TheLadders Blog

Last Thursday evening TheLadders hosted the latest New York Semantic Web Meetup, a gathering of local technology professionals specializing in various areas of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval and Information Extraction. The members are especially focused on issues having to do with markup that enables better extraction and retrieval through entity identification and linking of various types. The so-called “semantic web” community is basically a consortium devoted to data standards suited to various use-cases in industry – for example, we have a special markup for Resume data known as Human Resources eXtensible Markup Language (HRXML). This is arguably a “semantic web” markup despite the fact that it does not represent “linked data” by itself but could certainly enable applications that did. The “semantic” part is really about the inferences that can be drawn through utilizing the linked data.

A big issue in getting search and information retrieval to the “next level” is data normalization. This was a theme throughout the evening of talks and one that is central to improving everything from job matches to expanding triple-stores.

Marco Neumann is the organizer of the group and does an excellent job of gathering attendees and attracting top-notch talent from around the area as speakers. It was a pleasure to host this Meetup and the reviews were some of the best that recent meetups have had. Go Ladders!!!

Click here for the presentation ›

Leslie Barrett is the Senior Search Architect at TheLadders. Leslie has worked making enterprise search software for companies large and small for many years. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University in Computational Linguistics, is a frequent speaker on issues in Search and Sentiment Analysis and is the author of over 20 academic papers on language technology. 

It’s been a busy summer here at The Ladders. Over the past five-plus months, we have been working hard to extend our product offering to service all professionals during their job search. The Product, Technology and Customer Support teams approached the project with two core objectives:

• Simplify the job search for everyone. We constantly hear from job seekers that the process of finding the right job has gotten harder, not easier. In fact, because the Internet has made it simple to publish jobs, it has created a cluttered and confusing landscape for job seekers. Using a mixture of people and technology, we sort through millions of jobs a year to make sure real jobs are presented to our members. Now that we are serving all professionals, we have taken our screening process a step further to sort jobs into the correct pay scale.
• Efficiently surface relevant candidates to recruiters. The pressures and time constraints of a recruiter’s day demand that only relevant candidates are delivered to their desktop. We have been doing this for years to help recruiters hire $100K+ candidates. This experience has taught us a lot about the technology and human processes required to sort candidates for recruiters. We have taken that learning and extended it to cover all professional job seekers. Thus recruiters can now expect to see candidates correctly segmented by function and pay scale.

We are very proud of the online tools we have developed. In fact, we want to get them in the hands of all professional job seekers and recruiters. To this end, over the coming months, we will be making some of our functionality free in a new basic product. Simply go to www.theladders.com and give it a shot. I hope you enjoy the experience.

Eric Burd

Eric Burd is Vice President of Product for TheLadders.com. He brings extensive experience in the management of product marketing and development to the company. At TheLadders, he leads the product and creative teams in the development and execution of the long-term, customer-focused vision of the company.