Is this job worth applying for? How to judge a posting against your CV

A LinkedIn search returns hundreds of postings, and most of the time spent on them goes on reading each one far enough to find out it was never going to fit. Remote turns out to mean two days in the office. The permanent role is a six-month contract. The senior title is a mid-level job. None of this is hard to judge; it is just slow, one posting at a time.

This is the method we use, and the one Job Puffin's ratings follow. It splits the decision in two: a gate you check in seconds, then a judgement of fit that is worth your time only for the postings that pass.

Step 1: check your musts before anything else

Before reading a posting closely, write down the few things that would rule a job out for you no matter how good the rest is. For most people they come from this list:

• Where and how: the city, remote, hybrid, how many days in the office.
• The terms: contract or permanent, full or part time, the length of a contract.
• The pay: a salary floor, or a day rate.
• The right to work: whether you need sponsorship, and whether the employer offers it.
• The level: a step down you would not take.

Keep the list short. A must is a hard limit, not a preference; if you would take the job for more money or a better team, it is a preference, and it belongs in step 2.

Then check each must against the posting's own words. There are three possible answers, and it helps to keep them apart:

• Broken: the posting contradicts it outright ("this is a fully on-site role", "we are unable to offer sponsorship"). That is a no, and you can stop reading.
• Met: the posting says so. Move on.
• Unstated: the posting says nothing. This is a question for the recruiter, not a reason to skip the job. Many good postings leave out the pay or the office days.

Here is one posting checked against a search for a permanent marketing manager role in Manchester or remote, paying £55k or more:

The mistake to avoid is averaging. A job that is perfect in every way but on-site in a city you will not move to is not a good job for you with one weakness. It is a no. Keep the musts out of the scoring and treat them as a gate.

Step 2: find what the posting is really screened on

Most postings list far more than anyone expects a candidate to have. Somewhere in the list are the two or three things the first reader of your application will actually look for: a particular stack, a sales motion, a regulatory regime, a kind of client. Clues to which they are:

• They appear in the title or the first paragraph.
• They come with a number of years.
• They are repeated in the responsibilities and the requirements.
• The rest of the list reads as "nice to have", even when it isn't labelled that way.

Those few things are what the application rises or falls on. A long list of tools you don't know matters much less than the one you do, if that one is the screen.

Step 3: weigh the fit

With the gate passed and the screen found, weigh the posting against your CV on a handful of questions. These are the seven Job Puffin scores, roughly in order of how much they decide:

Skills and tools

Do you have what the posting is screened on? This is the heaviest of the seven, because it is the one the first reader checks.

Seniority and level

Is it the level you are at, or a sensible step up? Read the responsibilities rather than the title: titles vary between companies far more than the work does.

Working arrangement and terms

Beyond your musts, how well do the terms suit you? A hybrid role two days a week may pass your gate and still be worse for you than a remote one.

How competitive an application would be

Your honest odds of getting past the screen. A posting that wants exactly your last two roles is a better bet than one you could do but would have to argue for.

Experience and domain

The industry, the size and stage of the company, the people you would work with. Moving from a bank to a start-up is possible; it is just a harder story to tell.

Career direction

Does it take you where you want to go next, or back to work you have moved on from? A job that fits your past perfectly and your plans badly is a poor trade.

Evidence in your CV

This one is easy to miss. Can a stranger see from your CV that you have what the posting asks for? Missing evidence is not missing ability: if you have done the work but your CV does not say so, the answer is to change the CV, not to skip the job.

Put together, it looks like this: a marketing manager's CV from retail weighed against a marketing manager role in broadcasting, each question scored with the reason beside it, and a word on whether to apply and what to lead with.

Marketing ManagerBBC · Salford, hybrid

84of 100

Apply. Lead with the app sign-up campaign and the paid social budget you ran, and add a line on working with content teams to cover the move from retail into broadcasting.

• 90
  Seniority and level

  A marketing manager leading a team of three, the level you have held for three years; owning the channel budget outright is a small step up from what you run now.

• 80
  Career direction

  It keeps you in consumer marketing and moves you towards the audience and content work your last two roles leaned into, which is where your target points.

• 85
  Skills and tools

  The screen is multi-channel campaign planning, paid social and audience data in GA4, all of which you have run at scale. Their CRM is Salesforce Marketing Cloud; yours was Braze, a close neighbour.

• 90
  Evidence in the CV

  Your CV names the campaigns, the budgets and the results, the 32% lift in app sign-ups among them. It could say more about briefing agencies, which the posting mentions twice.

• 70
  Experience and domain

  Broadcasting is new to you, with your experience in retail and ecommerce. The audience-growth focus carries over, but expect questions on working alongside editorial teams.

• 90
  Working arrangement and terms

  Permanent and hybrid, two days a week in Salford, at £56,000 to £62,000: inside Manchester, permanent and your floor of £55k.

• 80
  Application competitiveness

  The role will draw a lot of applicants, but you meet every essential and most of the desirables, and measured results put you in the strong part of the pile.

Step 4: decide

You now know whether the job passes your musts and how it does on each question. In practice the decision comes down to this:

One considered application to a job that fits does more than many sent without reading. The point of judging postings quickly is to have the time to do the good ones properly.

Doing this for a whole search

By hand, this takes a few minutes a posting, and most of that is the reading. Across a search of a hundred postings it is still most of a day. Job Puffin does the same thing for every posting in a LinkedIn search: the Chrome extension sends the search over in one go, each job is checked against the musts you set and scored on the seven questions above with a sentence on each, and the inbox lists them best first. You read the top of the list, not the whole of it. How a score is worked out is set out on the About page.