What Recruiters Search For First — and What It Means for Your Profile

One advantage of a search-based platform over a job-board is that we can actually see what recruiters look for first, instead of guessing from application data after the fact. We looked at an aggregated, de-identified sample of recruiter searches to understand what tends to surface a profile — and what applicants can do to make sure they show up.

The single strongest signal, unsurprisingly, is a specific, current job title — not a generic one. Profiles that say "Senior Product Designer" get pulled into far more relevant searches than ones that say "Design Professional." Recruiters search the way they'd search anything else: with specific terms, not broad categories.

The second signal that mattered more than we expected was years of experience combined with a named industry, rather than either alone. A profile tagged with both "6 years" and "Healthcare" shows up in searches that a profile with just one or the other misses entirely, because recruiters commonly filter on both dimensions at once.

Skills came third, which surprised us — we expected them to matter more. The reason seems to be that most recruiters use skills to narrow an already-relevant pool rather than to find it in the first place. That means skills matter most once you're already in the running, as a way to stand out among similar profiles, not as the thing that gets you discovered initially.

The practical takeaway: get your job title and industry exactly right before you spend time polishing your skills list. A precise, current headline is worth more to discoverability than an exhaustive skills section on a vague one.