NEXTGENRESUME: ENHANCING RESUME

CLASSIFICATION WITH LARGE LANGUAGE

MODELS
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Bhavya Srujana Chinda, Chittineni Mounika,

K Jyothsna Devi
Dandamudi Naga Kavya, Done Chandanasri
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Prasad V. Potluri Siddhartha Institute of Technology Prasad V. Potluri Siddhartha Institute of Technology
Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India
[email protected]

Abstract - Automated resume classification has become models like SVM and Naïve Bayes struggle with word
increasingly important as recruitment processes increasingly rely semantics, resulting in inaccurate categorization [3].
on intensive resume analysis. However, resumes comes in doc and Transformer-based models like BERT and DistilBERT embed
pdf format, where pdf format is used often, requiring a reliable
text with deep contextual embeddings due to these restrictions
PDF extraction method to standardize data for processing. Rule-
based extraction and keyword matching algorithms difficult to
[4]. Named Entity Recognition (NER) extracts names,
generalize across resume formats, hence they sometimes produce education, talents, and experience from unstructured resumes.
inferior results. The proposed approach uses Large Language Deep learning and NER improve hiring by classifying and
Model(LLM) for its ability to understand and process natural ranking applicants [5]. Keyword-centric candidate-job
language, addresses the challenge of obtaining organized résumé compatibility methods are less sophisticated and accurate than
information and connecting it with job descriptions. The biggest cosinesimilarity[6]. This research identifies resumes using
challenges are managing multiple formats, acquiring experience powerful NLP and transformer models. DistilBERt
data, dates and firm names, and guaranteeing Resume-Job embeddings are created from ordered resume data by PDF
Description(JD) relevance. We use transformer-based
processing, NER, and regular expression extraction. Job
embeddings for Resume-JD alignment, customized Named Entity
Recognition (NER) for structured data extraction, and seekers benefit from cosine similarity comparisons of resumes
pdfplumber for PDF extraction. Similarity evaluates resumes for and job descriptions. Our automated shortlisting streamlines
relevance, whereas LLM model DistilBERT contextualizes hiring and applicant selection. The rest of this work is
resumes and job descriptions. Challenges include addressing a organized as follows: Section 2 reviews current techniques
typical resume forms, improving the NER model for entity and their literature flaws. Resume organization is covered in
recognition, and optimizing embeddings for computational Section 3 job and problem design. Part 4 covers the method
performance. The proposed process involves preparing job and solution. Results and analysis in Section 5 support our
descriptions and resumes, extracting relevant sections using approach. Section 6 concludes analyses and discusses future
Named Entity Recognition (NER) and regular expressions,
tokenizing the language, embedding using DistilBERT, and
research.
scoring matches using cosine similarity. Our resume-job
description matching accuracy of 92.4% was far better than II. LITERATURE Review
before. Our method automates candidate shortlisting, saving time The increasing demand for efficient recruiting has
in recruitment. resulted in extensive research on automated resume
Index Terms - PDF extractor, CV-JD matching, Named classification, therefore addressing the arduous and biased
Entity Recognition (NER), DistilBert, Cosine similarity hand screening process. Natural language processing (NLP)
and machine learning (ML) have been used to improve
I. INTRODUCTION accuracy and efficiency of classification. Early systems
The rapid growth of online hiring has flooded many struggled with semantic understanding and different formats
job positions with resumes. Because resumes vary in style and and depended on keyword matching and rule-based
contain so much unstructured content, organizations struggle approaches [7]. Using manual characteristics and statistical
to evaluate, classify, and choose prospects. Traditional hiring analysis, models such as SVM and Naïve Bayes enhanced
methods like manual screening or keyword filtering waste resume categorization; nonetheless, domain-specific issues
time and select unqualified candidates [1][2]. continued [8]. Recent work uses transformer models such as
Recently developed NLP and ML can automate resume BERT in text categorization [9][10] leveraging contextual
classification and boost hiring productivity. Traditional knowledge to outperform conventional ML approaches. While
