The word in the title predicted more than the job did

Most job listings answer the wrong question first. They tell you what the role involves before they tell you whether the company is even allowed to hire you for it.

Under a visa that requires a licensed sponsor and a salary floor, that ordering is backwards. A perfect-fit role at a company without a sponsor licence isn't a long shot — it's not available to me at all. But it still shows up at the top of a search, ranked by keyword match, sitting next to roles that were never real options.

So the tool I built doesn't start with “does this match my CV.” It starts with three separate questions, checked in order: can this company legally sponsor a visa, does the salary clear the floor, and only then, is this actually a good fit. Most job-search tools collapse all three into one relevance score. Keeping them separate was the point — a role can fail the first check and the second two stop mattering.

The part I didn’t expect: once the eligible roles were actually comparable, the strongest predictor of a rejection wasn’t the responsibilities in the job description. It was one word in the title. In my search, “Manager” bounced almost every time, regardless of the seniority of the duties actually listed, while titles like “Analyst” or “Specialist,” covering equivalent work, stayed live.

That’s not a complaint about how hiring works. It’s closer to the same problem I keep running into elsewhere: a shallow, easy-to-read signal — a title, a star count — quietly doing more work than the substance underneath it deserves to.

Now the filter checks for that too. Not because a title should disqualify a good match, but because pretending it doesn’t happen wastes an evening writing a cover letter for a role that was already decided before I applied.