Using AI Job Matching

What matching is comparing

Two things are read: what you have said about yourself, and what the employer has said about the role. The result is an ordering of how well the second answers the first.

Your side is your resume plus the structured parts of your profile, which is where categories, skills, experience and preferences live. The structured fields matter more than people expect, because they are unambiguous where prose is not.

The employer's side is the posting. A vague posting produces vague matching in exactly the same way a vague resume does, which is worth remembering before concluding that the fault is yours.

The things that actually change your matches

Finish the profile. The most common cause of thin matching is a profile with the structured sections left empty. There is simply less to match on, and the roles that would have fit never surface.

Get the categories right. These do a lot of filtering. Being too narrow hides adjacent roles you would take; being too broad fills the list with things you would not.

Check the preferences you set months ago. Location, remote or in-office, and job type are applied as real constraints. A radius set narrow during a period when you could not travel keeps applying long after that stopped being true.

Keep the resume current and specific. Everything that makes a resume readable to a person makes it readable here: concrete evidence, industry vocabulary, no information trapped in graphics. See AI Resume Analysis.

Reading a match score

A score says how well a posting answers your profile. It is a way of ordering a long list so your attention goes to the right end of it.

What it is not is a prediction that you will be hired, or a judgement of you. Hiring turns on things no profile contains: timing, who else applied, whether the team clicked with you. Treat a high score as a reason to read the posting properly, and a low one as a reason to check whether your profile is telling the truth about you.

It is also worth applying to something below the top of your list occasionally. Matching optimises for what you have described, and people are regularly hired into roles that looked like a stretch on paper.

When the matches are wrong

Too few. Usually preferences applied as filters: radius, work model or job type. Widen one at a time so you can see which was doing the excluding.

Wrong field entirely. Usually categories, or a resume whose most recent role dominates a direction you are trying to leave. Career changers should read Changing Careers, because this is the specific problem it deals with.

Right field, wrong level. Usually a resume that describes activity rather than scope. Saying what you owned and how much, rather than what you worked on, moves this more than any setting.