Diagnose a Week-over-Week Drop in Job Applications

Scenario

A job marketplace observes that its daily application count has declined week-over-week.

Task

As the analyst on call, outline the analyses and actions you would take to:

1. Diagnose why application count dropped.
2. Identify likely root causes.
3. Recommend short-term mitigations and longer-term solutions, including experiments.

Clarifications and Expectations

Make and state minimal, reasonable assumptions if needed. Your response should cover:

• Metric and scope clarification, and initial data-quality checks.
• Funnel analysis from traffic to completed applications.
• Segmentation (e.g., channel, geo, device, user cohort, job category, apply path).
• Recent releases/experiments, guardrail metrics, and rollback/holdout checks.
• Seasonality and external/competitor factors.
• A prioritized action plan with hypotheses and proposed experiments.