Am I qualified for this job? How to decide in ten minutes

A job ad is usually written by several people at once. The hiring manager lists what would make the job easy, a recruiter adds the company template, and some lines survive from the last time the role was open. The result describes an ideal candidate, often a composite of two or three real ones.

The labels rarely help. Many ads mark nothing as required or preferred, and others mark everything as required. So the list alone cannot tell you where the bar is. The structure of the job can: what the person will spend the week doing, and which conditions nobody in the company can waive.

That gives the check its order. Gates first, because they end the question. Then the core of the role, because that is what an interview will test. Everything else is a tie-breaker.

A gate is a condition the employer cannot relax for a good candidate, usually because a law, a client contract or the physical job decides it. Read the ad once looking only for these.

Read the responsibilities before the requirements. Three to five lines usually describe most of the week; mark them. These are what the interviews will probe, and what a hiring manager will look for in the first half-minute with your CV.

For each core line, find one sentence in your CV that shows you have done that work, and write a verdict next to it. Met: the CV states the work with a scope or a result. Partial: you did a close neighbour, such as the same work with a different tool, or the same tool at a smaller scale. Missing: nothing in the CV touches it. The resume vs job description guide walks through this mapping line by line.

Watch for the gap that is only on paper. If you have done the work but the CV never says so, the fix is a truthful line in the CV, not a lower opinion of yourself.

"5+ years" is shorthand for the level at which somebody usually handles this scope. If you have three or four years and have already carried that scope, the number is soft. If you have eight years at a smaller scope, the number is met and the level may not be.

Compare scope instead: did you own the result or contribute to it, how large was the team, the budget or the account list, and who was the customer. Two people with the same title and the same years can sit a full level apart.

With the gates and the core mapped, the decision is short.

The posting and the CV here are a prepared illustration, not a real person or a live vacancy. The posting: Customer Success Manager at a software company in Berlin, hybrid, working language English. It asks for four years or more in customer success, Salesforce and Gainsight, a book of mid-market accounts, renewals and expansion, and quarterly business reviews. German is "a plus".

The CV: three years as an account manager at a logistics software company, 40 mid-market accounts, renewals and a few upsells, quarterly reviews with the ten largest customers, HubSpot as the CRM, German at B1, based in Berlin with an EU passport.

Gates: right to work, the city and the working language all pass. Core: the account book and the renewals are met, while expansion and the business reviews are partial, because both were done but on a smaller scale. Preferences: three years against four is soft, HubSpot for Salesforce is the same CRM work in another tool, Gainsight is missing and learnable, and German is a plus the candidate partly has.

Verdict: apply. Lead with the account count and the renewals, write HubSpot as HubSpot rather than implying Salesforce, and leave Gainsight out of the cover letter entirely. A gap that is a tool, not a skill, is rarely the reason somebody is turned down.

The mapping in steps 2 to 4 is mechanical and a tool can do it consistently: read the whole posting against the whole CV and list what is met, partial and missing, with the evidence. MatchRadar's fit check does this for a posting you paste, 35 a month on the plan.

What no tool can know is anything outside the text: whether this team would sponsor a visa, whether the manager will flex on years, how many other people applied. A match score is a way to decide where your time goes, not a forecast of an offer. The methodology says what our score reads and what it cannot.

If you do not have one posting in mind but want to know which of this week's jobs you would qualify for, the free preview runs the nightly search on your CV over the new jobs of the last seven days, without an account.