Finding the right person, in their own words

Watch: Introduction to AI Matching (2 min 29 sec)

Refugees bring skills, experience and ambition. Connecting that talent to the right opportunity is where it gets hard, and often the words are the obstacle. A bookkeeper in Kabul and a finance clerk in Amman may both be right for the same accounts role, but if neither used the word the recruiter typed, neither one surfaces.

Open Pathway Collective has built AI matching into Talent Catalog, the open source platform that Talent Beyond Boundaries uses to connect skilled refugees with work around the world, and where around 155,000 people have registered. The first parts of it are live now.

How it works

Start from a job and Talent Catalog reads the description, pulls out the skills and sets up the search. Or describe the experience you need in your own words. Either way it then searches two ways at once: for the specific skills you asked for, and for candidates whose experience means something similar, however they happened to describe it. A slider decides the balance between the two, so you can hold tight to exact requirements on a specialist role, or open it up to find people you would otherwise miss. What comes back is a ranked shortlist, and every filter you already use still applies on top of it.

The short video above walks through it properly.

Built responsibly

AI helps people find and understand candidates. People make the decisions.

Matching looks at skills and work experience, and ranks candidates by how that experience fits the role in front of you, and by nothing else. Where AI generates text about a candidate, it is produced only when someone asks for it, clearly labelled as AI generated, and limited to the job requirements and the candidate’s own work history, never their name, contact details or personal information. AI can make mistakes, so it is a guide and never a substitute for human judgement. Because Talent Catalog is open source, how all of this works can be inspected by anyone, including the organisations whose candidates depend on it.

What comes next

This is the first release of the matching engine, and there is more to come: the search will get simpler to run, and match quality will keep being tuned against real use.

Job matching is the beginning rather than the end. The same technology will power the Global Refugee Network, matching refugee talent to opportunities beyond jobs and connecting people with the services that help them build their futures.

AI matching was designed and built by Open Pathway Collective, and released in Talent Catalog version 2.6.0. Talent Catalog is open source, originally created by Talent Beyond Boundaries and now maintained by Open Pathway Collective. Technical release notes: talent-catalog.github.io/talentcatalog/v260