2009).
The literature evidences that information from social media and previous publications has been recommended using collaborative filtering
(Herlocker et al., 2004; Pham et al., 2011). This method keeps track of users' likes and dislikes by using their Internet history, and it is usually inte-
grated with other filtering tactics such as content or social knowledge-based techniques (Bobadilla et al., 2013).
On the other hand, as detailed in the survey presented in Mu (2018), hybrid approaches have proven to provide optimal results in the devel-
opment of RSs (Burke, 2002). Hybrid approaches, for example, allow developers to blend content-based and knowledge-based strategies. In RSs,
determining context information is critical; if potentially valuable data is not taken into account, the prediction may be inaccurate. The use of
ANN should be considered while determining context information (Christakou et al., 2007).
Therefore, determining the factors that are most likely to affect the establishment of a new relationship is crucial for social network RSs.
These factors are input to the recommender so that on their basis the recommender can provide the most relevant result. Similarly, it is necessary
to analyse unstructured text to extract non-instantaneous information and formalize it in the form of a factor. Such a factor can be an essential
input for the system.
2.2 | ANNs in RSs
As with RSs, the use of neural networks has been booming in recent years, even though it is not such a recent technique (Goodfellow
et al., 2016).
However, researches published in mid-90s, such as that presented by Tu (1996), already indicated that, by choosing an appropriate non-linear
activation function(s), ANNs can be modelled to detect complex nonlinear relationships between features and independent variables, to identify
higher polynomial features, their interactions, and to leverage the availability of multiple optimization algorithms. Therefore, models built using
ANNs optimally learn complex relationships between users and items, and they can therefore make better recommendations. Thus, ANNs are a
highly appropriate mechanism for developing the foundations of a RS, which has also been affirmed in more recent work (Shambour, 2021; Zhang
et al., 2019).
Technological advancement has been especially visible in fields such as pattern recognition, artificial vision (Russakovsky et al., 2015)
and natural language processing (Zhang et al., 2015). These advances have also favoured the development of more advanced RS and offered
new solutions to a series of learning problems. In particular, deep ANNs are newer computational models with a number of previously
unused layers or processing stages. Deep neural networks may reach exceptional success rates in many pattern recognition tasks because of
the employment of an increasing number of processing layers, which allows for a gradual refinement of the input representations and fea-
tures. As a result, neurons in the deepest layers may recognize complicated patterns or concepts and abstract them, extending their applica-
tion to a wide range of fields, including the development of RSs for learning from numerous input parameters, also including YouTube
(Covington et al., 2016).
Moreover, deep neural networks are composite in the sense that multiple neural building blocks can be composed of single differentiable
functions and trained end-to-end. The key advantage of this is when dealing with content-based recommendations, as multimodal data are inevi-
table when modelling users/items on the web (Zhang et al., 2019).
2.3 | Multi-agent systems and VOs
The capacity to construct a flexible software core with high independence and modularity in the application of recommendation approaches to
provide the answer that is most likely to be considered by the end user, the concepts proposed in the paradigm of multi-agent systems (MASs)
and VOs are used since they fit perfectly with the solution sought for the problem to be solved. When the notion of organization is applied to
software applications, the concept of MASs must be presented. A MAS is a collection of agents that work together to achieve the system's
goals using (i) a set of rules and (ii) the assignment of diverse roles. It is ideal for systems like the one described in this article, where users and
the organization of organizations that make up the social network have a direct link so that they can be directly identified in a similar software
structure.
Using an architecture based on VOs of agents makes it possible to couple or uncouple different organizations under different criteria or
action factors to select the most suitable profiles of workers, or the selection of the most in-demand offers according to the search carried out.
Within each organization, independent interactions take place, although most of them are carried out in a cooperative way to find the most suit-
able candidate for the corresponding offer. Structurally, a VO is considered to be a set of entities whose association is established through rela-
n
tionships of inheritance and aggregation, and it is on this structure where a series of social relationships and workflows are defined (Pavo
et al., 2005). The organization structure is applied to agents in groups, which may be formed by agents, roles, resources, and applications, whose
allocation results in an organizational purpose that facilitates their coordination.
