Entity-aware features for personalized job search ranking

A system comprising:

• a computer readable medium having instructions stored there on, which, when executed by a processor, cause the system to:
• obtain a plurality of member profiles in a social networking service, each member profile identifying a member and listing one or more skills the corresponding member has explicitly added to the member profile, the one or more skills indicating a proficiency by the member in the corresponding skill;
• form a members-skills matrix, wherein each cell in the matrix is assigned a value based on whether the corresponding member has the corresponding skill;
• compute the dot product of the members matrix and the skills matrix;
• compute the dot product of the members matrix and the skills matrix;
• use the dot product to identify one or more latent skills of a first member of the social networking service;
• augment a first digitally stored member profile for the first member with the one or more latent skills by combining the one or more latent skills with explicit skills listed in the first digitally, stored member profile for purposes of one or more searches that utilize member skills as an input variable;
• and
• return results from the one or more searches, the results based on the explicit skills listed in the first digitally stored member profile and the one or more latent skills of the first member.

A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium comprising instructions, which when implemented by one or more machines, cause the one or more machines to perform operations comprising:

• obtaining a plurality of member profiles in a social networking service, each member profile identifying a member and listing one or more skills the corresponding member has explicitly added to the member profile, the one or more skills indicating a proficiency by the member in the corresponding skill;
• forming a members-skills matrix, wherein each cell in the matrix is assigned a value based on whether the corresponding member has the corresponding skill;
• computing the dot product of the members matrix and the skills matrix;
• computing the dot product of the members matrix and the skills matrix;
• using the dot product to identify one or more latent skills of a first member of the social networking service;
• augmenting a first digitally stored member profile for the first member with the one or more latent skills by combining the one or more latent skills with explicit skills listed in the first digitally stored member profile for purposes of one or more searches that utilize member skills as an input variable;
• and
• returning results from the one or more searches, the results based on the explicit skills listed in the first digitally stored member profile and the one or more latent skills of the first member.