Artificial intelligence integration to improve job matching

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) is expected to improve the search and hiring process for both jobseekers and employers, online employment marketplace group SEEK said.

SEEK has integrated its JobStreet and JobsDB marketplaces under an AI-powered platform to improve search recommendations and data processing, it said.

“This new technology allows us to really scale up and move faster with more features the Philippine market can expect to come in the next months and years ahead,” Dannah Majarocon, managing director for the Philippines at JobStreet by SEEK, said at a briefing on Tuesday.

“[It] can now seamlessly match them based on specific skills, job roles, and career aspirations, which is crucial in the Philippines’ highly dynamic and evolving employment landscape,” she added.

Improvements include personalized recommendations, processing larger datasets from candidates’ profiles, job ad descriptions, and employers’ past behaviors.

The new natural language search feature to be rolled out this year also allows job queries through phrases or a sentence.

“They do not need to rely solely on keyword phrases,” JobStreet by SEEK said in a statement.

The use of AI on the job marketplace can help boost the hiring process in the Philippines, Ms. Majarocon said.

“Unemployment and underemployment have improved, but it still remains to be a challenge for the Philippines,” she said.

Preliminary results of the Philippine Statistics Authority’s Labor Force Survey showed the unemployment rate fell to 3.6% in November from 4.2% in the previous month and in November 2022.

The underemployment rate remained at 11.7% for a second straight month in November. Year on year, it was lower than the 14.4% in November 2022.

“The volume of hirers has doubled from pre-pandemic, and we anticipate that this is going to continue forward,” Ms. Majarocon said.

There was a 45% growth in average monthly active employers on JobStreet Philippines last year, she said.

“We also see a lot more active candidates, employed or unemployed. It makes sense to give more access to options for our fellow Filipinos,” she added.

She noted that 61% of employers are confident that the job market will be more active in the first half of the year, with 71% planning to increase their permanent employee head count.

Hybrid work has dominated work arrangements in the country, with employers exploring other benefits and allowances to attract and retain talent, she added.

To aid in upskilling, Jobstreet launched its seekMAX digital platform last year, which provides training resources and enables a community for knowledge sharing across industries. — Miguel Hanz L. Antivola