Smart Search for Candidates and Employees

Marmend can now understand what you mean when you search for people — not just match the exact letters you type. This smarter search works on the Candidates page and the Employees page.

This feature is rolled out per workspace. If your search still only matches names and emails, it has not been switched on for your workspace yet — contact support.

What changed

Before: the search box only matched the exact characters you typed against first name, last name, and email. Searching for "Kubernetes" found nobody — even if a candidate's CV was full of Kubernetes experience.

Now, with smart search enabled, the search box understands three things at once:

1. Words — classic text matching, now across much more content: name, email, position, location, languages, and (for candidates) the full text of their parsed CV — skills, work experience, summary.
2. Typos — "Mullre" still finds "Müller". Small spelling mistakes no longer hide results.
3. Meaning — searching "container orchestration" can surface a candidate whose CV says "managed Kubernetes clusters", even though the words don't match. The search understands that these are related concepts.

The best matches appear first. All your existing filters (pipeline stage, vacancy, team, archived) keep working exactly as before — smart search only changes which people match and in what order.

Where it works

Page	What is searched
Recruiting → Candidates	Name, email, position, location, languages, and the candidate's CV content (skills, experience, summary)
Company → Employees	Name, work email, job title, work type, work location

Each page only searches its own people — searching on the Candidates page never shows employees, and vice versa.

Privacy

Smart search was built with strict privacy boundaries:

• What is searchable: only professional information — names, work contact details, positions, locations, languages, and CV content.
• What is never searchable: salaries, private phone numbers, home addresses, emergency contacts, social media links, internal notes, and documents.
• Where the processing happens: all "meaning" analysis runs on Marmend's own private servers. Candidate and employee data is never sent to any external AI provider for this feature.

Good to know

• Very short searches (1–2 characters) use the classic exact matching — type at least 3 characters to activate smart search.
• New candidates and employees become searchable immediately after they are created or updated. A candidate's CV content becomes searchable shortly after the CV has been processed.
• If the meaning-analysis service is temporarily unavailable, search automatically falls back to word and typo matching — you always get results.

How to test (for internal testers)

Run through this checklist on a workspace where the feature is enabled:

1. Classic behavior intact — search an exact first name, last name, and email on both pages. The same people must be found as before the feature.
2. CV content — pick a candidate whose CV mentions a specific skill (e.g. "PostgreSQL") that does NOT appear in their name or position. Search that skill on the Candidates page — the candidate must appear.
3. Typo tolerance — search a name with one or two letters wrong (e.g. "Shevchnko" for "Shevchenko"). The person should still be found.
4. Meaning matching — search a paraphrase of something in a candidate's CV (e.g. CV says "led a team of nurses", search "nursing team management"). The candidate should rank near the top. Note: this only works once the meaning-analysis service is running for your environment; otherwise results come from word matching only.
5. Page isolation — search an employee's job title on the Candidates page: no employees may appear. And the reverse on the Employees page.
6. Filters still work — combine a search with a pipeline-stage filter (Candidates) or a team filter (Employees). Results must respect both.
7. Privacy spot-check — search a salary number, a private phone number, or a street name you know exists in a profile. Nothing may be found through these values.
8. Archived stay hidden — archived candidates/employees must not appear in search results on the active tab.
9. Switch-off test (admin) — when the feature is disabled for the workspace, search must instantly behave exactly like the old name/email search.

If any of these checks fail, report it with: the page, the exact search text, what you expected, and what you got.