Guest Post | JDX: A schema for Job Data Exchange

A Schema for Job Data Exchange

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation has recently proposed a modernized schema for job postings based on the work of HR Open and Schema.org, the Job Data Exchange (JDX) JobSchema+. It is hoped JDX JobSchema+ will not just facilitate the exchange of data relevant to jobs, but will do so in a way that helps bridge the various other standards used by relevant systems. The aim of JDX is to improve the usefulness of job data including:

• Signalling around jobs
• Addressing such questions as:
  • What jobs are available in which geographic areas?
  • What are the requirements for working in these jobs?
  • What are the rewards? What are the career paths?

This information needs to be communicated not just between employers and their recruitment partners and to potential job applicants, but also to education and training providers, so that they can create learning opportunities that provide their students with skills that are valuable in their future careers.

Job seekers empowered with greater quantity and quality of job data through job postings may secure better-fitting employment faster and for longer duration due to improved matching. Preventing wasted time and hardship may be particularly impactful for populations whose job searches are less well-resourced and those for whom limited flexibility increases their dependence on job details which are often missing, such as schedule, exact location, and security clearance requirement. These are among the properties that JDX provides employers the opportunity to include for easy and quick identification by all.

In short, the data should be available to anyone involved in the talent pipeline. This broad scope poses a problem that JDX also seeks to address: different systems within the talent pipeline data ecosystem use different data standards so how can we ensure that the signalling is intelligible across the whole ecosystem?

The starting point for JDX was two of the most widely used data standards relevant to describing jobs: HR Open Standards Recruiting standard, part of the foremost suite of standards covering all aspects of the HR sector and the schema.org JobPosting schema, which is used to make data on web pages accessible to search engines, notably Google’s Job Search. These, and an analysis of the information required around jobs, job descriptions and job postings, their relationships to other entities such as organizations, competencies, credentials, experience and so on, were modelled in RDF to create a vocabulary of classes, properties, and concept schemes that can be used to create data.

The full data model, which can be accessed on GitHub, is quite extensive: the description of jobs that JDX enables goes well beyond what is required for a job posting advertising a vacancy. A subset of the full model comprising those terms useful for job postings was selected for pilot testing, and this is available in a more accessible form on the Chamber Foundation’s website and is documented on the Job Data Exchange website. The results of the data analysis, modelling and piloting were then fed back into the HR Open and schema.org standards that were used as a starting point.

JDX in HR Open Standards

As with schema.org, JDX highlighted some issues that are within the scope of the HROpen Standards Recruiting standard, and the aim is to incorporate the lessons learnt from JDX into that standard. However, the Recruiting standard is part of the inter-linked suite of specifications that HROpen maintains across all aspects of the HR domain, and these standards are in plain JSON, a record-based format specified through JSON-Schema files not RDF Schema. This makes integration of new terms and modelling approaches from JDX into HROpen more complicated than was the case with schema.org. As a first step the property definitions have been translated into JSON-Schema, and partially integrated into the suite of HROpen standards, however some of the structures, for example for describing Organizations, were significantly different to how other HROpen standards treat the same types of entity, and so these were kept separate. The plan for the next phase is to further integrate JDX into the existing standards, enhance the use cases and documentation and include RDF, JSON Schema, and XML XSD.

Want to learn more? Read Phil Barker's full blog post HERE.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phil Barker offers consultancy in the area of technology to enhance learning, and information systems for education. He aids in the support of sharing, discovery and selection of appropriate learning resources. Much of the work he does is with Cetis LLP, a cooperative consultancy for innovation in educational technology.