Should I apply to this job?
A blunt answer in 30 seconds.

Usually yes, because job postings are wish lists rather than specifications. They are typically written by combining an existing job description with everything the team wishes the last person had known, which is why they routinely ask for more than the role needs. The useful question is not what fraction of the bullets you hit but which ones you miss. Missing a nice-to-have is noise. Missing the one requirement the posting states first, repeats, and marks essential is the whole story — that is the thing the hiring manager will screen on. A rough working rule: cover most of what the posting treats as must-have and you are a normal applicant, even with several gaps further down. Cover the pleasant extras but miss two must-haves and you are asking a stranger to take a risk they have no reason to take. Sort the requirements by weight first; then the answer is usually obvious.

When the gap is in something that cannot be argued around. Hard credentials are the clearest case: a licence, a specific degree, a security clearance, a visa status, a certification the role legally requires. No amount of tailoring closes those, and an application that ignores them wastes your evening and the screener's morning. The second case is a seniority mismatch in the wrong direction — applying to a staff role three levels above anything you have done invites a no that costs you the company for a year. The third is a stack you have genuinely never touched when the posting is built entirely around it. Everything else is negotiable, and adjacent experience explained plainly in a cover note is often enough. Most tools in this category will never tell you to skip, because skipping does not sell anything. This one will.

Fewer than the internet tells you, with more effort each. Mass applying feels productive because the counter goes up, but a hundred untailored applications to roles you half-fit produces less than fifteen deliberate ones to roles you clearly fit. The bottleneck is not how many applications you submit; it is how many get read properly by someone with the authority to move you forward. Time spent picking the right fifteen is time not spent being filtered out of the wrong hundred. That is the entire argument for checking fit before you apply rather than after: not to talk you out of ambition, but to spend your limited evenings where they might return something. Once you have decided a role is worth it, tailoring the resume to that specific posting is the next lever — tailoring a resume to a job description is what the paid product does, and the score stays free.