WorkRB: A Community-Driven Evaluation Framework for AI in the Work Domain
Authors: Matthias De Lange, Warre Veys, Federico Retyk, Daniel Deniz, Warren Jouanneau, Mike Zhang, Aleksander Bielinski, Emma Jouffroy, Nicole Clobes, Nina Baranowska, David Graus, Marc Palyart, Rabih Zbib, Dimitra Gkatzia, Thomas Demeester, Tijl De Bie, Toine Bogers, Jens-Joris Decorte, Jeroen Van Hautte
Organizations: TechWolf Ghent, Belgium · Avature Barcelona, Spain · Malt Paris, France · University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark · Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK · WAPES Brussels, Belgium · Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands · University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherlands · Ghent University - imec Ghent, Belgium · AIDA-IDLab, Ghent University Ghent, Belgium · IT University of Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark
Today's evolving labor markets rely increasingly on recommender systems for hiring, talent management, and workforce analytics, with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities at the core. Yet, research in this area remains highly fragmented. Studies employ divergent ontologies (ESCO, O*NET, national taxonomies), heterogeneous task formulations, and diverse model families, making cross-study comparison and reproducibility exceedingly difficult. General-purpose benchmarks lack coverage of work-specific tasks, and the inherent sensitivity of employment data further limits open evaluation. We present WorkRB (Work Research Benchmark), the first open-source, community-driven benchmark tailored to work-domain AI. WorkRB organizes 13 diverse tasks from 7 task groups as unified recommendation and NLP tasks, including job/skill recommendation, candidate recommendation, similar item recommendation, and skill extraction and normalization. WorkRB enables both monolingual and cross-lingual evaluation settings through dynamic loading of multilingual ontologies. Developed within a multi-stakeholder ecosystem of academia, industry, and public institutions, WorkRB has a modular design for seamless contributions and enables integration of proprietary tasks without disclosing sensitive data. WorkRB is available under the Apache 2.0 license at https://github.com/techwolf-ai/WorkRB.
Figures & tables
Figure 1. Overview of the community-driven WorkRB evaluation framework. A high-level overview diagram of the WorkRB framework showing tasks, models, and multilingual evaluation.
Dataset
Labels
Size (en)
Lang.
Occupation-to-Skill Rec.
ESCO Occupation-to-Skill ( le Vrang et al., 2014 ; De Lange et al., 2025 )
multi
3,039 (en) × 13,939 (en)
28
Skill-to-Occupation Rec.
ESCO Skill-to-Occupation ( le Vrang et al., 2014 ; De Lange et al., 2025 )
multi
13,492 (en) × 3,039 (en)
28
Similar Item Rec.
Job Title Sim. ( Zbib et al., 2022 ; Deniz et al., 2024 )
multi
105 (en) × 2,619 (en)
11
Table 1. Overview of WorkRB tasks. Dataset sizes are shown for the English (en) number of queries × targets. For non-English datasets, we separately report the maximum number of queries and targets for cross-lingual (x), Bulgarian (bg), and Swedish (sv). ESCO-based target spaces vary by language and version. Table listing the 13 ranking tasks in WorkRB organized by task group, with their label type, number of queries and targets, and number of supported languages.
Model
SRec
ORec
SIRec
CRec
JNorm
SNorm
SExtr
All
#Multilingual datasets
28
28
12
12
72
35
84
271
Random Ranking
0.4
0.6
0.7
8.2
0.3
0.1
0.1
1.5
BM25 ( Robertson and Zaragoza, 2009 )
2.9
6.1
11.0
27.5
2.5
47.4
5.5
14.7
Qwen3-Embed (0.6B) ( Zhang et al., 2025 )
6.0
14.7
26.3
50.4
12.5
65.5
16.9
27.5
JobBERT-v3 ( Decorte et al., 2025a )
9.3
20.5
30.6
43.4
25.6
62.5
16.6
29.8
#EN-only datasets
1
1
2
2
2
1
3
12
Table 2. MAP per task group. Multilingual models are evaluated on all languages with no language aggregation; EN models are evaluated on English monolingual subsets only. Best result for both scenarios in bold .
