Monster.com’s new semantic search platform SeeMore uses algorithms and analytics to hone in on the best human capital. But will it need a human touch too?

Monster.com adds 25,000 new resumes to its database each day—a new one is added every 2.3 seconds. Add to that the resumes on other job boards, internal corporate databases, and social networks such as LinkedIn—and an unemployment rate topping 9.2 percent. Employers are potentially wading through thousands of resumes for any one given job opening.

Despite continued high levels of unemployment, shortages of key skills remains the top talent acquisition pressure among organizations, asserts Mollie Lombardi, research director, Human Capital Management at Aberdeen Group.

So how best to find those talented needles in massive haystacks of both virtual and paper resumes? Meet SeeMore, the world’s first cloud-based semantic search and analytics platform that allows companies to manage their own resume databases regardless of where those resumes originate.

Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, president and CEO of Monster Worldwide, the creators of SeeMore, says the platform will centralize all of the info and make it easy to search by relevant skills and experience –- not just by keyword and score results. This enables companies to be more precise about their talent matching needs, reduce the time and cost of acquiring and managing talent, and improve the quality of hires.

Yet SeeMore is hitting the market when other technology and media brands are improving their algorithms and analytics by adding human input. Netflix, Pandora, MTV’s Music Maker and RiseSmart’s Transition Concierge are examples of products that use a blend of human input and algorithms. Darko Dejanovic. EVP, Global CIO and head of product for Monster Worldwide tells Fast Company that his company recognized recruiters’ needs for more effective searches a few years ago and the company’s 6Sense Semantic Search does bring a human understanding of context and meaning.

Traditional search technologies couldn’t determine if, for example, a candidate had Oracle software experience, previously worked at Oracle, or played an oracle in a university theater troupe. SeeMore brings the power of our 6Sense search to the cloud environment and applies it to talent pools beyond Monster, he explains.

But just like songs, there are hundreds of thousands of individuals out there waiting to be discovered. Will it ever be possible to vet all of the relevant candidates? Dejanovic says conceptually SeeMore is a starting point. Other than the idea of finding things that are similar to what you know, there are only a few interesting similarities. There is a significant difference in the application and complexity of the problem trying to be solved by Pandora and Monster’s 6Sense. Pandora simply uses a classification system to tag and match songs using a fairly narrow set of criteria. We have built an entire ontology and taxonomy that deals with human capital.

Dejanovic says SeeMore is like other SaaS services. We host, provide, and manage the search service which is accessed by the company through an interface or API. The customer has control over who can access that data. With a small capital investment and low maintenance costs, ultimately it’s up to the company to kick it in gear. Says Dejanovic, In a race to the best talent before the competition, speed and precision matter. In other words, hiring managers, start your (search) engines.