Daily job alerts based on your CV

A keyword alert matches words, usually in the title and sometimes in the text. It cannot tell a posting that needs your experience from one that merely mentions the same word, and it has no idea of seniority. So "project manager" returns construction site managers, junior coordinators and programme directors in one list.

The opposite failure is quieter. The same work is advertised under different names, such as customer success manager, account manager and client partner, or in the local language. An alert on one title never shows the others, and nothing tells you they were missed.

Read your last two roles and list what you actually did most weeks. Then write down the titles other companies use for that work, and check them against real ads: a title is worth an alert when the ads under it describe your week.

Three to five titles is usually right. Fewer misses the synonyms; more starts to bring in roles you would not take. The guide to finding jobs from your CV covers turning responsibilities into role families.

Add a short exclusion list for the words that keep bringing in the wrong level or trade, such as intern, trainee or a neighbouring profession that shares your title. Where the board supports quoted phrases and excluded words, use them. Where it does not, keep the alert and let the triage below do the excluding.

Location is where alerts leak most. Make one alert per city you would commute to, and a separate one for remote work, rather than a single alert with a wide radius. A remote alert should name the country you live in, because "remote" in an ad often means remote within one country or a short list of them.

The boards disagree on the fields, so the setup is not portable: one lets you set a radius, another has a remote filter that only reads what the employer ticked. That is also why most postings never say whether the job is remote at all. In our own pool, more than half of the postings for most roles do not state a work mode. You can see the share by role and country on the jobs by role pages.

Daily is the right frequency. Postings do not stay open long: on the median employer career site we watched, a quarter of postings were gone within 8 days and half within 25 (how long job ads stay open). A weekly batch meets many ads in their last days.

Read each alert with a fixed rule, so the decision takes seconds rather than a re-read:

The free setup above works. Its cost is the triage: every alert on every board, read one posting at a time, most of them closed within a line. For a narrow role in one city that is a few minutes a day. For a broad profile, several countries or a career change, it becomes the hour you lose each evening.

A CV-based alert moves the triage to before the e-mail. MatchRadar reads your CV and the preferences you confirm once, compares each new posting with the whole CV every weekday night, and sends one e-mail at 08:30 with the few that fit, each with the requirements you meet, the partial ones and the gaps. It reads employers' own career sites, the EU's EURES register and a few aggregators. It does not read LinkedIn, and it never applies for you.

It is one plan, with a seven-day trial and no card (pricing). Before any account, the free preview shows what the e-mail would have contained over the last seven days of new jobs.

No alert sees every job. Boards overlap and each misses some employers, so the honest aim is enough good postings each week to keep applying, not completeness. If a role you know exists never appears, check whether the employer publishes on a site your alerts cover before rewriting the alert.

And no alert decides for you. The value of a good one is that the decision you make each morning is between a few postings that deserve it, not between forty that mostly do not.