The Matching Scarcity Problem: When recommenders do not connect the edges in recruitment services

Abstract Connecting candidates and jobs to promote real placement opportunities is one of the most impacting and challenging scenarios for Recommender Systems (RSs). A major concern when building RSs for recruitment services is ensuring placement opportunities for all candidates and jobs as soon as possible, avoiding financial losses for both sides. We refer to these scenarios where candidates or jobs suffer from the absence of matching in the system as the Matching Scarcity Problem (MaSP). This paper introduces the MaSP, discussing the reasons we consider it as a recurring threat to recruitment services and presenting novel strategies to identify, characterize, and mitigate the MaSP on real scenarios. Experimental assessments on real data from Catho, the leading recruitment company in Latin America, evinced that curricula tend to be more poorly written than job descriptions, exhibiting several irrelevant pieces of information. Replacing these pieces properly by useful ones reduces up to 50% the number of curricula and jobs that suffer from MaSP.