An interactive search platform for job advertisements based on faceted search and visualization techniques

• Main Author: Hee, Jun Yi
• Other Authors: Anwitaman Datta
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66623
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Online job portals provide a platform for job seekers to search for employment opportunities through job advertisements. In order for the users to perform the search request, these websites provide keyword search or advanced search to specify multiple criteria such as salary range, location and industry. However, there is often a lack in the ability to further refine the search results easily based on the various attributes which are already present in the advertisements. This project aims to solve this problem by proposing an interactive search platform for job advertisements which utilizes faceted search and visualization techniques. By crawling Jobs Bank, an online job portal set up by the Singapore Ministry of Manpower, job advertisements are collected over a period of over 5 months for the purpose of populating the search engine. The collected data subsequently undergo pre-processing and analysis before they are indexed using Elasticsearch, a full-text search server. The final implementation makes use of the indexed data to showcase the proposed search engine in the form of a web application. The search engine is designed to allow the end users to find relevant jobs through a combination of features, including keyword search, faceted filters and similarity search. A visualization tool is also developed based on the same techniques and technologies to display charts based on the attributes in the advertisements. While the tool is still in its early stages, its architecture which focuses on extensibility and reusability would expedite its future developments. It is envisioned that the tool would help researchers and policy-makers to gain insights into the job market and local economic situations. The search engine and the visualization tool are accessible at https://fyp.heejunyi.me/job/search and https://fyp.heejunyi.me/chart respectively.