Abstract: In one embodiment of the invention, a company could create a system whereby individual job seekers voluntarily enter their own career history information as well as their implicit preference information. In addition to these job-seeker entered profiles, a company could create technology to aggregate job listings from multiple sources. In turn a company could create a “standard application” interface wherein job seekers could apply to jobs at many different destination organizations using their pre-established profile. In this way the company could capture information about what jobs candidates were applying for. The company could leverage this information to make higher quality matches between people and jobs, both in terms of recommending jobs for candidates as well as candidates for jobs, providing the underlying data to enable the company to charge for data offerings, and to enable the company to employ matching techniques of the invention to find highly desirable candidates.

Abstract: A method of and system for collecting data from multiple sources and improving the ranking and matching of documents based on meta data obtained during data collection, sorting and review processes is disclosed. Incentives are provided to contributors in exchange for data/documents that have been acquired by such contributors. The incentives may include, inter alia, licenses to use certain software applications that facilitate the collection of documents from a number of means and collect Meta Data about the collected documents. Contributed documents are then aggregated into one or more online databases. Customers are able to perform multi-criteria ranked searches in the databases and “preview” a ranked set of documents that meet the search criteria. Customers may then purchase the individual documents they deem appropriate. The ranking of the search results may be impacted by the Meta Data collected through the use of the provided software applications.