Searching Smarter: What is Intelligent Ranking?

Finding the best candidates can be daunting. You might be looking on job boards, social media or working with the native search in your ATS or CRM. Then, you’re left to look through pages of results. Your eyes glaze over as you review hundreds of resumes, trying to find the right candidate for the job you’re filling. It’s tedious, time-consuming and demanding. 

But, what if there was an easier way?

With Daxtra, there is. We’ve built a smarter way to search with our Intelligent Ranking. By harnessing the power of machine learning, natural language processing and large language models, Daxtra Search Nexus can find and intelligently rank candidates based on the context of their skills and experience. 

This means recruiters can more easily find the most relevant candidates for the job—right at the top of their search results—so they can focus their energy on building connections, helping clients fill roles and introducing candidates to their dream jobs. 

Read on as we explain Daxtra’s intelligent ranking system, explore how it utilizes AI and skills taxonomies to rank candidates and discuss how the tool helps recruiters find the best candidates fast.

What is Intelligent Ranking?

Intelligent ranking is the unique process Daxtra Search Nexus uses to evaluate, rank and score candidates in a recruiter’s search results. Our AI search and match technology identifies which candidates are the best match for your query, and Intelligent Ranking analyzes the profiles of each candidate, ranking them so that the candidate that best matches your query is at the top of every search. 

But how does Intelligent Ranking work? There are three main components to the process: 

1. Understanding Context 
2. Finding Top Talent 
3. Ranking Results

Let’s break each of those down: 

1. Understanding Context

Daxtra Search Nexus understands the context of resume terms as a human recruiter would. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze a candidate’s resume. It intelligently recognizes the content and the context it appears in. 

Plus, unlike other search tools, Daxtra Search Nexus doesn’t rely on term frequency as its sole ranking mechanism - so mentioning a phrase multiple times doesn’t necessarily mean a candidate will rank higher in the search for that phrase. 

In practice, that means Daxtra Search Nexus can understand the meaning of each word on a resume, allowing it to distinguish between employer names and skills, for example. 

For example, consider a recruiter searching for the terms “project manager.” The terms “project” and “manager” might appear several times on a resume. But, Daxtra Search Nexus can distinguish between those words appearing in a job title, employer name or work history description.   

Because those terms are present in a candidate’s work history, Daxtra Search Nexus takes into account the dates for each position—analyzing how long a candidate has used project management skills or experience, and whether they were used in a current or previous job. 

Plus, if the job description requests “excellent project management skills,” Daxtra Search Nexus can recognize that as a relevant search term, understanding that the term “excellent” infers a highly rated, skilled candidate. 

This means that Daxtra’s search results are highly precise—which helps recruiters source more relevant candidates, more easily. 

Daxtra Search Nexus also leverages machine learning (an application of AI that helps computers learn) and terms expansion (including related terms and aliases for search terms used) to cut through the noise and find more of the most relevant candidates. 

Here’s how term expansion works:

• First, Daxtra Search Nexus searches for the exact word in your query. For example, something like “software developer” or “forklift driver.”
• Then, it expands on those words in your query with machine learning, suggesting related skills, job titles, qualifications, companies, languages and industries. For the above example, it might expand the “software developer” query to include alternate job titles “software engineer,” “programmer” or “solutions architect.” Similarly, a query for a forklift driver might expand to also include “FLT operator” and other related terms. 

Term expansion works thanks to Daxtra’s built-in general skills taxonomy—a database of the most popular skills (and their semantic aliases) that are parsed from resumes by our Daxtra Parser engine. 

With the power of that skills taxonomy, Daxtra Search Nexus understands that certain jobs are functionally the same and require the same kinds of skills, even if the specific titles of those jobs differ. It recognizes that resumes containing those job titles typically share similar skills or experience. Then, term expansion does the hard work of identifying those equivalent terms for you. This results in highly relevant and customizable search results. 

While Daxtra’s semantic search means recruiters don’t need to rely on Boolean, Daxtra Search Nexus does support a variety of Boolean queries—so recruiters who prefer to type out their on queries can still leverage those methods. 

“With Boolean search, if you search for “java developer,” you might find a candidate who is currently a C++ developer but used Java in College. But with Daxtra Search Nexus, you can search “Java Developer” as a job title, and candidates with that title will be returned. From there, you can use filtering to find candidates where that is their current job title—it is very accurate. Daxtra Search Nexus gives us scalpel-like precision.” – Brian Cunningham, Allen Recruitment

3. Intelligent Ranking of Search Results

After Search Nexus finds precise candidate matches, intelligent ranking comes into play. 

Our technology ranks candidates based on how qualified they are—building on the context and relevance of what you use to search (whether that’s a search query, job-to-candidate matching or candidate-to-candidate matching). 

For example: imagine you’re looking for a candidate with prior experience as a CEO. With traditional search, a candidate with experience as an executive assistant who mentions “CEO” in their resume several times would rank highly - even if their resume actually says they worked with a CEO, assisted a CEO, and reported to a CEO in their last three roles. Intelligent ranking would recognize this, and rank a candidate with 10 years of experience as a CEO higher than the executive assistant—even if the CEO only mentions “CEO” on their resume once. 

Daxtra also scores each candidate to give recruiters insight into why each candidate received their ranking. Candidates receive a score out of five stars for each skill, indicating their relevance to the search query. Hovering over this ranking shows what specific values contributed to that candidate's overall match scores. 

This means that the first result will always be the most relevant, best-matched candidate—and you’ll also see a ranking to indicate why they received their particular score and rank, and how they measure up to your search terms. 

“If Daxtra Search Nexus says a candidate is number one, that candidate is number one. You don’t have to search through hundreds of candidates. It’s like magic. But, you also have the ability to see starred rankings of candidates to provide transparency in the ranking process, so you know which candidates are a good match and why—that is huge.” – Brian Cunningham, Allen Recruitment

How does Intelligent Ranking help recruiters? 

Finding the right candidate for a job can require time, effort and expertise from recruiters. With Intelligent Ranking, recruiters can spend less time and effort on sourcing. Instead, they can see the highest-ranked candidates from each source without logging in and out of each site individually. This gives time back to use for interviewing, building relationships with candidates and filling more roles for their clients. 

• Recruiters can easily see the best candidate on the first page of search results, potentially saving hours that would otherwise be spent combing through hundreds of candidates across dozens of pages of results.
  This also means recruiters can reduce the risk of missing a great candidate who’s further back in results—it’s like finding the right webpage as your first Google result. 
  
  
• Daxtra Search Nexus suggests additional search terms from both Daxtra’s native skills taxonomy and any existing taxonomy in your database. This means your results are tailored for your database, your line of business and real candidate data — not just terms that are vaguely related to the job you’re trying to fill. The end result? More accurate searches and higher candidate relevancy for each search. 
  
  
• Daxtra Search Nexus’ post-filtering technology can do even more of the heavy lifting for recruiters - it recognizes similarities in your search results and displays the most frequent items in each category to help you refine your query.  For example, it could display the top 10 most common job titles, locations or skills present in your search results. This ultimately makes sourcing more efficient, so you can spend more time focusing on connecting people to jobs - and less time scrolling through endless candidate search results. 

Searching Smarter with Daxtra

Streamlining recruiting is essential in a competitive recruitment landscape. By leveraging smarter searching with tools like Intelligent Ranking, Daxtra can help recruiters save time, source top talent quickly, and maximize the capabilities of your CRM. 

Learn more about how Daxtra can make a difference for you by booking a demo with our team.