Case Study: The Ladders achieves real-time, scalable job matching with Elastic

TheLadders - Customer Case Study

TheLadders is a premier online job‑matching service that helps millions of career-driven users search hundreds of thousands of job listings. Faced with the need to re‑architect its search after a decade on Solr, the company needed a more scalable, reliable, and fast way to connect job seekers and recruiters in real time.

TheLadders migrated search to Elasticsearch, using it to power real‑time matching (about 100 ms), serve over 1 billion documents and 100K+ open jobs, and run both batch and instant recommendation workflows. The change delivered greater scalability and visibility, higher reliability with fewer incidents, and faster developer velocity—reducing feature development from weeks to days—while improving the speed and accuracy of job matches.

The Ladders

Peter Pathirana

Lead Engineer, Recommendations Infrastructure, Platform Team