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Need a Job? Need a Worker? It’s a Matching Problem

While the recent recession re-determined many American lifestyles, some companies saw the increasing amount of lost jobs as an opportunity to both help those who lost their jobs and promote their company in the process. One such company is Tworky.com. Tworky is a website designed to help the challenges a working person might encounter. While other websites such as LinkedIn draw their basis on the connections from person to person, Tworky’s focus is on addressing real life issues that come up at the office and allowing others to participate in all of giving advice to others, sharing company concerns, asking for advice about a particular subject, advertising their business or trade, uploading a business card, hosting a webinar, etc.

Yet all these job-related accessibilities and free promotions are not useful to someone who does not have a job. In response to the recession’s loss of jobs, Tworky added a section to their website that allows for a person with no job to fill out a short and succinct information page that summarizes skills and experience. In parallel, Tworky allows for an employer to fill out a similar short and succinct page that advertises a need for particular skills and experience. Both the person in need of a job and employer can search for what they need, but Tworky goes further. In filling out the page that describes skills and experience, Tworky attempts to match employers to those in search of a job. Very evidently, Tworky uses a textbook example of a matching problem.

Tworky models a person unemployed and an employer as a bipartite graph. If we call an employer x in the set of employers X, and a person unemployed y in the set of people unemployed looking for a job Y, then on one side of the graph is all Xs and on the other is all Ys. Each x in X and y in Y is a node, and any edge connecting them represents a skill of someone unemployed matched with the needed skill an employer wants. Since no employer is in search of another employer, there will be no edge from any x in X to another x in X. Likewise, nothing in the set Y will connect with anything else in the set Y because nobody unemployed will be in search of another unemployed person.

This matching problem is then not difficult to imagine. All Tworky has to do is model each employer as a node with specific traits that connect to someone unemployed (another node) with similar traits. It is not likely that Tworky ever finds a perfect matching; for that to occur, each employer would have to be matched to a job seeker. But Tworky’s endeavor is to try to find as close to a matching as it can. Some nodes in Y (job seekers) will have many connections to nodes in X (employers) if a certain y has many skills. Likewise, an employer searching for someone very broad will have many edges connecting to nodes in Y.

It is interesting to see how landmarks in history can affect matching problems such as this one. With the recession, there must have been an influx in the amount of nodes in Y (job seekers), but no large influx in the amount of nodes in X (employers). Tworky has not made public how many nodes are in each set, so it cannot be determined if there is a constricting set, but it is probable to imagine that if the recession made a large amount of nodes in Y, then there would be a constricted set because the amount of nodes in Y would be more than the amount of nodes in X, and no matching could thus be formed.

Still, it is always a good thing to have websites such as Tworky.com that not only facilitate pairing a person in need of a job with an employer, but to have the rest of the website dedicated to assisting those already in the workforce. The United States is a nation of hard workers, after all.

website: http://www.tworky.com/career-party.htm

-Royce

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