Filling the gap between social network analysis and control is becoming increasingly popular. Advances in complex networks theory and
MAS, as well as the incorporation of new mathematical models explaining social group dynamics and the creation of new computer tools for rele-
vant information analysis, sparked this movement.
This is the main reason why the MAS approach makes it possible to better adapt the solution to the context of this type of problem. Com-
pared to other distributed systems that enable software modelling and structuring, such as REST services, agents provide considerable advan-
tages. The use of roles, allows the behaviour of an agent with a given role to be easily exchanged for another agent with the same role and
another behaviour to solve the same problem. The role of each agent can be established in real-time according to the conditions of the context.
However, hybrid proposals have been made using the advantages of software agents and communication through REST services, such as the one
presented by VMware in (Rajendran, 2016).
In conclusion, the control of collective behaviour is the main objective in many applications related to social network analysis and mining, and
the present work aims to complete this initial objective by integrating a RS into a MAS.
3 | P R OP O SE D S YS TE M
This section details how the system is designed to determine whether or not a possible relationship should be recommended, either between a
user and a job offer or between two users. To do this, it is necessary to follow a series of steps that are described in this section. First of all, an
agent must extract information from the user (User_information_agent) or from the job offer (Job_information_agent). Extraction is performed when
new information is inserted or updated. In the case of user–user recommendations, interactions with other users (agents in the Interaction_VO)
are also analysed. Once extracted, two agents (Tie_analyser_agent and Relationship_filter_agent) determine whether the recommendation analysis
process should be initiated, as if it were a pre-filtering stage. If the exit of the two previous agents is affirmative, the agent analysing the recom-
mendation is executed from the information and the use of ANNs (ANN_agent). Finally, an agent (Recommender_agent) is responsible for submit-
ting recommendations to the user and acting on the user's responses.
In Figure 1, a general outline of the proposed system is shown. It is based on VOs where the agents associated with the above-mentioned
steps can be identified. Their functionalities are described in greater detail in the following sections.
FIGURE 1 virtual organization (VO) architecture diagram
3.1 | Information extraction
This section depicts two critical points of the platform, on the one hand, the extraction of information from users, and on the other hand, the
extraction of information from job offers. Although both have similar parameters, they are very different cases. The extraction of information is
carried out by different types of agents for users (User_information_agent) and for job offers (Job_information_agent).
For the extraction of unstructured information (free text), RASA NLU and Spicy have been used as the main tools, in addition to regular
expression analysis for parameters where applicable (dates, monetary amounts, etc.).
3.1.1 | Users' information
Users fill in a form with their personal information when registering on beBee. It is desirable that users fill in all fields with realistic information so
that the recommendations made by the platform are as accurate as possible to each user's profile. Each time a user updates or enters new infor-
mation, the User_information_agent starts a new information extraction process, which is associated with different parameters that the system will
later use to evaluate whether a relationship User_information_agent should be recommended or not. These parameters are listed below:
1. Education (e): information on the user's studies, including the year and place, is stored. These parameters can be very relevant when it comes
to recommending user–user relationships in cases where users have been colleagues. One of the main challenges is to obtain, using a semantic
(dictionary-based) analyser, the level of each study indicated by the user.
2. Languages (l): it is necessary to extract and unify each of the languages the user has indicated they know. This is because it is a parameter that
is widely used when analysing whether a profile meets the requirements of a job offer. Unification consists in, for example, treating the words
‘Español’ and ‘Spanish’ as the same, since both are associated with the same language.
3. Skills (sk): the list of skills provided by the user must pass through a series of filters when extracted. For example, the stemming technique is
applied.
4. Years of experience (ye): the system determines years of experience in the sector through the use of dictionaries that discriminate experiences
from other sectors.
5. Salary range (sr): information on the salary range of the current job (or previous job) is used.
6. Geographic area (ga): is a determining factor, when it comes to both, interacting with other users and when recommending offers. To make a
correct extraction, the system applies a series of location services and they are treated internally as pairs of coordinate and radio types.
In addition to this information extracted by the User_information_agent, there is more information about the user associated with its behaviour
