When creating a document search term, Adapt offers the user a ‘Weighting’ number. This is used to show how important that result is to the user. By ‘weighting’ the term, it allows results to be ‘ranked’ according to how many times that term appears in documents and which is the most recent document. For example, I have added weighting to the following search term according to how important they are:

Recruiter (1), Trainer (2), “MS Word” (1), “MS Excel” (2) 

Note: Weighting is done from 1 to 5 with 1 being the most important and 5 being the least important.

What we are saying here is that we would like a Recruiter OR Trainer but would prefer a Recruiter and we would like the person to have MS Word OR MS Excel but would prefer them to have MS Word.

The search will look for how many times the words ‘recruiter’ and ‘trainer’, for example, appear in documents. Word searching in the CV scores that word more highly if it occurs more often. It will then look at the weighting of the word and will use these 2 factor to ‘rank’ the results.

Use Ranking/Weighting from the Formatter tool (add to the View column and tick the option in the Sort column) on search results to show which results are the most relevant. The higher the ranking, the more recent the documents are and the more they match the weighting specified.

Click on the ‘Weighting’ bar to show the words matched for each result.