1A 73 is a shape, not a verdict
A 73 does not mean you have a 73% chance of anything. It means that when the engine read this job description against your profile, the weighted total of five dimensions came to 73 out of 100, and 27 points were deducted somewhere specific.
Which is why the number on its own is close to useless. Two people can both score 73 on the same posting and be in completely different situations. One is missing a single core skill worth 22 points and clears everything else. The other is a decent match on paper who is applying two levels above their career stage. The first should apply today. The second should search one rung down and watch the same profile score 88.
Reading a score means reading the deductions. Here is what generates them.
2Where the 100 points actually come from
The overall number is 70% profile fit and 30% resume match. The profile side splits into five dimensions with fixed point budgets, scored independently in a single pass and then summed.
Skills Match owns 40 of the 100 because it is the dimension that separates candidates who can do the job from candidates who read like they might. It does not check whether a skill appears on your profile. It checks how deeply the role needs it, on a five-level scale from awareness to architect-grade, against how deeply you have it, and it weights the job's core defining skill two to three times heavier than the secondary ones.
That weighting is why a posting that names Python nine times and Terraform once does not treat them as equal, and why missing the headline skill can cost more than missing three peripheral ones combined.
The five dimensions and their point budgets
Profile fit, 70% of the overall score. Resume match supplies the other 30%.
Depth against depth, not keyword presence. The core skill counts 2-3x a secondary one.
Relevant years in this field, not total career length. Unrelated years do not count.
Deducts in both directions. Overqualified costs points the same way underqualified does.
Same industry scores full, adjacent scores partial, unrelated scores low.
Location, remote alignment, salary band. Remote roles score full automatically.
A separate set of rules bypasses the total entirely. Commission-only and MLM roles, agency listings, and roles gated behind a credential you do not hold score zero regardless of skill overlap.
3What each band should change about your behavior
The bands are decision thresholds, not probability estimates. We want to be exact about this: they are calibrated on what the scoring model can defend about structural fit, not on measured callback rates from our own users. We do not yet have the sample to make that second claim, and we publish the raw counts rather than implying otherwise.
What the bands do encode is how much of your evening a posting has earned, and whether the work of tailoring can realistically close the distance that is left.
The four score bands
Where a 73 sits, and what sits either side of it
Likely mismatch (0-59): A core dimension is significantly off, or a disqualifier fired. Tailoring does not reach this far.
Borderline (60-69): Real gaps in the structure. Apply if you want it, but address the gap explicitly and keep the effort proportionate.
Good match (70-84): Solid fit with nameable gaps. This is where tailoring earns its hour, because you already clear the bar.
Magic match (85-100): Strong across most dimensions. Full investment, sent today, plus direct recruiter outreach if you can find them.
The gap between 73 and 85 is usually one or two named things, not a general sense of not quite right.
4The five dimensions in detail
Skills Match
Every required and preferred skill in the description is mapped against your profile, and the depth the role needs is matched against the depth you have. A skill named five times in the body costs far more when missing than one listed once at the bottom of the preferred section.
Experience
Relevant years in this specific field, not your total career span. Time in an unrelated field does not count toward a marketing or engineering role even if it happened during the same calendar years.
Seniority Fit
Whether the job level matches your career stage. This is separate from raw years. A senior IC applying to a junior req is overqualified and loses points; a manager reaching for a VP role is underqualified and loses points the same way.
Industry Fit
How far your background sits from the company sector and the domain context in the description. Same industry scores full, adjacent scores partial credit, unrelated scores low. Listed domain knowledge that matches the company adds points back here.
Culture and Logistics
Location match, remote alignment, and salary band fit. Remote roles score full points automatically because location is not a constraint for them. This is a normal weighted dimension, not a pass/fail gate.
Each dimension is scored on its own budget and reported separately, so you can see which one is doing the damage.
5Reading the Why Not 100 breakdown
Every deducted point carries a reason and a cost. This is the part of the score worth your attention, because two identical numbers can describe opposite problems.
A 73 assembled from a 22-point skills gap and a 5-point experience gap is a targeting success with one hole in it. You match the level, you match the field, and one requirement is missing. That is addressable, sometimes by surfacing something already true about you that your profile never mentioned.