and the content it shares on the social network. For this reason, each User_agent_n extracts information from each user, completing the informa-
tion extracted with:
1. Strong ties (s): the information on each user's strong links is updated (other users that they follow).
2. Strong ties profile (sp): the system obtains a list of keywords from the profiles followed by the user.
3. Groups (g): beBee offers its users the possibility of joining ‘hives’, which are groups or communities of users who share the same interests or
professional sector. This information is also extracted.
4. Published offers (o): job offers can also be posted by users. Users who publish job offers oriented at a certain work profile or category may
wish to establish new relationships and create new job opportunities.
5. Job applications (a): two users that apply to the same job offers, could be interested in establishing professional links that will help them find
new professional opportunities.
6. Publication of contents (co): beBee is a social network that allows users to share content with others. This material can be in the form of text,
an image, or a hyperlink to the content of another website. As a result, when people share similar material, their level of affinity grows with
each match. Given that the system is constrained, only a limited number of common nc contents are considered. Because of the activity of
users on this social network, the value of nc has been set to 10, which symbolizes the number of similar published material that users must
share to achieve the highest possible score.
7. Interests (i): Users can also comment on articles produced by other users on the basis of their interests. When one user recommends (or likes)
another user's material and they do not have a strong connection, the amount of affinity grows.
All of this information is taken into account in the later stages of the system when determining whether or not a user should be rec-
ommended to another user or a job offer.
3.1.2 | Job offer information
One of the main problems when it comes to extracting information from job offers is that the same text is often used for a number of job portals
so that the job offer information is copied and pasted in an unstructured form.
At beBee, it is not compulsory for job advertisements to be sent in a structured form, otherwise, it would restrict the publication of job adver-
tisements. This is because, from a strategic point of view, it is important to have a large number of offers so that users do not switch to other job
portals. The reception of free, unstructured text is an advantage for HR technicians as they can copy and paste this information into various job
advertisement portals, but it is a disadvantage because it needs to be processed in order to be used by RSs (with text mining tools, such as the
use of dictionaries, the elimination of stop words, stemming techniques, etc.).
Just as the user profile factors are assessed, the job offer factors are also analysed so that the system can provide the most appropriate rec-
ommendations. The system uses the following job offer factors:
1. Required education (meo ): the level of education required by a job offer is a vital factor when determining whether a user is likely to be hired
or not. In addition, it is possible that more than one qualification may be required.
2. Required skills (rso ): most of the job offers on the website, in addition to a degree, usually require the applicant to have various abilities or skills
that make them suitable for the position.
3. Desirable skills (dso ): this factor does not have the weight of the previous factor, but it does have the same reasoning. Although not essential,
offers that list desirable skills look for profiles that will be the most eligible for the position offered.
4. Previous experience (years) (yeo ): usually, the offer asks the applicant to have a certain level of experience that guarantees the user's ability to
work in the required field.
5. Required languages ( ln o ): the number of languages a user knows is also a key factor for offers that involve the knowledge of languages. When
a user applies for a position that requires the knowledge of various languages, the more languages they know from the languages desired in
the offer, the higher their affinity value.
6. Salary range (sro ): although this factor is not taken into account in every case, since it can be affected by factors such as geographic location, it
can be inferred that the higher the salary offered, the greater the salary of the user should be.
7. Geographic area (gao ): an important factor to be extracted from a job offer is their geographical location and whether the candidates are
required to reside in that location in order to determine which users should be recommended.
With all this information extracted, along with the user information described above, the system is able to determine whether or not an offer
should be recommended to a user.
3.2 | Prefiltering stage
With the information extracted, it is necessary to perform a series of checks before starting the recommendation evaluation system. The first step
is to analyse stiffness with other users or offers. If there are elements in common, it will be susceptible to being evaluated for its recommendation,
otherwise, the following phases of the system will be avoided.
