HeadHunter: Job Seekers Skill Calculator

The main articles are:

• HRM Classification
• Functionality of HRM systems

2023: "Skill Calculator" product launch

The Russian online recruiting platform has hh.ru launched a skills calculator. With it, IT professionals can understand their real "value" in the market. Thanks to the hh.ru Skills Calculator, you can now find out what offer and salaries they can apply for here and now. At the same time, those who are already inside the profession will be given tips on how to succeed in it - they will learn more and get it. This was announced on August 11, 2023 by HeadHunter.

To create the Calculator, the Skills team in the hh.ru described and verified 46 IT professions and 310 skills in them, approved grades and checked  salary data. The hh.ru skills calculator is a large analytical market slice packaged in a smart model capable of predicting income according to the candidate's competency level. It shows data that coincide as much as possible  with the sectoral realities. Because, in achieving the relevance of the results of the calculator, the project team in its implementation went from the methodological base: for the project they collected information about all the skills needed in IT, studied the level of salaries, compiled descriptions of professions, processed and checked an impressive array of data.

When studying the demand for a product, we took into account the increased demand for skills in professions. Of course,  they include IT. In 2023, there is an increased demand for the transition to this industry and development within it, so the focus of the first launch fell on the field of information technology. For various reasons: to compensate for the lack of IT professionals  in the country; to tell those who are not yet  in IT what exactly you need to know and be able to do in order to earn money in this area; to show those who are already working in this direction that there is no development ceiling and how they can grow in salary, said Marina Dorokhova, expert of the "Skills" direction at the hh.ru.

The skill calculator hh.ru also created  in order for designers, programmers, developers, analysts and all other IT specialties to  have benchmarks, a kind of map by which they could pave a personal path to professional peaks and understand exactly what they are paid and for what they can pay even more.

Competence cards of most IT professions are well "marked," because the skills of IT specialists are described as technologies. SQL - it is SQL: everyone knows what it is and when it should be indicated in the resume.  And there's no problem getting that out of the data. Thus, most of the professions were "marked." We updated this , and also validated the frequency of mentions of skills - we found the threshold at which we consider the mention of a skill more random than systemic in this profession, added Anastasia Lobanova, methodologist of the "Skills" direction in hh.ru.

 Embedding allowed to collect many similar professional roles in clusters - a run of their names through a neural network capable of distinguishing words close in meaning.

To assess skills in money, we created a model that predicts an applicant's salary by their skills. At this stage, we were interested not so much in predicting the model of a person's salary as in what monetary contribution this or that skill makes to the final predicted value. We considered this importance of each skill within each professional role as some kind of monetary estimate for the calculator. As a result, they came to the format when there is a base salary for a specialist model , and all skills increase its size, noted Petr Chuikov, Team Lead Data Scientist of the DS team of the applicant vertical in hh.ru.

The calculator makes it possible to add up the existing skills according to the principle of the designer and clearly understand how such a combination of them is evaluated by employers in money. And if you are  somewhere in the middle of your dream salary, the program leads to it step by step, suggesting which skills should be improved, how this will help income evolve and where to learn better - using links to specific educational platforms and courses of proven partners.

The calculator allows you to "equalize" the salary market according to the expectations of applicants and employers. There are many cases where the employer is faced with inflated salary expectations of the applicant , statistics show a large number of inconsistencies between salary parties. And our functionality is such a mediator of the market, helping the applicant audience to objectively assess the current cost of work and their talent. This speeds up and simplifies matchmaking, where one is looking for an employee for one of the positions and the other for work, and everyone has their own conditions, summarized Marina Dorokhova, expert of the "Skills" direction on the hh.ru.

 The plans of the product developers are to scale the calculator for all professions, within which you can distinguish clear qualification competencies and determine their value.