About Notch Resume
Notch Resume is an independent editorial site for job seekers. It publishes original research on what employers ask for, measured from real job postings, plus plain guides to the application systems that screen candidates before a recruiter looks.
What we publish
- Research. Every week we pull about 250 job postings from company career sites, extract the requirements, and add them to monthly cohorts. The first study covered 254 postings from 39 companies. The series now spans five employer panels: tech, consumer, enterprise, AI-era startups, and large US employers.
- Application guides. Field-by-field walkthroughs of Workday, Greenhouse, iCIMS, Taleo, and Lever, written from the applicant's side, which the vendors don't document.
- A free tool. Notch scores a resume against a job posting, lists the competencies the posting demands, flags gaps, and suggests rewrites limited to what the resume can defend in an interview.
How the research works
Each posting is analyzed by the same competency-extraction engine that powers the tool, run with no resume attached. For every posting it identifies the competencies the role requires and weights each from 1 (nice to have) to 5 (the role cannot be done without it), based on the posting's own language: must-have phrasing, repetition, "required" versus "preferred." Skill names are normalized so synonyms collapse into one bucket. Since September 2026 it also records stated years of experience, salary disclosure, degree requirements, named AI tools, and work arrangement.
Panels are kept separate and never blended, because the mix of employers changes month to month and a blended number would show composition shifts as trends. Monthly samples per panel run from about 100 to 450 postings, so differences under roughly eight points are treated as noise until several months agree. Extraction and weighting are model-assisted judgments applied uniformly, not human ratings. Every published number is computed directly from the corpus.
Writers and researchers can request a custom cut by role family, segment, or requirement. Email hi@notchresume.com. Custom cuts are free for working journalists, with attribution.
Who runs it
Notch Resume is run by one editor with a background in personal finance and consumer technology journalism. It is not a recruiting firm, a resume-writing service, or a staffing agency, and it does not accept payment for placement in its guides or research.
What Notch Resume is not
Notch Resume (notchresume.com) is not affiliated with Notch, the technology recruiting company at notchteam.com, with wearenotch.com, or with any other company that uses the name Notch. If you were contacted by someone claiming to be "Notch" about a job, that was not us. We never contact job seekers unsolicited and never ask for payment, documents, or personal information.
Corrections
If a number, a step, or a status meaning on this site is wrong, email hi@notchresume.com with the page and the correction. Guides are updated when application systems change, and each page shows its last-modified date.
Privacy
Resumes and job descriptions pasted into the tool are processed to produce the analysis and are not stored or used to train models. Details are in the privacy policy.