Indeed: Rob Williams – “We generate more than 24 TB of data every day”

Indeed is a search engine website founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan in 2004. This company serves in over 60 countries and in 28 languages. In 2010, it made a record of passing a competitor famous job portal and become the highest-traffic job website in the US.  The site collects jobs from millions of websites, companies, staffing firms, and job boards. Their main source of revenue coming by selling premium job searching plans and resume writing services. Also, they take premium charges from the employer company for posting the jobs in their portal. In 2011, Indeed become easier to use and job seeker can directly register on Indeed platform and contact with the recruiter.

A Team of Recruitment Tech has taken the interview which is posted as an article below-

In October, an interview held with Indeed’s evangelist Rob Williams who explained at Unleash Amsterdam about how is Indeed uses AI to match candidates with jobs. The algorithm of indeed by using 24 terabytes of data help the people to get the desired matching job. He further said we collect over 25 terabytes of data a day. Put another way if you remember the old-fashioned telephone directories that we perhaps use when we’re a little bit younger we were to get 1 million of those and then times that by 2 that would be approximately 24 terabytes of data.

Rob, you just did a presentation and in the demo at certainly sheesh what was it about?

Yes, it was only 20 minutes but what I wanted to try and do enable all the recruiters here to very quickly understand the power of job search from a jobseeker’s perspective and then as employers how we can ensure that we manage to get the maximum number of job seekers to apply to our jobs rather than our talent competitors. You were also talking about artificial intelligence and I don’t think so quickly of Indeed when you talk about AI.

Can you explain how do you use it?

So once we talked about how the job search works, what I did is give a sneak peek into the Indeed algorithm and you know kind of what levers an employer can pull to maximize the chance of their jobs appearing to a relevant job seeker. When I think about artificial intelligence that indeed or machine learning I’m thinking about our matching technology how do we match an appropriate job to a job seeker based on a very simple input the what and the where? What do I want to do where do I want to do it how does our algorithm ensure that we match the very best jobs to that job seeker and so I endeavored to explain to the audience how by ensuring you have really great content. In other words, your job is relevant such as job title and importantly great keywords in that job description and also if you’re investing in indeed how you can influence the time components.

Very simply if your jobs being on Indeed a short amount of time it’s got a high probability of being presented to the job seeker in our search engine results page or the job search listings there’s been on there a long time it’s less likely to be presented so how is an employer can I trump a time. Will things like deep learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and sometimes it is the same, will it change the way people find jobs or recruiters will recruit? Absolutely if you think Indeed has now been having the same model for twelve years our matching technology is very different today than it was twelve years ago and that’s all through firstly some you know some great engineers in our Austin office. But also as our platform grows and as we get access to more data we can better match jobseekers to great jobs.

To put it into context, we collect over 25 terabytes of data a day but put another way. He again repeats, If we remember that old fashioned telephone directories again, that we perhaps use when we’re a little bit younger, we need to get 1 million of that data and then multiplies by 2 and that will still less in the count but that would be approximately 24 terabytes of data. So a lot of data we’re using to better understand how job seekers are finding great opportunities. New technology to get in-depth insight and all those data? Absolutely so and one of the things I often talk about is when a job seeker first comes on Indeed and they type in the Watson aware our algorithm is as much looking at what they’re not than clicking into as much as to which jobs they are clicking into. So in subsequent pages and in subsequent searches, we can fine-tune almost in real-time the results that that job seeker sees, and again it’s all about better matching the right job to the right job seeker at the right time.

What are the other kind of technologies you using or will you be using with Indeed?

If I look forward to 2019, assessments are a big focus for Indeed. Assessments are a technology we’ve developed not only to improve the efficiency of hiring particularly high-volume hiring if we think perhaps of an example of recruiting for a multilingual call center. How can you efficiently recruit tens, the twenties, hundreds of people to staff that call center from many different markets in many different languages. Assessments help us do that but also assessments help us take bias out of the process so when recruiters are interviewing we all come with natural bias by using technology at the start of the process we believe we can create short lifts that remove some of that bias. So we use our technology our machine learning our AI to assess someone’s language skills for a particular role in a particular call center for argument sake and then that recruiter can then take them through the process from there on in.

This is how Rob Williams explained how and why Indeed collects over 24 terabytes of data for perfect matching of the jobs to the candidates.