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WHY: Inspiration & Motivation

We believe that in order to deal with big labour market disruptions like in the Covid19 economic crisis, or in the churn needed during the upcoming energy transition, a massive and large scale matching on skills and competences is needed to reassess, reassign, retrain the workforce and relocate know how between industries and companies. Focus on skills and competences is also needed to have new multidisciplinary thinking and collaboration in order to solve the new problems we are faced with.

The corona crisis is currently provoking an economic and social slump of unknown magnitude, duration and impact. As part of that:

• Companies and organisations are suffering since they do not have enough work for their people and/or not enough income to pay their staff
• Employees are short in work or even without work, facing huge financial difficulties and support from governments are helping only partially
• Freelancers are short in work and income

On the other hand there are Industries and sectors desperately in the need of additional people, resources or even specific skills or competencies. There are very obvious ones such as healthcare but there a lot of not so obvious areas or projects run by any kind of organisation.

As corona has a temporary effect, companies would not like to lose their employees and employees would not like to lose their jobs. All would like to be back into the pre-crisis situation after the crisis is over. How can we bring both the demand and the surplus side together on a large scale for any sector, industry or niche to support that?

We believe that matching on skills and competencies rather than a CV or job experience only, will provide job opportunities and projects to people, beyond their current scope and industries. This may also create a more fulfilling work life, engage and develop people during and after this crisis.

We have the technology already available and the capability to fight the Corona impact in Europe. We really would like to make this contribution to avoid unemployment, loss of income for many people and maybe even make this an opportunity for personal development.

Mission

Our mission is to make the world of work transparent and to empower both individual users and organisations to make better, faster and more effective decisions with help of an AI assistant. With Jobliebe we want to contribute by matching the shifting demands on one hand with the corona induced surpluses in the labour market on the other hand. It will for instance help organisations fix their capacity unbalance by exchanging staff temporarily or provide unemployed people new opportunities.

Companies can save their payroll expenses for resources they currently don’t need and people can save their income with a temporary or new job. When projects and/or companies with growing demands are sufficiently staffed with people or have sufficient access to skills, they can grow faster and are better able to provide their services or products to the market. We assume that people mostly are exchanged temporarily and that it is ensured that they will return to their old jobs, as long as it continues to exist. We should avoid that people move permanently, as this will pose an additional threat to the companies that are already hit hard by the crisis. This would destroy their organisation. Jobliebe should not only provide a smart AI based solution to bring both sides together but also general support on how to do this legally in each country.

The opportunity of this crisis is that Jobliebe shows growth opportunities. Jobliebe makes employees more employable and accelerates organisational development. Jobliebe facilitates this through matching work, projects, assignments with available talent from inside and outside the organisation.

Why classical platforms don’t do the job?

There are many helpful initiatives to bring both sides together, mainly focused on certain sectors such as healthcare and agriculture or regional. There is a much broader need in many other sectors or in specific niches.

The classical platforms and solutions are too restricted. They are mostly manual or at best only match on keywords. This reduces the scale and scope of these solutions. Moreover they are not able to make matches beyond traditional paths. Another limitation is the dominant advertisement business model. This model is not about making the market transparent and taking away the search and match friction. It is about creating reach in an intransparent marketplace.

A full profile with focus on skills and competences, including desires and ambition, tells much more. It’s a reflection of someone's career or intention of a job. Our deep matching technology matches complete candidate profiles with complete job profiles instead of keyword search. It enriches profiles and vacancies, to be matched better and can “read between the lines”. Focussing on skills and competences offers the opportunity to match jobs and talents who would never have found each other in a classical system since none of the sides would have known what to search for. Our system searches in a far more wider field which benefits candidates and organisations.

The team, who we are

We are Vivian, Han, Chris, Frank, Simone, Steven, Max and Peter, located in the Netherlands and Germany. Most of us are working for 8vance, a Dutch tech StartUp having developed its own AI based Deep Matching engine. Like many other companies 8vance also faced the problem that our standard products are of no use any more in Corona times. Since we have the technology and a platform which is near to a solution to help individuals and companies to re-allocate work and people based on skills and competences. We decided to develop the concept of Jobliebe to support the society. The 8vance Platform is the base for Jobliebe but it needed some adoptions and additions and transformed into an open platform.

Who we can help

As the situation varies from country to country the type of customers for Jobliebe also may be different per EU-member state:

1. Employees
• who are unemployed or
• who are in short term work with lower income or
• who have time left next to their regular working hours
2. Companies with not enough work for their employees
3. Freelancers
4. Companies who have the need of additional people
5. Companies in the need of special skills or competencies for projects or assignments

How does Jobliebe work?

Jobliebe is a platform with an AI based matching engine at its core. It has two different user interfaces, one for employers and one for talents where both can input data. Furthermore it has API’s to import vacancies as well as profiles. Talents and jobs will be autonomously matched based on rich profile data as will be explained in the next alinea. Both sides can see either their personal job or talent market, in a graphical radar view or a list view. Matching is also based on skills and competences, rather than only job or function titles. Companies and talents will see a much richer match list in comparison to the classical way of searching.