The next stage the system goes through is only for user–job offer relations. It is filtered according to the geographical needs of the offer and
user preferences. At this point of the filtering, the system can also discard the possible recommendation. If it is not discarded, the system continues.
Each of these two filters is described in more detail below.
3.2.1 | Tie analysis
To automatically start a recommendation evaluation, the system must detect a tie between two users or between a user and a job offer,
depending on the case. Attachment analysis follows the recommendations of social attachment (He et al., 2021), which is based on mathematical
sociology and divides attachment into three possible types:
1. Strong ties: These ties represent formal direct ties. On social networks, strong ties represent the direct relationship that exists between a user
or a user and a job opportunity.
2. Weak ties: These are the most common ties in social networks. They are created when there is a weak connection between two entities (user–
user or user–vacancy), but there are elements that connect a user or user to a vacancy within the system.
3. Absent ties: The system ignores bindings between objects that do not have a real connection.
Thus, if the system detects a weak link between two users or a user and a job offer, the system continues the process to determine whether
a recommendation should be made. Once the user accepts the recommendation, the weak attachment turns into a strong attachment.
It is necessary to specify that links between two users are not bidirectional, they are unidirectional. Therefore, the system can suggest a rela-
tionship to only one of the users, since the affinity is calculated in such a way that it adapts to the profile of each user individually and automati-
cally. In the job offer RS, particular job offers are recommended to compatible users.
3.3 | Parameter based filtering
Before evaluating possible job offer recommendations to users, it is necessary to carry out a pre-filtering stage prior to recommendation evalua-
tion. At this stage, the system analyses the geographic information of the job offers and user profiles, taking into account the historical informa-
tion of user behaviour. If the conditions are not met, the proposal can be discarded immediately. For example, no matter how relevant an offer is,
if it does not fit in a user's geographic area, they are not going to be interested.
Algorithm 1 explain how the system behaves in different situations. First, the system identifies whether the location of the vacancy matches
the user profile (ga ¼ gao ). If this is the case, the system considers the suggestion. In the opposite case, where the location of the job offer and the
user profile are different, the algorithm evaluates whether the vacancy requires the candidate's location to match the posted location
(sameGARequiredðÞ function). If it is a requirement, the offer is discarded. However, if ga ¼ gao is not required, it is necessary to evaluate if the
user has previously applied to offers in different geographic areas (userHasAppliedToDifferentAreasðÞ function). If not, the recommendation is dis-
carded, whereas if the user has applied to offers where gao ≠ ga, the offer is not directly discarded and the system evaluates whether the job
offer should be recommended or not.
Following the pre-filtering stage, the system proceeds to the next stage, where it is evaluated whether the recommendation should be made or not.
3.4 | Recommendation
One of the advantages of using an agent-based approach or agent organizations is that within an organization, or even across multiple organiza-
tions, multiple agents can perform the same role independently and concurrently. This happens when generating recommendations as they are
performed by a set of agents of type ANN_agent. These agents have been implemented in such a way that they act as TensorFlow wrappers,
which provides a flexible framework for experimenting with various deep neural network architectures using large-scale distributed training
(Abadi et al., 2016). The system generates the recommendations independently according to whether they are user–user recommendations or
user–job offer recommendations, as each of them has its own characteristics as presented previously.
Algorithm 1 Geographic area filter
1: function checkGeographicArea(ga,gao )
2: if (ga ≠ gao ) then
3: if!sameGARequired() then
4: if!userHasAppliedToDifferentAreas() then
5: return false
6: else
7: return true
8: end if
9: else
10: return false
11: end if
12: else
13: return true
14: end if
15: end function
FIGURE 2 User–job offer recommender schema
3.4.1 | User–job offer recommendation
The system starts when a user is identified in the social network in order to present him/her the offers best adapted to his/her profile. Cache
mechanisms are implemented that keep the recommendations for 4 h, so it only runs if the user logs on for the first time in at least 4 h. Once
started, this RS is based on two neural networks, following the architecture presented in Figure 2.
First, the system retrieves information about the currently logged-in user (user i) and job offers posted or updated in the past 15 days, associ-
ated with their industry (tens of thousands of job offers). A data frame oj defined in Equation (1) is created and associated with each job ( j) and
used as input to the ANN. Each user (i) has an associated information data frame (ui) defined in Equation (2).