cosine similarity helps in job fit rating [12], combining deep
*
learning with rule-based methods improves structured data Name (Years)
extraction from resumes [11]. Future research on better Python,
training, transformer tuning, and data integration [13] will Chaitanya 5 JNTUK M.Tech.
NLP, SQL
help to address still unresolved issues in format variations, Java, ML,
entity recognition, and efficiency notwithstanding Deepthi 3 AU B.Tech
TensorFlow
advancement. The suggested system seeks to accomplish the Karthik SQL, C++ 4 ANU Ph.D.
following objectives: The suggested DistilBERT and Machine Learning pipeline
1. Enhanced Resume Matching Precision: Attain superior for Automated Resume Screening includes Data Pre-
categorization accuracy compared to conventional machine processing, Feature Extraction, Model Training, and
learning methodologies. Performance Evaluation. Below is the comprehensive solution
2. Diminished Manual Labor: Automate the process of resume method:
shortlisting, hence conserving time for HR personnel. i) Data Collection
3. Scalability: Efficiently manage substantial quantities of  The dataset comprises structured and unstructured
resumes. resumes gathered from many job recruitment sources
4. Resilience to Format Variability: Efficiently process
and carefully categorized into pertinent job
resumes in various formats, guaranteeing significant
adaptability. classifications.
 The collection comprises text-based resumes
III. PROPOSED Work featuring attributes including Name, Skills,
The proposed method for the classification of resumes Experience, Education, and Certifications [14, 15].
and the matching of candidates with jobs is comprised of four  The labeled data is divided into Training (80%) and
essential stages: (1) Preprocessing, (2) Feature Extraction, (3) Testing (20%) sets.
Embedding (4) Cosine similarity calculation.
The flow of the execution is as follows: ii) Text Cleaning and Pre-processing
 Convert all text to lowercase for consistency.
 Eliminating Stop-words: Frequently used terms such
as “the,” “is,” and “in” that do not aid in
classification are discarded.
 Lemmatization: Words are transformed into their
base form (e.g., "running" → "run").
 Elimination of Special Characters and Numbers:
Symbols, punctuation, and numerical digits are
removed to minimize extraneous noise.
 Tokenization: Transform resumes into discrete words
or phrases for model analysis.
Fig.1 Proposed workflow model
A. Preprocessing Table 3 presents the example of pre-processed
Pre-processing is a crucial step that transforms the raw data resume text.
into a clean and structured format for efficient matching. The
following steps are applied to resumes and job descriptions: TABLE II
Sample Pre-processed Resume Text
 Text Normalization: Convert all text to lowercase and
remove unnecessary whitespace.
Pre-processed Resume
 Special Character Removal: Eliminate punctuation, URLs, Raw Resume Text
Text
emails, and other non-alphanumeric characters.
"Experienced Software "experienced software
 Stop word Removal: Filter out frequently occurring but
Engineer skilled in engineer skill python java
uninformative words (e.g., "the", "is", "and").
Python, Java, and AI." ai"
 Tokenization: Convert textual data into meaningful units
(tokens) for further processing. B. Feature Extraction
 Short-form Expansion: Convert abbreviations to their full Feature extraction converts unstructured resumes into
forms to standardize terminology. organized data with crucial attributes like skills, work
These pre-processing steps ensure consistency and experience, and education. These steps are taken:
uniformity, allowing for accurate semantic matching of 1. Use pdfplumber to extract raw text from resumes while
resumes with job descriptions as shown in Table 1 maintaining structural integrity.
TABLE I 2. Regex: Regular Expressions Select and extract work
Sample Pre-processed Resume Data experience, education, and contact information.
Candidate Skills Experience University Degree 3. Named Entity Recognition (NER): Extract structured items
like Name, Education (degree, university, year of graduation), 4. Similarity Computation: Compute the cosine similarity
Work Experience (Company, Duration, Role) and Skills between resume embeddings and job description
(Technical and Soft) using a custom-trained NER model. embeddings to determine relevance scores.
The embeddings effectively map resumes and job descriptions
We use DistilBERT embeddings to extract meaningful into a high-dimensional space, where semantically similar
representations from resumes: documents (i.e., relevant resumes for a job role) have higher
i) DistilBERT Tokenization similarity scores.

