How your match score is calculated
The match score is 100 points split five ways: hard skills 60, soft skills 15, other keywords 5, job title 10, degree 10. With a worked example.
Your match score is 100 points, split five ways.
Hard skills are 60 of the 100, which is the single most useful thing to know about the score. Everything else on that table put together is worth less than the hard skills alone, so that is where your editing time pays off.
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How the skill parts are scored
Each of the three skill parts works the same way. We take every keyword of that type that the job description asks for, work out how much of it your resume earns, and award you that share of the available points.
If the job description contains no keywords of a type at all, that type scores full marks, since there is nothing there for your resume to miss. A posting that lists no soft skills hands you all 15 soft skill points.
How the job title is scored
The job title is all 10 points or none. If the exact title from the posting appears anywhere in your resume you get 10, and if it does not you get 0. There is no partial credit for a title that is close.
How the degree is scored
The degree has three outcomes:
- 10 points if your highest degree meets or exceeds what the posting asks for, or if the posting asks for no degree at all.
- 5 points if you have a degree but it is lower than the one the posting asks for.
- 0 points if the scan found no degree on your resume and the posting asks for one.
A worked example
A posting asks for 10 hard skills, 4 soft skills, and 2 other keywords, each mentioned once. It asks for a Bachelor's degree. Your resume covers 6 of the hard skills, 3 of the soft skills, and both other keywords, and it has your Bachelor's and the job title on it.
The total is rounded, so this resume scores 72.
Now add 2 of the missing hard skills. Hard skills go to 8 of 10, worth 48 instead of 36, and the total becomes 84. Two hard skills moved the score 12 points, while closing the one missing soft skill instead would have moved it under 4. That gap between the two is the whole argument for working the hard skills list first.
Within a skill part, each keyword earns credit on how often you use it against how often the posting asks for it.
- Your resume mentions it as often as the job asks, or more: full credit for that keyword.
- Your resume mentions it at least once but fewer times than the job asks: at least half its weight. Precisely, half plus half of the ratio between your count and the job's count. A keyword the job asks for 4 times that appears once on your resume earns 62.5% of its weight.
- Your resume never mentions it: nothing.
The third case is the one worth your attention, because that first mention carries half the keyword's weight on its own. Going from zero mentions to one is always a bigger gain than going from one mention to three.
What is not scored
Only five things reach the number, and everything else in the report is advice. Your word count, email address, phone number, quantifiable accomplishments, buzzwords, verb choice, first-person language, date formatting, and years of experience are all reported and none of them changes the score.
Your plan does not reach the number either. The Premium-only checks are all advisory, so a free account and a Premium account scanning the same resume against the same job get the same score.
One more boundary is worth stating: only keywords the job description contains are scored at all. A skill on your resume that this posting never mentions earns you nothing and costs you nothing, which is why the same resume can score very differently against two jobs.