How ProfileMatch matches your resume to jobs

1. Where the jobs come from

Jobs are read from the public job feeds that companies publish through their own applicant-tracking systems, such as Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and Recruitee. We re-check every company every hour: new roles are added, and roles the company has taken down disappear from ProfileMatch. Every result links to the company's own application page, so you never apply through a middleman.

2. How skills are detected

When you upload a PDF or DOCX, we read its text and look for skills from a fixed skills dictionary: languages, frameworks, databases, cloud tools, practices like Agile, and so on. Common short forms count too, so JS is read as JavaScript and K8s as Kubernetes. The same dictionary is applied to every job description, which gives each job its list of required skills.

3. How the fit score is calculated

The score starts with skills: the share of the job's skills that your resume also contains. If a posting names fewer than 5 skills we can check, it is scored as if it named 5, so a job listing just two common skills can't look like a perfect fit.

Then the score is lowered, with a note under the job saying why, when:

• The role type does not suit your resume. A mainly technical resume is ranked down for sales, finance, HR and similar roles, and a little for product, program and design roles. A resume with no engineering skills is ranked down for engineering roles.
• The level does not suit your experience. Internships are ranked down when your resume shows 3 or more years of work, and staff, principal and director roles when it shows fewer than 4. Experience is estimated from the work dates in your resume (education dates are skipped). If we can't estimate it, the level is left alone.

Jobs are sorted with the best fit first. Next to every score you see the skills you matched, the skills you are missing and any note, so you can see exactly why the job is ranked where it is.

4. What the score does not consider (yet)

• Location, salary and visa needs: use the country filter, and read the posting.
• How deeply you know a skill: one mention counts the same as five years of daily use.
• Skills outside the dictionary: rare or very new tools may not be detected on either side.
• Role type and level are read from the job title, so an unusual title can be misread.

So treat the score as a fast way to find where you fit, then read the job description before you apply.

5. Turning missing skills into a plan

The skills you are missing most often are the fastest way to unlock more jobs. Many of them have a free course in our Learn section, and you can practise with interview questions before you apply.

6. What happens to your resume

Your resume is used to find your matches. You can try ProfileMatch without an account; creating one only lets you save results and get emailed about new matches. Read the Privacy Policy for what is stored and how to delete it.

Common questions