Lessons Learned from Workday's Search Application Journey from POC to Production

Angela Juang

Tech Lead Search

Workday

Madhura Dudhgaonkar

Head of Search/ML

Workday

In 2014, the Workday team realized their Lucene-based custom search would not scale or provide world-class relevance for end users. After extensive research and prototyping, Elasticsearch came out on top as a solution.

Three years later, Workday's highest-volume, most critical search use cases — Recruiting - Find Jobs and Find Candidates — are in production on Elasticsearch. With this change, indexing time has gone from more than 10 hours to less than a few minutes. Query results are being served in subseconds instead of timing out at the 20 minute threshold. Also, Workday has gone from lacking relevance in results to leveraging out-of-the-box relevance capabilities in Elasticsearch. Happier end users equals a happier team!