There's a number in the corner of the Risume editor, and we've watched people chase it like a high score. That's exactly the failure mode we designed against — so this post opens the box. Here is what the match score measures, what it deliberately ignores, and what moving it honestly looks like.
What the score measures
When you attach a job post, we decompose it into weighted requirements — skills, seniority signals, domain language — with the weights set by where and how often each one appears. A requirement in the title outweighs one in the fifth paragraph. Your resume is scored against that structure on three axes: coverage (is the skill present at all), recency (how long ago you used it — a skill from 2019 earns partial credit, not full), and prominence (does it appear where a scanner will find it, or buried in a final bullet).
What it deliberately ignores
The score does not reward repetition — the fourth mention of "Kubernetes" is worth nothing, because it's worth nothing to a human reader either. It doesn't credit a skills section that your work history never backs up; an orphaned skill actually scores below an absent one, because it reads as padding to recruiters, and we'd rather the number tell you that early. And it will never tell you to claim something the rest of the resume can't support.
If a change would make a recruiter trust the page less, it must make the number go down.
What moves it honestly
- Translation — you wrote "monitoring," the post says "observability," and you genuinely did the work. Renaming it is free points because it's a real match made legible.
- Re-ranking — moving your Kafka work from bullet six to bullet one raises prominence, and prominence is real: it changes what a six-second scan finds.
- Filling true gaps — the score's most useful output is the list of requirements you actually meet but never wrote down.
A 92 means "this resume is legibly aimed at this job." The last eight points usually belong to requirements you don't meet — and the honest response to those is not better wording. It's either a different application, or something to go learn.