# ConFit v3: Improving Resume-Job Matching with LLM-based Re-Ranking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.09760 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09760/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00453/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [Overview of the TREC 2019 deep learning track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07820/) (2020)
- [SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18449/) (2025)
- [RankZephyr: Effective and Robust Zero-Shot Listwise Reranking is a Breeze!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02724/) (2023)
- [Analyzing the Generalization and Reliability of Steering Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12404/) (2024)
- [Rank-R1: Enhancing Reasoning in LLM-based Document Rerankers via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06034/) (2025)
- [A Setwise Approach for Effective and Highly Efficient Zero-shot Ranking with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09497/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Person-Job Fit for Talent Recruitment: An Ability-aware Neural Network Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08947/) (2018)
- [Learning to Match Jobs with Resumes from Sparse Interaction Data using Multi-View Co-Teaching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13299/) (2020)
- [Learning Effective Representations for Person-Job Fit by Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07017/) (2020)
- [Shifting Perspectives: Steering Vectors for Robust Bias Mitigation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05371/) (2025)
- [Dyna-Mind: Learning to Simulate from Experience for Better AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09577/) (2025)
- [ConFit v2: Improving Resume-Job Matching using Hypothetical Resume Embedding and Runner-Up Hard-Negative Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12361/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Matching Models to Recruiting Agents: A Systematized Narrative Review of AI Recruitment Systems, Evaluation, and Governance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04286/) (2026)
- [Building Interpretable Feature Representations for Resume-Vacancy Matching by Distilling Production LLM Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03112/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A reliable resume-job matching system helps a company find suitable candidates from a pool of resumes and helps a job seeker find relevant jobs from a list of job posts. While recent advances in embedding-based methods such as ConFit and ConFit v2 can efficiently retrieve candidates at scale, the lack of controllability and explainability limits their real-world adaptations. LLM-based re-rankers can address these limitations through reasoning, but existing training recipes are developed on short-document benchmarks and do not account for noise in real-world recruiting data. In this work, we first conduct a systematic analysis over the LLM re-ranker training pipeline for person-job fit, covering inference algorithm design, RL algorithm selection, data processing, and SFT distillation. We find that using multi-pass re-ranking, training with listwise RL objectives, removing noisy samples, and distilling from a stronger LLM before RL significantly improves re-ranking performance. We then aggregate these findings to train ConFit v3 with Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-32B on real-world person-job fit datasets, and find significant improvements over existing best person-job fit systems as well as strong LLMs such as GPT-5 and Claude Opus-4.5. We hope our findings provide useful insights for future research on adapting LLM-based re-rankers to person-job fit systems.