oj ¼ meo , rso , dso , yeo , ln o , sr o , gao ð1Þ

ui ¼ e, l, sk, ye, sr, ga ð2Þ
These data frames are part of the input to the first neural network, which provides as output a set of job vacancies candidates to recommend to
users. Hundreds of job opportunities are provided as output. These vacancies best match the user's profile based on the user's profile information.
However, since the acceptance rate of referrals will not be very good, it is impossible to recommend so many offers to users. From these offers,
therefore, another call is made to an ANN that takes as input the user's information (ui), the set of job vacancies candidates, and the information
provided by Interaction_VO on how that user relates (including the history of offers to which he/she has registered, relations with other users,
content that has interested the user in the social network, etc.) and other users with similar information. This type of information is structured in
a array oui,j that is defined as shown in Equation (3).

oui,j ¼ mei,j , ln i,j , ski,j , yei,j , sr i,j , gai,j ð3Þ
Each value contained in the array oui,j is the result of the neural network being associated with parameters related to the suitability of the offer
to the profile, so candidate offers are limited to those that best fit them since they have a value that will have a higher probability of
acceptance.
Another ANN creates a ranking based on this information and information about how users interact with other offers. This ANN can deter-
mine the parameters that users give the highest priority to when signing up for offers, in order to better tailor them to their profile. The results
provide a subset of the 15 top-ranked job opportunities. The result of ANN is the affinity (af) between the user and the offer, which can take a
value between 0 and 1. These offers are presented to the user on beBee, with or without interaction with them. If it interacts, the recommenda-
tion can be accepted or rejected. The evaluation of the RS is presented in Section 4.
Both neural networks are built using multilayer perceptron (MLP), which follows the structure defined by Kolmogorov's theorem
(Krková, 1992), showing that it can be solved with a single hidden layer, 2n + 1 neurons, where n is the number of neurons in the input layer.
The first ANN has 13 neurons in the input layer, which contains information about the item j and the user i, so the hidden layer is configured
with 27 neurons, and the output layer has 6 neurons, one for each parameter for the array oui,j.
The second ANN has 12 neurons in the input layer, the 6 neurons that associate its contours with the quotes are the outputs of the previous
neural network, and the other 6 define the weights historically assigned to each parameter in the quotes, mentioned earlier. The hidden layer has
25 neurons and the output layer has 1, which is the value of af.
In both cases, softmax is the selected activation function (Jung et al., 2015), which is defined in Equation (4). yi represents the result of the
ANN for neuron i of the output layer.
eyi
PðiÞ σ ðy, iÞ ¼ ð4Þ
P
N
eyn
n¼0
The information available on the social network database was used to evaluate the configuration of the neural network. More specifically, infor-
mation available from 1 March 2016 to 28 February 2017, was selected. This information includes each user's registered offers, the profiles of
users, and offers. It should be noted that the selection process is generally not monitored by social networks, so information about whether users
are ultimately hired is unknown.
The information used for system training and validation included 133,217 users (although the social network has over 12 million users, most
of whom are inactive) who submitted 687,632 applications for 57,324 published offers. This resulted in an average of nearly 12 applications per
posted offer and an average of 5.16 job offers per user.
To test and validate the system, 712,368 non-existing relationships were generated (which should result in no offers being recommended to
users), completing a dataset of 133,217 users, 57,324 job opportunities, and 1,400,000 relationships. The sum of these relationships is estimated
as the balance between actual entries (which the system should not suggest) and non-existing relationships (which should not be suggested by
the system). It should be noted that non-existent relationships with offers and users from the same industry are established iteratively, for exam-
ple, IT offers are only available to professional IT users. It should also be remembered that a non-existent relationship is related to an offer, even
if the user sees the offer on the day it is sent, there is no response. In the evaluation, 70% of the data was used for training and 30% for validation,
as shown in detail in Table 1.
On the last day of each month, the neural networks are retrained in order to adjust them to new variations such as new labour market trends.
3.4.2 | User–user recommendation
In the same way that it happens with the job offer recommendation to users, the user referral to other users runs every time a user logs on to the
social network, with a 4-h cache system. Therefore, when connected and the system runs, the flow described in Figure 3 occurs.
TABLE 1 Job offer recommendation—Validation accuracy
Validation accuracy Recommended Not recommended

Real applications 94.84% 5.16%
Fake applications 9.32% 90.68%
FIGURE 3 User–user recommender schema
TABLE 2 Users recommendation—Validation accuracy
Validation accuracy Recommended Not recommended

Real follows 92.12% 7.88%
Fake follows 8.77% 91.23%
In this case, the neural network inputs are the dataframes formed by user information, defined in Equation (2) and by user interaction infor-
mation, defined in Equation (5). From the user's interaction dataframe, existing weak ties are evaluated and recommended. The neural network is
implemented by one ANN_agent and it provides the level of affinity of each tie. The social network presents the recommendations of 15 ties
which are sorted by their affinity, thus, the social network always shows 15 recommended users.

