How Monster.com's 6Sense Search Affects Jobseekers

Monster.com's 6Sense technology for recruiters, which officially launched Monday but which was used in the promotion to find Alicia Keys' head blogger, is good news for jobseekers too. Maybe. The semantic search technology is being touted by the company as an easier way for hiring managers to pull out the best applicants from a given pool: "Applicant Matching is designed to save recruiters even more time by automatically reviewing candidates applying to a job, finding top matches, highlighting key relevant skills based on the job matching criteria; while also providing side-by-side summary comparisons of the top matches" is how the company puts it in a press release. But we wondered: how does this change jobseeking online? Back when Applicant Tracking Systems were rolled out for the first time, they changed the way people write their resumes. Suddenly keywords were deathly important. What will 6sense do? We spoke with Monster VP of PR Matthew Henson about what this new tool means. "What 6sense does is use technology to make sure it's identifying the context of words," Henson explained. "If someone was looking for someone who had attended Harvard, in the past, [search engines] could pull up people who lived on Harvard Street." 6Sense supposedly won't do that, which means...what? Henson pointed to the Alicia Keys contest as an example of the tech at work. The job posting received 8500 applications, but out of the 75 resumes ultimately sent to Keys, only about a third of them came from applicants. The other 50 were candidates that 6Sense located in Monster's resume database. So theoretically, if hunting for resumes suddenly becomes a less painful proposition thanks to smarter search, people who have their resumes up-to-date in Monster will be more likely to be recruited for a given job. All that means is that you should keep your resume active and current on Monster, which Monster would have loved for you to do even before 6Sense. What about a magic bullet to make sure you're picked out of the millions of resumes in Monster's database? Henson said: "You can't alter your resume to game technology." But we're betting that as semantic search becomes more widespread, someone will figure out a way.

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How Monster.com's 6Sense Search Affects Jobseekers

Rachel Kaufman

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Rachel Kaufman