2292744 - The job search logic - Recruiting Management

How does the search work on Recruiting Management career sites?

SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management

This Knowledge Base Article explains the job search logic in Recruiting Management. If you are searching for more information regarding Recruiting Marketing search logic, please refer to the following Knowledge Base Article: 2091005

Recruiting Search Methods:

• "Keywords Search": Keywords text field under Job Search provides the ability to search the Job Title and Description using keywords and phrases.
• "Search using filters": Using various drop down filters (standard as well custom), which are configured in the job template you can narrow down the search results.
• "Job Requisition Id Search": By specifying a "Req ID" you can look for a particular job requisition.
• "Posted within days": By specifying this criterion you can look for jobs that have been posted recently.

Search Logic

When the user specifies the mix of search criteria above it will match all or none of criteria. The following are search characters and terms which will provide more advance capabilities in targeting searches. These can be used on the keywords fields in job search, in the Recruiting module. Search Logic – is based on a multi-dimensional search algorithm, which includes a ranking prioritization of results based on criteria occurrence, frequency, stemming, and relativities of the keywords criteria. When you specify keywords criteria it is searching the job title and description.

• Occurrence: is the most influential aspect of search logic. Eg) Jobs will be ranked higher if they match more or all of the search words specified in the keywords field.
• Frequency: the number of times a search criterion is found on the Candidate. Eg) Jobs with the word “Engineer” in their title/description multiple times will be ranked higher than people with fewer references to the word “Engineer”.
• Relevancy: includes a variety of searching logic, which helps to find superior matches. The uniqueness of criteria matches provides a relevancy boast to the results. Eg) 'Microplasticology' is given more weight in ranking results than the word 'project', due to its uniqueness. The location of search criteria to one another provides a relevancy boost to the results. Eg) ‘Engineer Vice President’ is ranked higher than Candidates with both the word ‘Engineer’ and ‘Vice President’ located distantly in the resume/CV.

Wildcard Characters

Wildcards are characters which can be used as search criteria to narrow or expand alternatives in the search results.

• Question Mark Character (?) – the ? question mark character can be used when searching for terms where a single character is not known, or is variable in the results desired. When the exact spelling of a name is not known, then the question mark character can be used to identify people with any character in that location. Eg) Searching for Thomps?n will return people named Thompson and Thompsen.
• Multiple Character (*) – the * asterisk character can be used as a wildcard when searching for terms, where any number of the characters are not known. Using the asterisk will results in the greatest diversity of matches. When the search needs to include a wide variety of results, the asterisk is the best option. E.g.) to locate jobs which have the terms certificate, certification, certified, cert. -you can search cert* which will return results with any of these terms in their profile/resume/cv.
• Capitalization – to search on the specific capitalization of characters, use the “” quotation marks around the letter(s). The default behavior of a search does not treat capitalized letters any different than non capitalized ones. If, however, the capitalization is important to the search results, then use quotation marks around the specific letter. E.g.) Searching on the term Success”F”actors will rank results higher where the letter F is capitalized, than ones where it is not (e.g. Successfactors, successfactors).
• Fuzzy searches (~) – to do a fuzzy logic search use the tilde ~ symbol at the end of a single term. Fuzzy logic provides assistive search logic to find similar spellings. Eg) Search for a term similar in spelling to roam use a tilde at the end of the word “roam~”. This search will find terms like foam, roam, roams, room, road, roads, etc.
• Phrase searching ("") – to search for more than one word in a specific order, use ‘quotation marks around the full phrase. A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "hello world", will rank that full phrase higher in results. Eg) Searching for the exact phrase "Project Manager” will only result in top Candidates which have the exact phrase Project Manager.

Search Terms

When searching for terms, it is possible to add the AND and OR operators to the criteria statement. Note! These operators must be capitalized as shown:

SearchCritieria1 AND SearchCriteria2 and not… SearchCritieria1 and SearchCriteria2

These operators will act as follows on the search:

• OR Logic (default behavior) -searches using multiple words, will be treated as an "OR" expression. In other words, the engine will look for anyone who has Term A OR Term B. The result set will be the combination of people with Term A, Term B, as well as people with both Term A and Term B in job title and description. E.g.) Sales OR Marketing = results in jobs with Sales and Marketing, only Sales, and only Marketing in their job title). Note, using the OR term in search criteria can be used, but it is not necessary.
• AND Logic (specific behavior) -searches using multiple words connected by "AND" will be treated as a single search criteria (e.g. Sales AND Marketing). In other words, the search engine will return to the top of the result those jobs who have BOTH words in her/his profile/resume. This will result in very smaller search results, because 'both' conditions must be met. (e.g. Russia AND USA = only people with both the word Russia and USA in their job title and description) The word AND must be expressed in the search field between the two word

Stopwords:

Some words appear so frequently in a language, that their usage will render a search useless, since the uniqueness of the results are lost. Because of this, most search engines contain 'stopwords' -which are not indexed, nor used in any search. For example, the word 'the' appears in most books over 10,000 times in a typical book -so searching for pages with the word 'the' will return virtually every page in a book.

The SuccessFactors' search engine also ignores stopwords. The following is a partial list of stopwords, in English, which are currently ignored in searches: an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, and with.

Additional notes:

• Case Insensitivity: Searches will not consider the letter case, unless the letter is surrounded by quotation marks (e.g. "S"uccess"F"actors ).
• Character Wildcards cannot start the search criteria. The wildcard characters of asterisk, question mark, and tilde cannot start the search criteria. E.g.) *person is not an accepted search term.

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