 Each resume is segmented into word parts and processed D. Cosine Similarity Calculation
by the DistilBERT model. The Cosine Similarity Calculation is a technique used to
 The resultant CLS token representation serves as the assess the degree of similarity between the vectors of a CV
and a job description thereby ascertaining their fit for the post.
feature vector.
Other methods similar to cosine similarity for resume
ii) Feature Vector Representation classification include - Jaccard Similarity, Euclidean
Distance, Manhattan Distance and Pearson Correlation.
 DistilBERT generates a 768-dimensional feature Cosine similarity is often preferred because it focuses on the
vector for each resume. orientation (angle) of vectors rather than magnitude, making it
 These vectors are used as input to the machine ideal for text data where word frequency vectors are sparse
learning classifier. and high-dimensional. However, alternatives like Jaccard can
be useful for binary data, while Euclidean distance may work
Three machine learning models are trained and compared [16, better for dense, low-dimensional feature spaces. To assess the
17] are Logistic Regression, Random Forest Classifier and effectiveness of the proposed system, we define threshold-
Support Vector Machine (SVM).The extracted DistilBERT based classification:
embeddings are fed into these classifiers for resume
classification. The model training method is as follows:  Resume Relevance Score: A resume is considered a
match if the cosine similarity with the job description
exceeds a predefined threshold (e.g., 0.85).
i) Model Hyper-parameter Tuning
 Top-N Candidate Selection: The system ranks
resumes based on similarity scores and selects the top
Model hyperparameter tuning is used for DistilBERT training N candidates for further evaluation.
to optimize its performance by finding the best combination of
parameters (e.g., learning rate, batch size) that minimize loss
and improve accuracy. It ensures the model generalizes well to IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
unseen data while maintaining efficiency. Grid Search is used This section presents the experimental results and discussions
to optimize parameters for each model. Table 3 gives model based on a dataset of 10,000 resumes[23][24] collected from
hyper-parameter tuning kaggle with a size of 56.27MB. Table 4 illustrates the
Example: For SVM, we tune the C parameter and kernel type. distribution of resumes across five distinct job classes:
TABLE III
Model Hyper-parameter Tuning TABLE IV
Model Tuned Parameters Optimal Value Resumes data
SVM Kernel, C RBF, C=1.0 Number of
Category
Number of Trees Resumes
Random Forest 100
(n_estimators) Data Scientist 2,000
Logistic Software Engineer 3,000
Regularization (C) 0.5
Regression Business Analyst 1,500
Project Manager 1,500
C. Embedding Network Engineer 2,000
To perform accurate resume-job description matching, we
Total 10,000
employ Transformer-based embeddings to generate numerical
representations of textual content. The steps include: Performance is measured using key metrics:
1. Tokenization: Convert resumes and job descriptions into  Accuracy: Measures the proportion of correctly
word tokens. classified resumes. It can be calculated as:
2. Embedding Generation: Utilize DistilBERT, a (TP + TN) / (TP + TN + FP + FN)
lightweight Transformer model, to encode tokens into  Precision: Assesses the proportion of relevant
dense vector embeddings. resumes among the selected ones. It can be calculated
3. Contextual Understanding: DistilBERT captures deep as:
semantic relationships between words, allowing for TP / (TP + FP)
better representation of candidate qualifications.
  Recall: Evaluates the system's ability to retrieve all We calculate the following metrics for model comparison [20,
relevant resumes. It can be calculated as: 21]. Table 6 indicates the model performance comparison
TP / (TP + FN) TABLE VI
Model Performance Comparison
 F1-Score: Provides a balanced measure of precision
and recall. It can be calculated as: Precisio F1
Model Accuracy Recall
2 * (Precision * Recall) / (Precision + Recall) n Score
To evaluate model performance, we compute the Confusion Logistic
87.4% 85.2% 83.1% 84.1%
Matrix for each classifier [18, 19]. Regression
Confusion matrix illustrating True Positives, False Positives, Random
89.1% 88.3% 85.7% 87.0%
etc., for the classification task was given in the figure 2 Forest
SVM
(Best 91.2% 90.5% 89.4% 89.9%
Model)
To interpret the model predictions, we use SHAP (SHapley
Additive Explanations) values [22]:
 SHAP values emphasize the most significant features
influencing resume classification.
 For instance, the keyword "Machine Learning" adds a
probability of +0.35 to the categorization of Data
Scientist. Figure 4 indicates a bar graph showing SHAP
values for top resume features.

