Smart Profile Matching
Smart Profile Matching is a single toggle that turns eight things you tell us about yourself into a pre-filtered job feed. It is not AI, not a CV scanner, and not a black-box recommender. Every rule it applies is published below — and the card itself tells you which dimensions matched.
The eight inputs
Your Smart Profile page asks for the following — none are mandatory:
- Highest education level — high school through post-doctoral.
- Field of study — free text (used for future soft-scoring only).
- Languages — each entry has a CEFR proficiency (A1 → C2 or Native).
- Work modality — on-site, hybrid, remote (Phase 2 signal).
- Preferred locations — cities, regions, or "Worldwide".
- Years of experience — one of four buckets.
- Skills & keywords — drawn from our category taxonomy.
- Availability — when you could realistically start.
- Nationalities — for eligibility warnings only (Phase 2).
How matching works — the published rules
When the toggle is on, every search query is AND'ed with a small set of deterministic clauses derived from your profile. We split them into HARD filters (must match), SOFT signals (boost only, Phase 2), and IGNORE (kept for future use).
| Profile field | Mode | Matching rule |
|---|---|---|
educationLevel | HARD | Show vacancies requiring your level or below. A Master's holder still sees Bachelor-level roles; a Bachelor holder does not see PhD-only vacancies. Jobs with no extracted education requirement are always included. |
yearsOfExperience | HARD | Show vacancies with required experience at or below your bucket. A 3–5-year profile sees postings requiring 0–6 years but not 7+. Null-tolerant for the same reason. |
languages | HARD | Match any language listed at B2 or higher(or Native). A2/A1 entries are excluded — having studied a language in school doesn't make it a working proficiency. Jobs with no language requirement are always included. |
workPreferences.locations | HARD | Job city, country, or duty station must appear in your preferred locations. Adding Worldwide also keeps any home-based / remote / worldwide-flagged vacancy. |
workPreferences.modality | SOFT | Phase 2. We don't yet extract structured modality from postings — planned scraper enhancement. |
skills | SOFT | Phase 2. Will weigh-up jobs that mention your skills or fall into related categories; never used as a hard filter. |
fieldOfStudy | SOFT | Phase 2. Free-text match against the vacancy description — low signal alone, useful as a tiebreaker. |
availability / nationalities | IGNORE | Kept for in-card warnings (eligibility / start-date). Not used to hide any vacancy in Phase 1. |
Why we tolerate missing fields
Roughly 15–30% of scraped vacancies arrive with at least one of education / experience / languages missing — that's the cost of unifying twenty-plus UN job boards. If we filtered them out, we'd hide thousands of postings the user actually could apply to. So every HARD filter explicitly includes null. We'd rather show one extra irrelevant job than hide one good one.
How to turn it on
- Open your Smart Profile and fill in what you can. The form is honest about what each field affects.
- Save the profile. The Smart Matching switch at the top must be on.
- Back on the search page, you'll see a green Smart Profile button next to Save and Favorites. Click it.
- Each matching vacancy shows a small Matches: … ribbon telling you exactly which dimensions matched. Click the toggle again to go back to the full list.
What's coming in Phase 2
- A match score and a "Sort by match" option in the results header.
- Eligibility warnings on cards where the posting is restricted to specific nationalities you don't hold.
- Smart Profile bit on saved searches, so your daily and weekly digests respect the toggle.
- An interactive "Loosen filters" prompt when zero vacancies match.