A machine learning-based human resources recruitment system for business process management: using LSA, BERT and SVM

Purpose Studies on mining text and generating intelligence on human resource documents are rare. This research aims to use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to facilitate the employee selection process through latent semantic analysis (LSA), bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) and support vector machines (SVM). The research also compares the performance of different machine learning, text vectorization and sampling approaches on the human resource (HR) resume data. Design/methodology/approach LSA and BERT are used to discover and understand the hidden patterns from a textual resume dataset, and SVM is applied to build the screening model and improve performance. Findings Based on the results of this study, LSA and BERT are proved useful in retrieving critical topics, and SVM can optimize the prediction model performance with the help of cross-validation and variable selection strategies. Research limitations/implications The technique and its empirical conclusions provide a practical, theoretical basis and reference for HR research. Practical implications The novel methods proposed in the study can assist HR practitioners in designing and improving their existing recruitment process. The topic detection techniques used in the study provide HR practitioners insights to identify the skill set of a particular recruiting position. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first study that uses LSA, BERT, SVM and other machine learning models in human resource management and resume classification. Compared with the existing machine learning-based resume screening system, the proposed system can provide more interpretable insights for HR professionals to understand the recommendation results through the topics extracted from the resumes. The findings of this study can also help organizations to find a better and effective approach for resume screening and evaluation.