ui,j ¼ s, sp, g, o, a, co, i, sr ð5Þ
The structure of ANN is based on Kolmogorov's theorem, similarly to the structure of recruitment advertisers. Information about these two users,
their possible relationship, and the history of user interactions on the social network are the factors used as input. Therefore, the input layer has
24 neurons and the hidden layer has 49 neurons. In the output layer is a neuron whose result is a number between 0 and 1 that determines the
affinity between the two evaluated users. When the 15 recommendations are presented to users on the social network, the most valuable recom-
mendations are shown.
To evaluate the configuration of the neural network, the information available in social network databases was used. More specifically, infor-
mation that was available between 1 March 2016 and 28 February 2017, was selected. This information includes the user's profile and the users
they follow on social networks.
The information used for system training and validation includes 87,171 users who were followed 270,230 times by other users (although
the social network has over 12 million users, most of which are inactive). This results in an average of 3.1 user relationships.
To test and validate the system, 229,770 non-existing follow-up relations (which would result in no item being recommended to the user)
were generated, completing a dataset of 500,000 follow-up relations. All of these relationships are judged to strike a balance between true suc-
cessor relationships (should be recommended by the system) and nonexistent successor relationships (should not be recommended by the sys-
tem). For evaluation, 70% of the data was used for training and 30% for validation, and the results are shown in Table 2.
3.5 | User interaction
Finally, the last step of the system is to present the obtained recommendations to the user. The social network displays the 15 recommendations
proposed from the Recommendation_VO as shown in Figure 4. The user's interaction with the website implies that the agent in charge of
maintaining the user's interaction information (User_agent) stores this response in the corresponding dataframe ui,j defined in Equation (5).
4 | E X P E R I M E N T A N D R ES U L T S
This section details the dataset used to evaluate the RSs developed in this research. The obtained results are presented for each type of recom-
mendation: user–user and user–job offer.
4.1 | Experiment dataset
The purpose of the proposed RSs is for them to be incorporated in the beBee social network. Therefore, the functionality of these systems must
be evaluated with data from this social network. To evaluate the recommendations between users and job offers, a selection has been made of
the 250 users with the highest and most relevant activity in each of the six most important professional areas during the last month (1500 users
in total). A total of 114,872 offers have been selected, divided by professional area (all the offers published during the last 15 days in the six most
relevant professional areas and which had the most activity during the development of the case study), as shown in Table 3. To study the
FIGURE 4 The social network website showing a carousel with five of the recommended job offer
TABLE 3 Job offer dataset
Professional area Offers

Trades & Professions 39,780
Sales 22,915
IT 17,047
Administrative 13,659
Economist & Finance 10,873
Engineers & Technicians 10,598
TABLE 4 Results of the job offer recommendation for the user of the main employment sectors
Professional area Recommendations Accepted Rejected Acceptance rate

Trades & Professions 8746 7759 987 88.71%
Sales 7863 7155 708 90.97%
IT 8212 7432 780 90.50%
Administrative 7968 7128 840 89.45%
Economist & Finance 6211 5573 638 89.72%
Engineers & Technicians 7481 6791 690 90.77%
relationships between users, 2000 users have been randomly selected from the set of users whose activity is sufficiently high to be the object of
the case study.
4.2 | Results
This section presents the results obtained from the case study carried out with the above-presented dataset. The two RSs have been evaluated
separately. First, the job offer recommendations for the user and then the relationship recommendations between users.
4.2.1 | User–job offer recommendations
The evaluation of the job offer RS has rendered the results shown in Table 4.
As detailed above, the 250 most active users in each of the different areas were selected for the evaluation. In the case study, the recommen-
dations made for each group of 250 users did not vary much, regardless of the number of offers that previously existed on beBee. This minimal
variation is due to the fact that the system previously preprocesses all offers and establishes a ranking of the 15 most likely to be relevant for the
target user. Depending on the user's interaction with the offer, new offers may be recommended, hence the small oscillation between the differ-
ent categories. It should be noted that the RS is quite accurate for all categories, as an average acceptance rate of 90% has been obtained across
all categories.
4.2.2 | User–user recommendations
Two-thousand users, who had intensively interacted with the platform, were selected for participation in the case study of user-to-user recom-
mendations. A total of 43,873 recommendations have been made to the users selected for the case study, as can be seen in Table 5. It has been
found that the acceptance rate of offer recommendations was of 88.27%, with each user receiving the 15 most relevant recommendations. The
system adds new recommendations as the user interacts with it. This is reflected in the fact that for each user, during this evaluation period, an
average of almost 22 recommendations have been made, with 19 being accepted. Similarly, the performance of the user–user recommendations
is shown in Table 5.
TABLE 5 User–user recommendation results
Recommendations Accepted Rejected

