This KB dives into how Job Feed and Job Search work for freelancers and how to identify if there are issues or it's working as expected along with best practices on how to guide freelancers on the usage.
How it Works
Job Feed
- If FL has Saved Searches and Categories, My Feed shows jobs only from Saved Searches (not Categories nor Faiss Recommendations)
- If FL doesn't have Saved Searches but has Categories, My Feed takes Jobs from Categories and Faiss Recommendations
What’s Saved Searches?
- On My Feed > Advanced Search > fill in keywords > click “search” > they can continue to customize by the filters on the left and then click “Save search” if they wish to save these search results > & finally they can name their search as shown here
- Once they save these results, when moving back to their Find Work page, their My Feed will show this off as a Saved Search here however they titled it
- If they ever decide they no longer want that Saved Search, they can click the ellipses and “Edit saved searches” shown here
- They can click the trash can icon and click “Done” to remove
What’s Categories?
- On My Feed > they can see their categories here and they can change them by clicking on the pencil icon
- The “Categories” for FL Search are what we call “L2 Categories” or subcategories
- An L1 is a main category (e.g. Legal), an L2 gets a bit more specific (e.g. Corporate Law), and an L3 gets even more specific (e.g. Business & Corporate Law)
- When a FL chooses their Categories, they select from an L1 which leads to their L2 - the L2 is the one their search results will feed off of e.g. when a FL chooses “Corporate Law”, they’d do this here, choosing “Legal” for their L1 and “Corporate Law” as their L2
WHY does this all matter? We’re getting there young Padawan, we promise!
- When a CL posts a job and they choose their category, it’s an L3 category e.g. see here
- Let’s say our FL sets one of their categories to “Corporate Law” e.g. see here
- When our FL clicks on their Corporate Law category and clicks on a job, they may see something a little different at the top, like this
- That “Business & Corporate Law” L3 category they see on the top is what the CL chose when posting their job. The reason the FL sees this job is because they selected “Corporate Law” L2 category for their searches. “Business & Corporate Law” lives within “Corporate Law”.
How do we know this, though?! The FL is telling us that it’s pulling up jobs not related to their category...
- Check out this handy dandy Ontology database! (Internal Only)
- What does Ontology mean? A set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them
- Click Legal (the main category the FL chose, their L1) > In the L2 section, click “Corporate Law”, the category the FL set for themself > we can see here what L3 is connected to Corporate Law and those are the jobs that will pop up for the FL
What’s Faiss Recommendations?
- This is essentially a super fancy techy type algorithm that we don’t entirely need to know or understand as this is where Tech Support comes in if we need help, but it’s good for us to know that there is an algorithm in process nonetheless. The goal of a recommendation system is to recommend items to predict the possibility that a user would favour an item based on their prior interaction with the system (Internal Info)
Pro Tip: improve My Feed results
- Advise FLs to create ‘Saved Searches’ (see above on how to go about that)
- A ‘Saved Search' uses FL skills as Keywords
- To get better results and have the search engine look for phrases (short sentence composed for many words), recommend using quotation marks, e.g."Content Writing", the search engine will look for that entire phrase instead of each word individually
a. Without quotation marks
b. With quotation marks (narrows search)
How to Identify Issues
Before escalating tickets to Tech Support, we should ensure this is an issue vs. working by design. Based on the understanding from “How it Works”:
- If a FL has Saved Searches, remember My Feed shows jobs from the FL's Saved Searches only
- If they want to look under a specific category, they’ll need to click on that category to search under those results OR remove all their Saved Searches (saved searches will override all other searches) which will then allow Categories and the Faiss Recommendations to take over
- Perhaps they have a Saved Search that they no longer want, they can delete that entirely so their feed no longer pulls results for that search
- If FL does not have Saved Searches, remember My Feed shows jobs from the FL’s Categories (if they have any) and the Faiss Recommendations
- They may need to update their categories a bit if they aren’t seeing jobs they’d hope to see
- If they feel the jobs they’re seeing are incorrect based on the category they’ve chosen, you can verify this with the fancy Ontology database! You can pull up their main category > L2 category to see which L3 categories fall within that. If the L3 you see there is on the top of the job posts, then this is correct!
- If a job is showcased that’s not from Categories, then it’s from the algorithm, Faiss Recommendations. If jobs come up that seem like the don’t align with the categories FLs are looking for work under (check with the Ontology database to see where those job L3’s lie within the L2/L1 categories), then this is a situation where it’s OK to reach out to TS:
- Send Tech Support a ticket under “Task” with as much detail as possible (e.g. giving the job post link the FL is seeing and the info about the types of jobs they’re looking for, etc.) and ask to ask this excluded from the Faiss Recommendations
- If FL has no Saved Searches or set Categories, the system pulls info and this shows within their Job Feed based on an algorithm, the Faiss Recommendations.
- If jobs come up that seem like they don’t align with the categories FLs are looking for work under (check with the Ontology database to see where those job L3’s lie within the L2/L1 categories), then this is a situation where it’s OK to reach out to TS:
- Send Tech Support a ticket under “Question” with as much detail as possible (SS showing Job on FL’s feed + Job post URL + Job post’s L3 category + FL’s L2 categories) and ask to have this excluded from the Faiss Recommendations