The job site problem statement

A job site serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it provides jobs to candidates, and on the other, it serves as a database of registered candidates' profiles for companies to shortlist.

A job search has to be very intuitive for the candidates so that they can find jobs suiting their skills, position, industry, role, and location, or even by the company name. As it is important to keep the candidates engaged during their job search, it is important to provide facets on the abovementioned criteria so that they can narrow down to the job of their choice. The searches by candidates are not very elaborate. If the search is generic, the results need to have high precision. On the other hand, if the search does not return many results, then recall has to be high to keep the candidate engaged on the site. Providing a personalized job search to candidates on the basis of their profiles and past search history makes sense for the candidates.

On the recruiter side, the search provided over the candidate database is required to have a huge set of fields to search upon every data point that the candidate has entered. The recruiters are very selective when it comes to searching for candidates for specific jobs. Educational qualification, industry, function, key skills, designation, location, and experience are some of the fields provided to the recruiter during a search. In such cases, the precision has to be high. The recruiter would like a certain candidate and may be interested in more candidates similar to the selected candidate. The more like this search in Solr can be used to provide a search for candidates similar to a selected candidate.

NRT is important as the site should be able to provide a job or a candidate for a search as soon as any one of them is added to the database by either the recruiter or the candidate. The promptness of the site is an important factor in keeping users engaged on the site.