Total 43,873 38,727 5146
Average 21.94 19.36 2.57
Rate (%) 100 88.27 11.73
TABLE 6 Performance results for user–user recommendations
Number of nodes Number of soft links to be evaluated Concurrent requests Processing time (ms)
1 100 100 227
200 100 318
300 100 487
2 100 200 233
200 200 322
300 200 480
3 100 300 216
200 300 329
300 300 477
4.3 | Performance analysis
Regarding the analysis of system performance, the neural network training process, which is the process that requires the most computing capac-
ity, takes place only on the last day of each month, this does not affect system performance. On the other hand, the 15 most related users and
the 15 most related job offers to each user were obtained once every 4 h for each active user in the last 365 days. In case a user connects to the
social network 365 days later, the system will be launched at that time for that user.
The time it takes for the ANN to produce a result is related to the number of existing users on the social network with whom it maintains a
soft link and the number of job offers in its professional sector. The system is able to determine that the response occurs within a set maximum
time and automatically adjusts the number of nodes needed to ensure that the response is proportionate before that set time is reached. This sys-
tem is based on a research carried out for the same project in collaboration with beBee, presented in Rivas et al. (2020).
When determining how many nodes are necessary to meet the number of received requests, a study has been made with 1, 2, and 3 nodes,
responses have always been obtained in less than 500 ms for users with up to 500 soft links with other users that had to be evaluated to deter-
mine whether or not they should be recommended to become hard links. Table 6 show the obtained results. Also, it can be seen that by
maintaining a constant 100 requests per node, the processing time to obtain 15 recommendations is kept constant for each of the added nodes.
4.4 | Discussion
To determine how efficient each RS (user–user and user–job offer) is, they should be compared with other RSs. Given that the RSs are very
context-dependent, they have been compared with the previous system that was developed for the same beBee social network, whose results
had been presented in Chamoso et al. (2018).
Both RS have shown an improvement in the percentage of acceptance of the recommendation by the user. The new version of the user–user
RS had an 88.27% recommendation acceptance rate, compared to the 84.11% acceptance rate of the first version of the system. The new version
of the RS user–job offer RS had a 90% recommendation acceptance rate compared to the previously proposed system. The main difference
between the two versions of RSs was the approach. The first version employed a case-based reasoning system (CBR), which did not provide fully
accurate recommendations during its learning process, as the user starts to interact. The obtained results have also been compared with those
presented in Shi (2016). The comparison is interesting due to the similarity between the proposed RSs; the user must complete their profile and
interact with the RS. The RS in Shi (2016) had a 67.34% average acceptance rate (percentage of people who have applied for the recommended
job or requested a recommended jobseeker profile). Meanwhile, the RS proposed in this paper has an acceptance rate of 88.2%. In addition, Shi
(2016) presents an average signing conversion rate of 34.17% (percentage of people who have acquired the recommended job/jobseeker profile).
In this paper, as previously mentioned, there is no information available on the status of a job application since the selection process is usually
done externally.
The context in which this case study has been developed, that is, the users and offers were different to the previous one, has meant that the
results have had a lower percentage of correctness with respect to the values obtained in the validation phase of the ANN in the first study. In
both studies, 70% of the information was used for training and 30% for validation. The use of ANN has made it possible to determine the contex-
tual information that had to be input to the RSs. This has made it possible to determine the factors that affected the establishment of each new
relationship the most, which is a crucial aspect of this type of social network RS. On the other hand, it has been proven that agent-based VOs pro-
vide the ability to develop a flexible software core that is autonomous and modular, providing optimal solutions for hybrid RSs.
5 | CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
At a theoretical level, we have provided a novel SR proposal that mixes different paradigms (MAS and ANN) capable of being applied in specific
contexts to obtain results that meet the needs of the context to which it is applied. However, from a practical point of view, this proposal can be
replicated in other problems in which the aim is to design a RS oriented toward the interactions that users carry out within any Internet portal,
simply by adapting the context block (the parameters taken into account in the recommendation).
As mentioned above, the obtained results are satisfactory in terms of the percentage of users accepting recommendations, so it can be con-
firmed that the designed system works optimally. However, some parameters that could indicate the degree of user satisfaction could not be
incorporated into the study so as not to worsen the user experience, as it is a system deployed in a real environment. To complete the evaluation
of the system, a future research will assess the system with a set of volunteer users, randomly selected from different areas, to provide advanced
feedback on the recommendations.
Moreover, future lines of research will focus on implementing a RS aimed at users with a company profile, that is, employers who publish
offers. This RS will be based on the technical aspects presented in this paper but will recommend candidates for possible offers published by a
user, rather than job offers to users. This is intended to offer a new functionality that encourages companies to use the social network as the main
showcase for their offers. Consequently, it is possible to offer a better service to users, who will receive requests from companies and will have a
greater number of job offers on the social network. When the RS will be complete, it will be integrated on beBee, so that all users have the RS
available for use and not just the users selected for the experiment.
ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS
n de la empleabilidad’. ID: RTC-2016-5642-6. Project
This work has been supported by project ‘BeEMP - Inteligencia social para la dinamizacio
co-financed with Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and ERDF funds.
DATA AVAI LAB ILITY S TATEMENT

