Arca24 wins a tender of Innosuisse to enhance its AI

Corporate News | 03.23.2023

Thanks to a collaborative research project with the Idiap research institute in Martigny and the University of Fribourg, over the next 2 years Arca24 will enhance the accuracy of its Artificial Intelligence, developed in six languages, bringing benefits to the international HR sector

Innosuisse is the Swiss innovation promotion agency that supports Swiss organizations in their R&D activities. It’s mainly concerned with supporting innovative projects between companies and research institutions.
Through innovation projects and networking activities, this federal public law institute specifically promotes cooperation between science and the market.

As part of the promotion of national projects, Arca24 attended and won a tender called Impulse program: Swiss Innovation Power with the SEM24 project (also known as Skillskan).

The current environment

The SEM24 project  is placed within the recruitment world and attempts to answer the present needs of the market: the high volume of CVs to be analyzed with consequent loss of time, performance and precision.
The existing semantic engine (SEM) developed by Arca24 is already able to extract relevant information from a resume and automatically match candidates with job ads.
However, the current system presents two challenges: the accuracy of the software and the human intervention always needed to keep the system up-to-date.

Project Abstracts

To address these latters, the Skillskan project will develop a solution for automatically matching candidates’ resumes to job ads that incorporates insights from the Human Resource Management (HRM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) fields.
The semantic engine will identify a wider range of relevant skills, including soft skills, improving matching, significantly reducing manual effort and the risk that the system will exclude suitable candidates.
The optimization will be done for the six languages already managed by the semantic engine: Italian, English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. A thoughtful choice to give international resonance to the entire project.

Partnership

The project will be carried out partnership with:

• Prof. Lonneke van der Plas is head of the Computation, Cognition and Language group al the Idiap research institute in martigny, and Associate Professor in language Technology in affiliation with the University of Malta.
• Dr. Bertrand Audrin is assistant professor in Human Resource management and Organizational Behavior at the EHT Business School and at UniDistance. His is an alliliated researcher at the Chair of Human Resources and Organization from the University of Fribourg.

The Future

The project will enable a step forward for the entire HR industry.
It is reasonable to assume that within a few years the use of AI will be in common use in talent acquisition. We will select, screen, and evaluate using this technology.

Arca24 will improve its competitiveness in the market, but recruiters will have a better performing ATS that can reduce unconscious selection bias and support diversity and inclusion in talent acquisition processes.

There will also be benefits for candidates. Already currently, Arca24’s AI simplifies the application process by reading the CV in different formats (pdf, jpeg, word, etc.) and automatically filling out the application form, which saves time and energy.
In addition, the development of the Skillskan project will improve the automatic recognition of the candidate’s experience and the assignment of professional tags that identify the candidate. It will thus be easier for job seekers to be found and be known for their skills.