Real-World Expertise Retrieval: The Information Seeking Behaviour of Recruitment Professionals

Recruitment professionals perform complex search tasks in order to find candidates that match client job briefs. In completing these tasks, they have to contend with many core Information Retrieval (IR) challenges such as query formulation and refinement and results evaluation. However, despite these and other similarities with more established information professions such as patent lawyers and healthcare librarians, this community has been largely overlooked in IR research. This paper presents results of a survey of recruitment professionals, investigating their information seeking behaviour and needs regarding IR systems and applications.