Research data are not shared.
ORCID
Alfonso González-Briones https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3444-4393
Pablo Chamoso https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5109-3583
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHI ES
Alfonso González Briones currently works at Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence Department, at the Complutense University of
Madrid. He is also member of the GRASIA Research Group since March 2020. He earned his PhD in Computer Engineering from the Univer-
sity of Salamanca in 2018. At the same University, he obtained his degrees of Technical Engineer in Computer Engineering (2012), Degree in
Computer Engineering (2013) and Master in Intelligent Systems (2014).
Pablo Chamoso earned his PhD Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Salamanca in 2017. He also obtained the degrees of
Technical Engineer in Computer Systems in 2011, Computer Science Engineer in 2013, Master in Systems Development for Electronic Com-
merce in 2012 and Official Master in Intelligent Systems in 2014. He is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department of the
University of Salamanca, and member of the BISITE Research Group since March 2011.
n is a full-time professor at Universidad Complutense Madrid. He got a PhD degree in Computer Science from Universidad
Juan Pavo
Politécnica Madrid (1988). From 1987 to 1997 he was working in R&D departments of Alcatel in the development of component-based archi-
tectures for distributed systems and their application to multimedia services on broadband networks and mobile systems. He joined UCM at
the end of 1997, where he created the UCM-GRASIA research group, whose focus is on the application of multi-agent systems technology, in
particular, on software engineering, knowledge management, simulation of complex systems, decision making, interactive art, and ambient
assisted living.
Fernando De La Prieta is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation at the University of Salamanca. At
the research level, he has been published in around 30 articles in journals and more than 80 articles in books and at recognized international
conferences. He has worked on 50 research projects and around 20 research contracts. It is worth mentioning that he has been active in the
organization of international scientific congresses (PAAMS, CEDI, FUSION, ACM-SAC, etc.).
Juan M. Corchado is a full professor with chair at the University of Salamanca. He earned a PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of
Salamanca and he also holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of the West of Scotland. He is a visiting professor at Osaka
Institute of Technology since January 2015, visiting professor at the University Teknologi Malaysia since January 2017 and a Member of the
Advisory group on Online Terrorist Propaganda of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (EUROPOL).
n, J., De La Prieta, F., & Corchado, J. M. (2022). Job offers recommender

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Received: 8 March 2022 Revised: 4 August 2022 Accepted: 9 September 2022

Job offers recommender system based on virtual organizations

Alfonso González-Briones 1,2,3 | Pablo Chamoso 2,3 | n 1 |

Expert Systems. 2022;e13152. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/exsy 1 of 16

2.1 | Recommender systems

2.2 | ANNs in RSs

2.3 | Multi-agent systems and VOs

FIGURE 1 virtual organization (VO) architecture diagram

3.1 | Information extraction

3.1.1 | Users' information

3.1.2 | Job offer information

3.2 | Prefiltering stage

3.2.1 | Tie analysis

3.3 | Parameter based filtering

Algorithm 1 Geographic area filter

FIGURE 2 User–job offer recommender schema

3.4.1 | User–job offer recommendation

3.4.2 | User–user recommendation

TABLE 1 Job offer recommendation—Validation accuracy

Validation accuracy Recommended Not recommended

FIGURE 3 User–user recommender schema

TABLE 2 Users recommendation—Validation accuracy

Validation accuracy Recommended Not recommended

3.5 | User interaction

4.1 | Experiment dataset

TABLE 3 Job offer dataset

Professional area Offers

Professional area Recommendations Accepted Rejected Acceptance rate

4.2.1 | User–job offer recommendations

4.2.2 | User–user recommendations

TABLE 5 User–user recommendation results

Recommendations Accepted Rejected

TABLE 6 Performance results for user–user recommendations

4.3 | Performance analysis

5 | CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

DATA AVAI LAB ILITY S TATEMENT

n, J., De La Prieta, F., & Corchado, J. M. (2022). Job offers recommender

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