How Fewer scores a job posting
Every posting the search finds goes through the same steps, in the same order, against your own rulebook. Nothing here is a black box: each step leaves its evidence on your Results, and any step can be corrected in a sentence.
1. The title screens
Before anything is read in full, the title and the location go through the screens you set: titles to reject on sight (Director, Intern, Head of), and where you will and will not work. A posting that fails here is never scored; it is listed under Thrown out with the rule that caught it. This is what lets a search read thousands of postings for the cost of reading a hundred.
2. The requirement lines
The AI reads the full description and takes the requirements one line at a time. Each line gets one of four marks, with the evidence beside it:
- Clears · your profile shows it, and the evidence is quoted.
- Soft · the posting says preferred, ideally, a plus, or nice to have. It does not reject.
- Does not clear · a hard line your profile cannot show. On a line of the kinds your rulebook names as gates, this rejects the posting.
- Craft · a line asking for evidence of a skill in practice that the profile cannot show. It does not reject; it caps.
A posting rejected here is listed with the exact line, quoted, and with the score it would have had if that one line had been soft. That is the number to look at when you think the AI was wrong.
3. Two scores under every fit
A posting that clears the gates gets two scores, each starting at 5.0 and moved by the rules in your rulebook:
- How well you clear the bar · the strength of the match. Your rulebook names what raises it (the buyers, the kind of sale, the signals it should look for in the description) and what lowers it (a gap in years of experience, deal sizes or quotas above what you have carried, a seat that is really a channel or a people-management seat).
- How much you would want it · the desirability. Industry, pay, location, remote or not, the size and stage of the company, whatever you said mattered.
The fit is the two blended, 55 parts strength to 45 parts desirability, rounded to a whole number. The lower of the two gates the top: a 9 or a 10 needs both scores high, so a role you would love but only half qualify for cannot reach them, and neither can one you qualify for but would not want.
4. Caps
Some lines do not reject but hold the fit down: a craft line, a pay range that only reaches your floor at its top, a soft industry your rulebook says to treat with care. A capped posting is marked Conditional and its fit is held at 7, with the rule and the line that capped it shown. It is kept, because it may still be worth a look.
5. The words
The fit is a number from 1 to 10. Postings scoring 6 or better are kept and shown on your Results; the rest are thrown out with the reason. 8 and above is Strong, 7 is Reasonable, 6 is Stretch. A 9 or 10 in a search you run by hand sends you an email at once, if you switch that on.
6. Where the rules come from
The first version of your rulebook is written from your questionnaire, in plain sentences, numbered. It grows three ways. Correct a verdict on your Results and the correction becomes a numbered rule. Add a rule yourself. Or test a posting you know the answer for, disagree with the verdict, and teach it from the result. Every change keeps the previous version, and a reference posting you set is re-checked after each change so you can see whether the change did what you meant.
What it never does
It never applies for you. It never invents a requirement line that is not in the posting. It never scores a posting it did not read in full. And it never hides what it threw out: every discard is on your Results, with the line that failed it, until you say otherwise.
When it is wrong
It will be, sometimes. Open the role, say what is wrong in a sentence, and that becomes a rule for every search after. Most people find two or three postings in their first search that should have passed; teaching it those is the fastest way to a rulebook that thinks like you. See an example account · What Fewer reads