Government employment portals are often fraught with usability issues, such as complex navigation and limited language support, which create significant barriers for job seekers. Addressing these challenges head-on, researchers from Presidency University, including Srihari R, Adarsha B V, and Mohammed Usman Hussain, have developed JobSphere, a sophisticated AI-powered career assistant tailored for the Punjab Government’s PGRKAM employment platform. JobSphere employs advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, enabling it to provide highly accurate, verified responses, while supporting multiple languages including English, Hindi, and Punjabi. This multilingual support, along with voice-enabled features, broadens accessibility for a diverse demographic, markedly enhancing user experience and engagement.
One of the most striking innovations underpinning JobSphere is the use of the Llama 3.2 3B language model, optimised through a 4-bit quantization technique that drastically reduces computational resource demands. This approach, leveraging consumer-grade GPUs rather than expensive cloud infrastructures, achieves an impressive 89% cost reduction, making the system both scalable and economical. Despite these savings, JobSphere maintains a high standard of performance, achieving 94% factual accuracy in responses and delivering a rapid median response time of approximately 1.8 seconds. The system’s architecture integrates advanced AI functionalities such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part of Speech (POS) tagging, syntactic parsing, and real-time web scraping, implemented with robust tools like Selenium and Beautiful Soup, to keep job listings current and relevant.
The platform not only recommends jobs but also automates mock test creation from past question papers using sophisticated extraction methods, significantly reducing manual test-building efforts. Resume parsing is another cornerstone, converting unstructured documents into structured profiles with an accuracy rate of 92%, helping the system to tailor recommendations effectively. Behind the scenes, JobSphere’s backend employs efficient data structures such as B-trees and hash tables to ensure fast, reliable data retrieval, while the user interface benefits from modern web technologies including React 18, FastAPI, and JWT-based authentication, resulting in a smooth, scalable, and secure user experience.
Evaluation metrics attest to the platform’s breakthrough usability improvements; user testing based on the System Usability Scale indicates a 50% increase in ease-of-use over the existing PGRKAM interface. By virtue of these advancements, more job seekers in Punjab can connect with credible employment opportunities through a trusted government channel. However, the developers acknowledge there is room to enhance certain modules, particularly the resume parsing accuracy and the breadth of the mock test repository. Future iterations aim to incorporate more personalised career guidance leveraging user profiles and skills, thereby refining JobSphere’s role as a comprehensive career companion.
The underlying Llama 3.2 3B model itself is renowned for its balanced design, offering a large context window of up to 128,000 tokens which supports complex tasks such as document summarisation and extended dialogue handling. This ability aligns well with the needs of a career assistant that must process diverse user inputs and provide contextual, meaningful guidance swiftly. Furthermore, similar quantized models by Meta have demonstrated up to a 4x speedup and significant reductions in memory footprint while retaining high-quality output, reinforcing the efficiency claims of JobSphere’s design.
In the broader AI landscape, efficient tuning methods like QLoRA have recently enabled large language models to be finetuned on modest hardware without compromising performance, suggesting promising avenues for future development of AI assistants like JobSphere. Moreover, research indicates that small language models in the parameter range used here can deliver responsible, fair, and efficient natural language processing, crucial for public sector applications where trust and accessibility are paramount.
JobSphere represents a meaningful leap forward in government employment services, blending cutting-edge AI technology with practical considerations of cost, accessibility, and usability. It exemplifies how AI can be harnessed to make public resources more navigable and equitable, offering a model that can inspire similar initiatives worldwide.
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Source: Noah Wire Services