SHORT ANSWER
JobHQ reads a job ad against your own confirmed profile and judges it through four separate lenses: whether you can do it, want it, can win it, and whether it fits your life. It then gives one recommendation, Apply, Consider or Skip, with its reasons, its main concern and what it does not know.
The question JobHQ answers is “is this opportunity good for this person?”, never “is this objectively a good job?”. The same ad can be an Apply for one person and a Skip for another.
What it uses
- The job ad you add. The text as saved, which stays available even after the listing expires.
- Your confirmed profile. Built from your primary resume and the preferences and constraints you confirm during setup. Nothing is assessed until you have confirmed it.
- Your cover letter is used for writing style only, not as career evidence. Other documents you upload stay private and are not used.
The four lenses
- CAN. Can you credibly do the work, based on evidence in your history?
- WANT. Does the work match the direction you said you want?
- WIN. How competitive are you likely to be against the realistic field?
- LIFE. Does it fit your practical constraints: pay, location, flexibility, travel, hours?
Each lens is judged separately so a strong answer on one does not hide a weak answer on another. Lens scores are a guide to reasoning, not a precise measurement.
Apply, Consider or Skip
- Apply. Strong on the work, plausibly competitive, no confirmed dealbreakers.
- Consider. Worth pursuing, but something important is weaker or still unknown.
- Skip. A confirmed dealbreaker, or an honest read that it is not worth the effort. Skip is reversible: you can still look into a role.
In the current assessment version, a confirmed breach of a hard constraint you set leads to Skip, while practical friction that is not a hard constraint can lower priority without ruling the role out. Unknown details are never treated as a confirmed breach. Before an assessment is saved, it is checked against the rubric’s explicit rules; a contradictory result is retried, not quietly rewritten.
How unknowns are handled
Job ads leave a lot out. JobHQ treats missing information as unknown, not bad. A missing salary is not assumed to be low, and a missing work setup is not assumed to be on-site. When LIFE depends on details the ad does not give, it is marked provisional, meaning uncertain information, not a poor fit. The key unknown is shown so you know what to find out.
Research is kept separate
You can ask JobHQ to research a role using public sources. Research can update the current recommendation, but the original assessment is kept and labelled, so you can always see what was judged from the ad alone. When a recruiter advertises for an unnamed client, the advertiser is not treated as the employer, and no contact details are guessed.
Seniority is shown as context only. It never changes the lens scores or the recommendation.
Limits
- It only knows what the ad, public sources and your profile contain.
- It has no access to employers, recruiters or applicant pools.
- It can be wrong. Its reasons are shown so you can disagree with them.
- It is not legal, financial or career advice and does not guarantee any outcome.
- Your decision always outranks JobHQ’s opinion.
For the thinking behind this, read how to decide if a job is worth applying for, or browse all guides.