People queue to enter a jobcentre in east London in July 2016. People queue to enter a jobcentre in east London in July 2016. In my six months of looking for work, I've found that from fake ads to AI screening software, the search is more soul-destroying than ever A s I apply for yet another job, I look at the company's website for context. I've now read their "what we do" section four or five times, and I have a problem - I can't figure out what they do. There are two possibilities here.

Data from online job postings are difficult to access and are not built in a standard or transparent manner. Data included in the standard taxonomy and occupational information database (O*NET) are updated infrequently and based on small survey samples. We adopt O*NET as a framework for building natural language processing tools that extract structured information from job postings. We publish the Job Ad Analysis Toolkit (JAAT), a collection of open-source tools built for this purpose, and demonstrate its reliability and accuracy in out-of-sample and LLM-as-a-Judge testing. We extract more than 10 billion data points from more than 155 million online job ads provided by the National Labor Exchange (NLx) Research Hub, including O*NET tasks, occupation codes, tools, and technologies, as well as wages, skills, industry, and more features. We describe the construction of a dataset of occupation, state, and industry level features aggregated by monthly active jobs from 2015 - 2025. We illustrate the potential for research and future uses in education and workforce development.

Labor market analysis relies on extracting insights from job advertisements, which provide valuable yet unstructured information on job titles and corresponding skill requirements. While state-of-the-art methods for skill extraction achieve strong performance, they depend on large language models (LLMs), which are computationally expensive and slow. In this paper, we propose \textbf{ConTeXT-match}, a novel contrastive learning approach with token-level attention that is well-suited for the extreme multi-label classification task of skill classification. \textbf{ConTeXT-match} significantly improves skill extraction efficiency and performance, achieving state-of-the-art results with a lightweight bi-encoder model. To support robust evaluation, we introduce \textbf{Skill-XL}, a new benchmark with exhaustive, sentence-level skill annotations that explicitly address the redundancy in the large label space. Finally, we present \textbf{JobBERT V2}, an improved job title normalization model that leverages extracted skills to produce high-quality job title representations. Experiments demonstrate that our models are efficient, accurate, and scalable, making them ideal for large-scale, real-time labor market analysis.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), is being rapidly deployed in recruitment and for candidate shortlisting. We audit several mid-sized open-source LLMs for gender bias using a dataset of 332,044 real-world online job postings. For each posting, we prompt the model to recommend whether an equally qualified male or female candidate should receive an interview callback. We find that most models tend to favor men, especially for higher-wage roles. Mapping job descriptions to the Standard Occupational Classification system, we find lower callback rates for women in male-dominated occupations and higher rates in female-associated ones, indicating occupational segregation. A comprehensive analysis of linguistic features in job ads reveals strong alignment of model recommendations with traditional gender stereotypes. To examine the role of recruiter identity, we steer model behavior by infusing Big Five personality traits and simulating the perspectives of historical figures. We find that less agreeable personas reduce stereotyping, consistent with an agreeableness bias in LLMs. Our findings highlight how AI-driven hiring may perpetuate biases in the labor market and have implications for fairness and diversity within firms.

Accurately modeling the relationships between skills is a crucial part of human resources processes such as recruitment and employee development. Yet, no benchmarks exist to evaluate such methods directly. We construct and release SkillMatch, a benchmark for the task of skill relatedness, based on expert knowledge mining from millions of job ads. Additionally, we propose a scalable self-supervised learning technique to adapt a Sentence-BERT model based on skill co-occurrence in job ads. This new method greatly surpasses traditional models for skill relatedness as measured on SkillMatch. By releasing SkillMatch publicly, we aim to contribute a foundation for research towards increased accuracy and transparency of skill-based recommendation systems.

We introduce a fairness-aware dataset for job recommendation in advertising, designed to foster research in algorithmic fairness within real-world scenarios. It was collected and prepared to comply with privacy standards and business confidentiality. An additional challenge is the lack of access to protected user attributes such as gender, for which we propose a solution to obtain a proxy estimate. Despite being anonymized and including a proxy for a sensitive attribute, our dataset preserves predictive power and maintains a realistic and challenging benchmark. This dataset addresses a significant gap in the availability of fairness-focused resources for high-impact domains like advertising -- the actual impact being having access or not to precious employment opportunities, where balancing fairness and utility is a common industrial challenge. We also explore various stages in the advertising process where unfairness can occur and introduce a method to compute a fair utility metric for the job recommendations in online systems case from a biased dataset. Experimental evaluations of bias mitigation techniques on the released dataset demonstrate potential improvements in fairness and the associated trade-offs with utility.

The field of text classification, a fundamental subdomain within the natural language processing (NLP) field of machine learning (ML), has witnessed a remarkable evolution in recent years. With the exponential increase in textual data generated across various domains, the need for effective text classification methods has become increasingly pressing. Text classification is the task of assigning predefined labels or categories to textual documents based on their content. This task holds immense importance across various industries and applications, including but not limited to sentiment analysis, spam detection, content recommendation, and news classification. The ability to automatically organize and categorize large volumes of text can streamline information retrieval, enhance decision-making processes, and enable efficient data management. Traditional text classification methods rely on well-established techniques such as term frequency - inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) representations and traditional ML algorithms. TF-IDF measures the importance of each term within a document relative to a corpus of documents, providing a numerical representation of textual data.

The fast adoption of new technologies forces companies to continuously adapt their operations making it harder to predict workforce requirements. Several recent studies have attempted to predict the emergence of new roles and skills in the labour market from online job ads. This paper aims to present a novel ontology linking business transformation initiatives to occupations and an approach to automatically populating it by leveraging embeddings extracted from job ads and Wikipedia pages on business transformation and emerging technologies topics. To our knowledge, no previous research explicitly links business transformation initiatives, like the adoption of new technologies or the entry into new markets, to the roles needed. Our approach successfully matches occupations to transformation initiatives under ten different scenarios, five linked to technology adoption and five related to business. This framework presents an innovative approach to guide enterprises and educational institutions on the workforce requirements for specific business transformation initiatives.

Artificial intelligence jobs took the longest to fill across tech roles in the railway industry in Q2 2022 according to Railway Technology's analysis of millions of online job advertisements. Artificial intelligence job ads at these companies were online for an average of 47 days before being taken offline during the quarter, meaning they took 16 days longer to fill than an average job at the same companies. The figure for Q2 2022 was an increase compared to the equivalent figure a year earlier, indicating that the required skillset for these roles has become harder to find in the past year. Artificial intelligence is one of the topics that GlobalData, our parent company and from whom the data for this article is taken, have identified as being a key disruptive technology force facing companies in the coming years. Companies that excel and invest in these areas now are thought to be better prepared for the future business landscape and better equipped to survive unforeseen challenges.