Misclassified experience
Academic and extracurricular experience could be surfaced as professional experience.
PRODUCT DISCOVERY · WEEKDAY · JAN–MAR 2025
Making candidate matchingmore relevant.
How conversations with job seekers helped uncover gaps in experience classification and candidate selection logic — and turn those insights into product improvements.
01 / THE CONTEXT
Helping the right candidates find the right opportunities.
Weekday supports the hiring process for companies through an AI-based job-search and candidate-matching module. Employers share role requirements and experience expectations, and the platform searches its candidate database to identify potential matches.
The process also involves understanding candidate interest, salary expectations and relocation preferences, followed by interview coordination and support through the hiring journey.
02 / THE DISCOVERY
Understanding what candidates were actually experiencing.
I conducted more than 50 conversations with job seekers to understand their expectations, experience and challenges during the job-search process.
50+Job-seeker interviews conducted
These conversations helped surface issues in how candidate experience was being interpreted and represented within the platform.
03 / THE PROBLEM
Experience on a profile did not always mean professional experience.
One issue was how the platform surfaced and classified experience. For example, a fresher's leadership roles in college clubs, internships or extracurricular activities could be interpreted as professional work experience.
This affected how candidates appeared on dashboards and could lead to less relevant matches against employer requirements.
Less relevant matching
Candidate profiles and selection logic did not always reflect the employer's actual experience requirements.
04 / THE IMPROVEMENT
Turning user feedback into product changes.
I brought these observations into the product improvement process, helping identify gaps in experience classification and candidate selection logic.
I worked with engineering and marketing stakeholders to communicate the issues, align on improvements and support the changes being shipped.
PRODUCT OUTCOME
More accurate experience representation and improved candidate selection logic.
The identified issues were addressed through product changes. The goal was to make candidate information more meaningful and improve the relevance of matching.
05 / WHAT I LEARNED
Good product decisions start with understanding the user.
This experience showed me how seemingly small product logic decisions can affect the quality of an entire user journey. It also reinforced the importance of validating assumptions through real conversations, rather than relying only on what a system is designed to do.
I enjoyed connecting user problems with product improvements and working across teams to help bring those changes to life.