The match rating is a 0–100% score shown on each candidate for a given job. It estimates how well their resume fits that role. It's built to be auditable — you can see exactly which requirements drove the number — and it's a way to sort a pile, not a verdict on a person.

How the score is built

Chosen doesn't eyeball a resume and pick a number. It works in steps:

It reads the job posting and derives a set of concrete, testable claims about what the role needs — usually 5 to 15 of them ("3+ years of backend experience", "has shipped a payments integration").
It scores each claim against the candidate's resume, and cites a specific phrase from the resume as evidence for the score.
It combines the per-claim scores, weighted by how much each requirement matters, into the final percentage.

Because every claim carries its evidence, the score is inspectable. A 72% isn't a vibe — it's a list of requirements, each marked met or not, each pointing at the line of the resume that decided it. When a number looks wrong, you can find out why.

What a good description gets you

The score is only ever as good as the job post it reads. Claims come straight from your description, so a vague description produces vague claims and a soft, uninformative score.

If you want sharper ratings, write a sharper job post — specific requirements, the things that actually matter for this role. The same description feeds the careers page candidates read, so this is effort that pays off twice.

It's a sorting aid, not a hiring decision

Treat the score as a way to order a long list, not a ruling on who's good.

A 45% can be exactly the right hire. It usually means the job post didn't capture what you actually want — the candidate's real strengths weren't in the description, so no claim rewarded them. The fix is to read the candidate, not to trust the percentage. A high score is a reason to look sooner; a low score is a reason to look, not a reason to skip.

The score is honest about one thing in particular: a requirement the resume simply doesn't mention counts as a gap, not a pass. So a strong candidate with a thin resume can score lower than a weaker one who wrote more. That's a reason to read resumes, which you were going to do anyway.

Limits

Match rating compares a resume to a job post. It doesn't know your team, the hiring manager's actual bar, or anything said in an interview. It depends on a clean parse — see resume parsing — and on a job description worth reading. It's a fast first pass over a stack of candidates. The hiring decision is still yours.