A collective intelligence approach to measuring and visualizing individual expertise

The evaluation of professional competencies based on the analysis of textual CVs is a challenging endeavor, particularly when a large amount of profiles have to be examined. As a result, identifying potential candidates for a given job or project role may be a costly and time consuming process. Besides, people use different criteria to describe their experiences and to measure the competencies acquired, and this results in no assurance that the best person is being selected. This article presents a contribution aimed to synthesize the description and standardize the assessment of professional expertise described within traditional CVs. An integrated collective intelligence approach is presented which is composed by a methodology, an algorithm and a software tool, aimed to produce graphical and comparable skill charts which can speed up the selection process in global-scale recruitment campaigns, large corporate or project management scenarios, with relevant impact in the areas of professional social networking.