Recruitment applications span diverse operations, from drafting job descriptions and interpreting queries to organizing profiles, assessing fit, and recommending candidates and jobs. Systematic LLM evaluation therefore requires task coverage that reflects this range of business needs. We introduce EHR-Bench, an open Chinese benchmark comprising twelve tasks across six capability families and five recruitment scenarios. The tasks cover generation, extraction, classification, retrieval, semantic similarity, and reciprocal ranking within one evaluation framework. An internal recruitment dataset guides task definitions, the occupation taxonomy and sampling targets, output requirements, and scoring protocols. Following these specifications, we construct 8,336 task instances from public materials and controlled augmentation, with source-aware expert review and documented provenance. We evaluate twelve LLMs through task-level, capability-level, and aggregate comparisons. Closely ranked models exhibit distinct task strengths, and performance varies across input sources, reference evidence, and candidate pools. Five shared models retain the same observed Overall ordering on a private operational reference, with variation in capability and task correspondence. EHR-Bench provides a reproducible foundation for systematic model assessment, task-specific model selection, and further research on LLMs for recruitment. The project repository is available at https://github.com/EhrBench/EHR-Bench.
Ruijia Yang, Bing Xu, Zulong Chen +5
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Alibaba Group · Guangzhou University +1
Many knowledge-work benchmarks are constructed around individual tasks, with the context needed for each task selected together with or after the task has been specified. This design measures performance on workplace-like tasks in an environment assembled for the task. When task specification guides which context is selected, the evaluation can encode task information into the environment and pre-complete part of the information-localization work that workplace performance normally requires. We introduce WorkWorlds, an evaluation infrastructure that separates organizational state from task specification. A world first fixes a revision, date, and employee seat and materializes the organizational state that employee can access; tasks are introduced only afterward. We implement WorkWorlds in a primary synthetic pharmaceutical company with 8 measured tasks across 6 employee seats, and construct additional organizational worlds. Across 192 matched evaluations, task-level curation increased evidence access by 17.6 percentage points, from 72.8% to 90.4%, and criterion pass by 8.7 points, from 68.0% to 76.7%, while pass conditional on evidence access remained nearly unchanged; most of the measured difference occurred before the agent reached sufficient evidence.
Yining Hua, Levi Lian
Harvard University · Agent Evaluation Science Inc. · Raycaster +1
The development of LLM agents has led to a growing body of work on knowledge-work AI, including coding, research, and healthcare. However, current knowledge-work evaluation and benchmark design still largely follow the logic of traditional NLP tasks. As a result, higher benchmark performance does not reliably show that a system can carry out knowledge work in real-world deployment settings. This paper contributes a three-step approach for making explicit how benchmarked tasks represent the work claims attached to their scores: defining the work activity under evaluation, specifying the tested setting, and scoring the appropriate work product. We review work studies showing that knowledge work is organized through roles and responsibilities, local materials and tools, and artifacts that must remain usable in downstream workflows. We then translate these concerns into benchmark design and reporting guidance, covering how tasks should be mapped to work activities, how tested settings should specify materials, tools, roles, and constraints, and how scoring should focus on the work product left by the system. To name the work activity being evaluated and distinguish it from common benchmark tasks, we derive an inventory of 18 work activities from the O{*}NET occupational task database. We demonstrate the approach through three benchmark case analyses: GDPval, a non-code occupational deliverable benchmark; OfficeQA Pro, a grounded document-analysis benchmark scored by final answers; and APEX-SWE, a software-engineering benchmark with executable scored products. These cases show how benchmark design choices shape the strongest work claim a score can support, and where gaps arise between the benchmarked task, tested setting, scored product, and broader work claim.
Yining Hua, Hongbin Na, Cyrus Ayubcha +1
Harvard University · University of Technology Sydney · Stanford University +1