A 73 assembled from a 15-point seniority deduction and a 12-point industry gap is a different animal. Nothing about your resume is wrong. The search is aimed at the wrong level in the wrong sector, and no rewrite fixes either.
The practical test: look at whether your largest deduction sits in Skills Match or somewhere else. Skills is the dimension tailoring can move. The other four are moved by changing what you apply to.
What to do with the score in front of you
In order. Most people stop after step one, which is the mistake.
- Read the number5 sec
Which of the four bands are you in? That sets the effort budget, nothing more.
- Open Why Not 100 and find the largest deduction30 sec
One dimension almost always dominates. That single line is the actual finding.
- Ask whether the top deduction is Skills Match10 sec
If yes, tailoring is worth it. If it is Experience or Seniority, tailoring changes nothing.
- Check whether the gap is a core or peripheral requirement1 min
A missing headline skill and a missing nice-to-have both cost points, but only one is disqualifying in a human review.
- Check ghost probability before committing the hour10 sec
A strong fit score on a 90-day-old posting is a good match with nobody on the other end.
- Then decide
Apply with full effort, quick-apply, or archive. All three are correct answers depending on the four steps above.
The same deduction pattern repeating across ten roles is worth more than any single score.
6What changes when you add a resume
The resume match layer is the remaining 30%, and it compares your actual resume against the description rather than the structured profile. It frequently scores differently from the profile side, because a resume carries specific outcome language that a profile summarizes away.
A profile scoring 68 can move to 76 once a tailored resume is attached, not because anything about you changed, but because the resume surfaces experience the profile compressed into a job title. That is the honest version of what tailoring does: it stops the engine, and the recruiter, from having to guess what you meant.
It also means a 73 with no resume attached is an incomplete reading. Roughly a third of the score is missing.
Upload a resume to see the full score including the resume match layer.
Score a Job Free7So what should a 73 actually make you do
Open the breakdown and find the two largest deductions. If they are peripheral preferences rather than core requirements, apply, and address the largest one in a single sentence in your cover letter rather than hoping nobody notices.
If the largest deduction is a core technical requirement worth more than 15 points, the honest read is that you are competing against people who have it. Apply if the company is worth a lottery ticket, but do not spend the evening.
And if the deduction sits in Seniority Fit, run the same search one level down before you conclude anything about yourself. That single change moves more scores than any resume edit we have seen.
We are tracking what these bands actually produce and publishing the counts raw, including the ones still too small to draw conclusions from. That data lives on the outcome data page.
Written by
Jesse Johnson
Founder, ShouldApply
Founder of ShouldApply. I write about job search strategy, hiring, and how to spend your time on opportunities that actually fit. Full bio →
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Frequently Asked Questions
It's a decent fit: better than the majority of roles in a typical job search, but with real gaps worth identifying. Whether 73 is "good enough" depends on what's driving the deduction. A 73 with 2 peripheral skill gaps and a 73 with a core technical skill missing are different situations. The Why Not 100 breakdown tells you which you're dealing with.
Yes, if the changes reflect genuine experience. Adding skills you don't have inflates the score without improving your candidacy. Adding skills you do have but haven't listed, or adjusting your skill depth rating to match your actual proficiency level, produces a more accurate score that better reflects real fit.
Your score is recalculated when your profile changes and when the JD is re-fetched. If you've updated skills or experience since the first score, the new score reflects the updated profile. The system uses a content hash to detect when both inputs are unchanged and skip rescoring.
Scores above 90 are possible but uncommon because the score accounts for every gap, including preferred qualifications that most candidates won't meet. A realistic ceiling for a well-matched application with a tailored resume is 82-88. Anything above 85 is a strong signal.
The score predicts structural match, which correlates with interview probability more than offer probability. What happens after the screen depends on factors the score doesn't see: how you interview, chemistry with the team, competing candidates, and internal dynamics. Use it as a pre-application filter, not a hiring predictor.
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A score without a breakdown is just a number.
The Why Not 100 analysis shows every deduction and what's driving it. Use it to decide whether to apply, and what to address when you do.
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