My Dad Uses Math & You Should Too!

By Lauren Milgram

Background Info

• Beyond.com is the “Google” of job search.• Helps people improve their resume and find a

job• Also helps companies advertise available jobs

and connect with the people

How do they use math?

• Sales• Finance• Customer Service• Marketing• Technology

Sales and Finance

• distribute customer leads• assign territories• Make sure that they are making money• Calculate commissions on new advertising

deals and renewals from existing clients

Customer Service

• “…understanding how long the average call takes and how many calls we receive each day helps us assess how many customer service representatives we need to answer phones.”

• Avoid putting people on hold• But not too many people on customer service

Marketing• customer surveys, compare to the competition, or recommend

pricing discounts• based on understanding, from a math perspective, the range by

percentage or numbers in which we fall for some specific analysis of our business. Whether it’s a customer satisfaction survey or comparing pricing against our competition math is involved in the decisions we make.

• In email marketing, we often test a new message to 5% of our audience and measure the open and click rates on that campaign and compare it to our baseline metrics. If the new campaign outperforms our baseline then we will retire the old email and declare the new email as our “winner” and our new baseline.

Technology• Beyond currently holds two patents on its matching and

scoring technology• Our scoring algorithm is bi-directional, meaning that

information from both the job seeker and the employer are taken into consideration when attempting to match

• The matching algorithm also uses other attributes like salary, distance between job/job seeker as well as user engagement with this posting and/or other postings

• All of this information is weighted based on past engagement of our audience and results in a score. The higher the score, the more likely the match so when showing a list of 25 jobs we display the highest scores first.

Technology (cont.)• search for a term like “Project Manager” in New Haven

CT and only display all jobs within 25 miles of New Haven CT, but at the same time give more weight to those jobs that are closer in along a radius of the Latitude and Longitude of New Haven.

• Although the frequency of the occurrence of the words “Project” and “Manager” give a higher score for a specific posting, the postings from Yale University display first because they are located in New Haven CT and a boost was given based on shortest distance.

Mapping Jobs• Using math, latitude and longitude we can create a heat

map of job postings along the east coast and understand the concentration of postings in certain locations.

• darker locations show more availability of jobs in those areas

Example with Javascript

var distance = 14 milesif (distance < 20)

{display:all;console.log(“This job is near you!");}

else{display:none;}

Yay :)