The data science behind the 8vance matching engine as used in Jobliebe 8vance has developed a matching engine / rich data platform that combines expert systems, large data sets, a big algorithm stack and ontologies with general big data infrastructure. The core of the system is a large data model of each person and each vacancy or project, like a “digital twin”. We named this profile the DNA-profile. The DNA is normalised to our own statistical ontologies, existing of; skills and competence ontologies, functions and experiences ontologies, education ontologies, industry ontologies and a few smaller categories. We enhance this DNA statistically or with neural networks. This means that for instance highly likely skills and competences will be added to profiles with a certain weighting factor depending on the likelihood (Model- and context-based enhancement). The algorithms for this are trained on a large (anonymised) training dataset that 8vance has collected over the last 5 years. This is a set of nearly 80 million classified and normalised career profiles and about 15 million classified and normalised vacancy profiles.

The algorithm stack includes: Linguistic networks, Deep learning networks for classification, Decay functions for decaying old skills and experiences, Word clouds, Expert system based on recruiter input, Reinforcement learning, Suggestion models and profile enrichment as mentioned above, Abstract DNA Clustering to find career patterns, Several classifiers for skills, function titles and more, DNA generation, Feedback learning based on system usage, Career path analysis, Matching, Prediction models, Psychological profiling, Harvesting, Parsing and 6 taxonomies in 4 languages with English as pivot language (248 Industries, 33,000 Functions, 1,600 Educations, 10,000 Skills, Competences & Knowledge Fields, Countries, Languages). We have made mapping and translation tables to most international standards like ISCO/ESCO, ONET and few others. Other qualification model is based on the European Qualification Framework and the European Competence Framework.

A SCREENCAP OF THE WEB APPLICATION, demonstrating the functionality from the talent side of the live product: link

Go to Market

A strategy for each country is required because each country has different regulations and also Corona support measures to support companies or individuals differ per country. To have a good start it is important to already have the whole Job market available on Jobliebe. For the Dutch and German market the Job market data (Job ads) are available via partners. This solves the chicken and egg problem for the launch. It is important to spread the message and to have support for this project in media and social media to ramp up the number of users in a short period of time. For social media a good network and support from people with a high reach (influencers) is important.

Project status

Jobliebe is the name of a recent Covid19 initiative of 8vance and 18 partners from the Netherlands. Jobliebe is not completely developed from scratch but is based on an existing and proven technology and platform developed by 8vance. Jobliebe is ready to be rolled out in English, French, German and Dutch. The System is hosted at Amazon in Ireland, the backend is coded in Python and the frontend in an Angular build Progressive Web App, everything automatically scalable.

In the #EUvsVirus Hackathon we focussed on sharpening the message, challenging the concept, getting to know the differences by country and finding sources for job ads by country and enlarging our European network. After 4 weeks of hard work Jobliebe went live in the Netherlands last Friday the 24th of April 2020, 17.00h, to fight against the Corona impact.

Note: Any additional country requires additional efforts and data such as job ads. It also requires local legal knowledge, local communication and marketing capacity and local connection to important stakeholders like governments, unions and industry organisations.

Business model

We plan that Jobliebe is to be provided for free during this Covid19 crisis, to help people and companies. After the crisis there are various business models possible based on the assumption that companies will pay for the match to find the right people, pay per match, a simple seat pricing or a charge per job posted.

Autonomous matching will increase transparency and reduce the cost of a successful match to a fraction of the current costs. This will reduce the market friction and mismatch significantly and new business models based on rich data based, will prevail.

Jobliebe can and will be connected to the 8vance products Inside and Matching As a Service after the crisis and will increase the value for their users as an integrated personal career development and management system.

What's next for Jobliebe - What do we need to keep people working

In order to be effective in fighting this crisis a system like Jobliebe needs data and users from both sides. These are companies in the need of people as well as people looking for work or volunteers ready to help. We will need support in spreading the message:

• Promotional support
• Marketing support or money to pay for marketing
• Media support
• Governmental and/or political support
• Support from governmental unemployment agencies

The general situation is the same in the whole of Europe but there are slight differences between the countries. We will need support from each country to understand their specialities and design in the necessary adjustments in order to support them. For each country we would need partners to provide us with the data, more specific jobs ads and freelance jobs.

During this hackathon the community helped us find public job data sets and data parties that we can contact and analyse in the upcoming days. This is a good way forward to further train our algorithms, parsers and classifiers on international data in multiple languages. We got in touch with other projects with similar ideas and are willing to collaborate.

The crisis is now and the society is suffering now. It is important to bring Jobliebe to the people in each country now or as soon as possible to have a positive impact. We are ready to go!

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• angular.js
• django
• django-rest-framework
• docker
• python
• typescript