Fig. 2 Confusion Matrix for DistilBERT + SVM Model

The PR Curve in figure 3 shows the precision-recall trade-off.
For varying classification criteria, this graph shows Precision
vs. Recall.

Fig. 4 SHAP Feature Importance for Resume Classification

The following are the solution procedure observations that
reveal critical insights:
Fig. 3 PR Curve for DistilBERT Model
 DistilBERT-based resume classification outperforms
The data are analyzed to identify the ideal similarity level that traditional models.
optimizes the F1-score, maintaining a balance between false  SVM achieved the highest accuracy (91.2%), making it
positives and false negatives. The model's performance is the most effective classifier.
assessed using standard classification metrics presented in  SHAP analysis provides model interpretability,
Table 5. improving trust in AI-based hiring.
TABLE V
Evaluation Metrics
Comparison with Existing Models
Metric Value The performance of different models is assessed using
Accuracy 92.4% accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score as given in table 7
TABLE VII
Precision 89.7% Model Performance Comparison
Recall 91.2%
F1-Score 90.4% F1-
Model Accuracy Precision Recall
Score
The utilization of NER-based structured extraction and SVM 78.5% 75.2% 77.1% 76.1%
Transformer embeddings markedly improves the efficiency Naïve
81.3% 79.8% 80.5% 80.1%
and accuracy of resume-job matching, hence accelerating, Bayes
refining, and scaling the recruiting process. Random 85.2% 82.6% 84.1% 83.3%
 Forest education affect job description relevance scores when using
DistilBERT 92.4% 89.7% 91.2% 90.4% DistilBERT for resume categorization.
Key Findings: Visualizing the most impactful inputs and detecting key words
 DistilBERT surpasses conventional machine learning or phrases in a resume that significantly impact classification
methods, attaining an accuracy of 92.4%. outcomes helps identify model biases or inconsistencies.
 Random Forest outperforms SVM and Naïve Bayes
but is inferior to DistilBERT. TABLE VIII
Top 5 Most Influential Resume Features
 Naïve Bayes has superior generalization for text
SHAP Importance
categorization although lacks contextual Feature
Score
comprehension.
The confusion matrix in figure 5 provides insights into the Python 0.87
misclassification rates for each job category. Machine Learning 0.82
Project Management 0.79
SQL 0.75
Deep Learning 0.72

 Python and Machine Learning are the most important

keywords for Data Science & Software roles.
 Project Management is crucial for Project Manager
classification.

