.svg)
.jpg)
When you are hiring firmware engineers, controls specialists, and hardware-aligned software talent, traditional recruitment workflows start to break down.
In a conversation between Amit Singh, Founder and CEO of Weekday, and Murtuza, who leads Talent Acquisition at Unbox Robotics, one theme was consistent: niche hiring demands precision, speed, and better signal.
This case study captures how Unbox Robotics restructured its sourcing workflow by working with Weekday and what that means for recruiting teams hiring in specialised markets.
“It’s a pretty niche market. Very difficult to hire roles.”
Unbox Robotics builds robots for logistics and e-commerce warehouses. The team is 150 people strong and hires across:
- Mechanical design
- Electronics
- Firmware
- Controls and validation
- Narrow-scope hardware-aligned software
These are not broad backend or frontend roles. The talent pool is small, domain-heavy, and largely passive.
“It’s a pretty niche market. Very difficult to hire roles.”
For companies in deep tech, robotics, hardware, or domain-specific SaaS, this constraint is familiar. The challenge is not posting jobs. It is identifying and activating the right passive profiles before competitors do.
Unbox hires roughly 15 to 55 roles annually with a team of three recruiters plus Murtuza. Every hour spent manually stitching workflows has an opportunity cost.
The pre-Weekday stack: Necessary but fragmented
Before adopting Weekday, Unbox relied on:
- Naukri.com
- Lusha
- Email Hunter
- X-ray searches
Each tool addressed a piece of the funnel. None unified it.
On LinkedIn:
“LinkedIn works for us, but the pricing is over the roof.”
For niche talent, LinkedIn is unavoidable. But high cost and mailbox-limited outreach restrict experimentation and velocity.
On Naukri:
“It’s not at all useful for us because our market again is a niche.”
Most relevant candidates were passive. Active applicants were typically freshers. For a robotics company hiring experienced hardware engineers, that mismatch created noise.
Contact enrichment tools filled some gaps, but required manual switching between systems. Search happened in one interface. Contact reveal in another. Outreach in a third.
For lean teams, this fragmentation slows everything down.
“To be honest, I was initially skeptical.”
Murtuza did not adopt Weekday immediately.
“Every day there are sourcing platforms which keep coming up… that’s the reason I was skeptical.”
This hesitation is common among experienced recruiters. Many tools promise automation. Few reduce real friction.
He started with a trial, then moved to a monthly plan. The decision to continue was based on internal reports, not surface impressions.
“Our reports itself showed a difference.”
For product-led recruiting teams, measurable workflow improvement is the only convincing argument.
Quality and speed: What changed operationally
The improvement was not framed as abstract efficiency. It showed up in candidate quality and time usage.
“The quality sourced candidates was higher… now it is easier and higher.”
For Unbox, this meant fewer irrelevant profiles and faster shortlisting for specialised roles.
He connected it directly to recruiter economics:
“You’re paying for the recruiter’s time and if the return is quicker, the efficiency increases.”
In practical terms, this freed up capacity for:
- Stakeholder alignment
- Deeper candidate conversations
- Managing leadership hiring
For companies hiring in high-skill domains, reclaiming recruiter bandwidth can be the difference between reactive and strategic hiring.
Response rates from passive candidates
One concrete example stood out.
“I had sent about roughly 9 or 11 invites and I got about 6 responses.”
That is over 50 percent response rate from passive candidates in robotics.
For niche markets, response rate is a leading indicator. If passive talent does not engage, the funnel collapses early.
Murtuza also highlighted visibility:
“You don’t need to actually pull out a report as such.”
For teams that care about sourcing metrics, built-in tracking removes manual reporting overhead and clarifies what is working.
Multi-channel outreach in one workflow
A major differentiator for him was outreach integration.
“Just with one click, you can reach out to them on three different platforms — email, phone call, and WhatsApp.”
Instead of limiting communication to InMail, Weekday centralises outreach across channels.
“All three platforms together, the chances are much better, which I have not seen in any other platforms yet.”
For companies hiring senior or hardware talent, candidates may not be active on one specific channel. Expanding outreach surfaces increases the probability of engagement without multiplying tools.
Search relevancy with transparent reasoning
Search precision was critical in his decision-making.
“It gives you the automated search string, which is a Boolean search string.”
Weekday generates a Boolean string but does not obscure it. Recruiters can inspect and understand the logic.
“AI could be wrong, so it’s always better to verify.”
This transparency matters for experienced recruiters who do not want blind automation.
He also emphasised relevance scoring:
“It will explicitly tell you which industry, what kind of experience range, and it will give you a scoring based on that.”
Instead of generic sorting, profiles are evaluated against defined criteria with visible reasoning.
“It has been accurate because it gives you a reasoning as well.”
For companies hiring in niche verticals, knowing why a candidate is scored a certain way helps recruiters make faster, defensible decisions.
From sourcing to screening: Where Weekday's Resume Screener fits
For Unbox, sourcing is only half the challenge. Screening for domain depth is equally important.
Once profiles enter the funnel, evaluation speed becomes the next bottleneck.
This is where Weekday’s Resume Screener becomes structurally aligned with the workflow Murtuza described. Instead of manually parsing firmware experience, electronics stack exposure, or validation background, the Resume Screener analyses resumes against role-specific requirements and surfaces structured insights.
For a lean team handling complex technical roles, this reduces manual resume scanning time and allows recruiters to focus on contextual conversations rather than keyword detection.
In high-skill environments, screening accuracy compounds the value created at the sourcing stage.
Leadership hiring impact
At the time of the conversation, Unbox was hiring for three leadership roles.
“From which two I have folks at the final stage, they came from Weekday.”
Even before long-term metrics were established, Weekday had influenced senior-level pipelines.
For deep-tech companies, leadership hires shape product velocity and engineering culture. Early traction at this level signals sourcing quality rather than volume.
“Weekday saved us a lot of time.”
When asked what he would miss if Weekday disappeared:
“If I’ve given you 10 reasons, I think seven of them definitely I miss.”
And at the end:
“Weekday saved us a lot of time.”
Time, in this context, meant:
- Less manual tool switching
- Faster relevance validation
- Quicker outreach
- Built-in reporting
For lean recruiting teams in specialised markets, time saved directly translates into hiring advantage.
Who should consider this model?
Murtuza drew a clear boundary.
“Where it is driven by the product and not driven only by timelines would definitely benefit.”
And on senior hiring:
“If you want to look at senior level and serious candidates, I think Weekday is the platform you should be.”
For companies building in robotics, hardware, AI, deep tech, or other constrained talent markets, hiring is not about posting and waiting. It is about structured outbound, accurate screening, and workflow consolidation.
Unbox Robotics adopted Weekday not because it was new, but because it reduced friction across sourcing and screening.
For recruiting teams operating with limited bandwidth and high technical standards, that combination creates leverage.
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
