Recommendation system for job coaches

Abstract: For any unemployed person in Sweden that is looking for a job, the most common place they can turn to is the Swedish Public Employment Service, also known as Arbetsförmedlingen, where they can register to get help with the job search process. Occasionally, in order to land an employment, the person might require extra guidance and education, Arbetsförmedlingen outsource this education to external companies called providers where each person gets assigned a coach that can assist them in achieving an employment quicker. Given the current labour market data, can the data be used to help optimize and speed up the job search process? To try and help optimize the process, the labour market data was inserted into a graph database, using the database, a recommendation system was built which uses different methods to perform each recommendation. The recommendations can be used by a provider to assist them in assigning coaches to newly registered participants as well as recommending activities. The performance of each recommendation method was evaluated using a statistic measure. While the user-created methods had acceptable performance, the overall best performing recommendation method was collaborative filtering. However, there are definitely some potential for the user-created method, and given some additional testing and tuning, the methods can surely outperform the collaborative filtering method. In addition, expanding the database by adding more data would positively affect the recommendations as well.