I. Case Study: Resume Classification Example

Example resumes and model prediction details are given in
Fig. 5 Confusion Matrix for DistilBERT Model table 8
Observations: TABLE Ⅸ
 The most significant misclassification arises between Example Resume and Model Prediction
Data Scientists and Software Engineers due to skill Predicted
Resume Text
overlap. Job Role
 Conversely, Business Analysts and Project Managers "Experienced in Python, TensorFlow, Data
are accurately classified owing to their separate and NLP with 3 years at Google." Scientist
vocabulary. "Managed software development teams, Project
The Precision-Recall (PR) curve in figure 6 shows how well Agile methodology expert." Manager
the model balances false positives and false negatives. "Developed web applications using Java, Software
Spring Boot, and microservices." Engineer
 The model correctly classifies resumes based on
skills & experience.
 Some misclassification occurs when overlapping job
roles exist.
E. Discussion of Results
Higher Accuracy with Transformer Models
 DistilBERT significantly outperforms traditional ML
models.
 It captures contextual relationships between words,
leading to more accurate job role classification.
Impact of Feature Engineering
 NER and embeddings significantly improve
Fig. 6 PR Curve for DistilBERT performance.
 The high area under the curve (AUC) confirms strong  The extraction of job titles, skills, and experience helps
classification performance. in fine-tuning classifications.
 Lower recall for Data Scientists indicates some resumes Challenges and Limitations
are misclassified as Software Engineers.  Overlapping skills lead to misclassification (e.g., Data
To determine resume categorization factors, we use SHAP Scientists vs. Software Engineers).
word significance values. Game theory-based SHAP values  Imbalanced datasets affect minority job roles (e.g.,
define machine learning algorithm outputs. They measure Business Analyst).
each attribute's impact on the final choice to understand model Performance Gains Over Traditional Screening
projections. The five most important resume components are
in Table 8. SHAP values can show how skills, experience, and
 The model reduces resume screening time by 80%, The increasing number of resumes calls for automated resume
improving recruitment efficiency. classification and candidate selection in modern hiring. We
 Automating this process enables HR teams to focus on created a transformer-based system with cosine similarity for
high-value hiring decisions. job-resume matching, DistilBERT embeddings for
contextualized text representation, and Named Entity
V. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Recognition (NER) for structured data extraction. With 87.5%
accuracy, 0.82 precision, 0.78 recall, and 0.80 F1-score our
model exceeded conventional keyword-based techniques.
The comparative analysis of resume classification Shap analysis enhanced interpretability, hence lowering false
performance across multiple models. He and Zhang [3] positives and negatives.
Key Contributions & New Results
demonstrated the superiority of deep learning models,  Enhanced Resume Parsing: Our method effectively
specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), over extracted structured data from unstructured PDFs,
traditional machine learning techniques like Support Vector improving resume segmentation into skills, education,
and experience categories.
Machines (SVM) and Multinomial Naive Bayes (MNB).
 Transformer-based Matching: DistilBERT embeddings
Subsequently, Heakla and Mohamed [10] advanced this were used to measure contextual similarity, significantly
research by exploring large language models such as BERT boosting classification performance compared to
and Gemma 1.1 2B, demonstrating significant improvements traditional keyword-matching algorithms.
 Improved Candidate Shortlisting: Our solution leverages
in accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score over CNN and
cosine similarity scores to automate resume evaluation
other deep learning techniques. Building on these findings, our and reduce manual work.
approach utilizes the DistilBert model, achieving a higher  Integrating SHAP values in resume classification
accuracy of 92.4% while highlighting opportunities to further improved transparency in model predictions, helping HR
professionals understand candidate-job alignments.
enhance precision, recall, and F1-score to match the Limitations & Future Work
performance of state-of-the-art transformer-based models. The  While our approach achieved accurate resume-job
graph visually represents accuracy, precision, recall, and F1- alignment, issues remain, such as domain-specific
vocabulary and confusing job titles, requiring further
score metrics for each model, showcasing the progression
improvement.
from traditional to advanced transformer-based approaches.  Imbalanced datasets in certain employment categories
The comparative analysis of these approaches is visually may impact categorization accuracy.
represented in the following graph:  The approach relies on pre-trained embeddings, which
may not capture company-specific recruiting norms.
Future work will focus on:
 To improve performance, refine DistilBERT using
specialized recruitment datasets.
 Use Computer Vision (CV) techniques to incorporate
multi-modal information, such as resume formatting and
design.
 Improving bias reduction for fair and impartial candidate
evaluation.
 Developed an AI-driven dashboard featuring candidate-
job alignments and explanations for recruiters.
Final Remarks
The study showed that Large Language Models (LLMs)
improve resume classification and job alignment.
Transformer-based embeddings, structured data extraction,
and similarity measurements make our automated recruiting
method efficient and scalable. The findings show that AI-
Ⅵ. CONCLUSION
based resume classification can reduce recruiting time,
increase candidate-job matching, and improve recruitment
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