Every staffing agency owner knows the number by heart: 300 applicants on a req, and maybe 10 are worth a call. The instinct is to blame the applicant pool — the market's flooded, candidates apply to anything, LinkedIn's Easy Apply lowered the bar. All true. But there's a cause further upstream that's easier to fix than any of that: the job post itself.
The job post is upstream of the pain
Every CV that lands in the wrong pile started with someone reading your req and deciding to apply. A vague seniority range, a missing comp band, a requirements list built by stacking every "nice to have" anyone on the team could think of — none of that just fails to attract the right candidate. It actively invites the wrong ones. By the time a recruiter opens the ATS, the damage is already done; screening is just cleanup.
That's the idea behind the Job Post Grader — a free tool that scores a job post the way an experienced recruiter would, before it ever goes live.
What actually gets graded
Paste in a live job post and it comes back scored on four dimensions:
- Clarity — whether seniority, comp range, and location/remote policy are actually stated, not implied.
- Appeal to qualified candidates — whether the post leads with the real work and team, or buries it under buzzwords like "rockstar" and "10x."
- Applicant-quality risk — whether the requirements list reads like a specific role or a kitchen sink that pulls in generalists.
- Noise/length — whether the two requirements that actually matter are visible, or padded out with jargon.
A post that scores low on clarity because seniority, comp, and remote policy are all missing or vague will keep pulling the wrong crowd no matter how well you screen downstream. The fix has to happen before the post goes live, not after.
Not just a score — a rewrite
Every weak line comes with a suggested rewrite and the reasoning behind it, so the tool doesn't just tell you the post is weak — it shows you exactly what a stronger version looks like. A requirement like "5+ years experience with modern JavaScript frameworks" becomes "3+ years with React (our stack) — we're not looking for framework-hopping generalists." Same requirement, a fraction of the wrong applicants.
Curious what your own job posts are scoring?
Try the Job Post Grader free — paste in a live req and get your score in under a minute.
Grade your job post free →A showcase, not a product
The Job Post Grader is deliberately minimal — no login, no saved history, no dashboard, no pricing page. That's on purpose. It isn't a SaaS side-business; it's a working example of what a custom-built agent looks like running on your own text. The version wired into an actual agency's workflow doesn't stop at a score: it pulls job orders straight out of Bullhorn, Loxo, or whatever ATS you run, grades every req automatically as it's created, and pushes the rewrite back in — without anyone on your team remembering to run it.
That's the difference between a demo and a production agent: one requires you to remember to paste something in; the other just runs.