MayaMaya. Transforming Job Searching with AI
December 10, 2023
Context: The $1.1 Trillion Problem.
By 2025, Gen Z will make up 27% of the workforce. But this generation of talent is entering the market with new challenges: rising mental health concerns, career instability, and constant noise in their decision-making. Students are asked to make career choices too early contributes to a workforce misaligned with its roles, contributing to a skill gap felt by the global economy for up to $1.1 trillion.
Catenate Corp’s product suite addresses this by understanding users’ soft skills, and helping them discover roles they may be suited for using their patented, AI enabled assessment system. (See MayaMaya for professionals, and MiraMira for students)
Matching Soft Skills to Roles
Duration: 2 Months
Team: 1 Designer (me), Lead Developer (Sameer Ranjan), CMO (Shiva Vishwanathan), CEO (Karthik Vishwanathan)
When I joined in Fall 2023 to help the team design and build their flagship job board, the tech job market was still recovering from the pandemic. Stress among job seekers was high, and many candidates described a “spray and pray” approach to applications—applying to as many roles as possible without much guidance or clarity.
To bridge MayaMaya’s long-term horizon of candidate development with user's immediate term hiring needs, we identified roles that matched their strengths and enabled instant applications.
We synthesized the following key features to accomplish this:
A “Best Fit” indicator (before AI integration in job boards made this common place)
A “Quick Apply” that sent tailored applications with a click of a button
A space to monitor the status of job applications that had been sent
Building trust: How well can AI really know me?
While we focused on soft skills, users still expected job platforms to prioritize technical qualifications. The idea of being matched based on arbitrary scores for communication skills or adaptability felt unfamiliar and untrustworthy.
To close that trust gap, we focused on making the system’s reasoning more transparent. We introduced a benchmark view that let users compare their soft skills to those typically needed in a given role by breaking down factors like technical skills, core strengths, and soft skills, resulting in higher confidence in their match score.
Today’s applicant tracking systems (ATS) typically focus on surface-level criteria—like years of experience or hard skills—when filtering thousands of resumes. MayaMaya’s approach aims to go deeper.
Closing the Loop
By 2025, Gen Z will make up 27% of the workforce. But this generation of talent is entering the market with new challenges: rising mental health concerns, career instability, and constant noise in their decision-making.
MayaMaya’s personality assessment tool already offers users insight into their strengths. But now, with the addition of MayaMaya Jobs, that awareness becomes actionable.