Lodestar: job listing scorer

Lodestar is a job screening tool I designed and built to sort saved listings in bulk. I was spending hours every week reading job posts that turned out to be the wrong level, the wrong pay or the wrong stack. Most of them could have been ruled out in seconds if something had done the first pass for me, so I built that something.

You tell Lodestar what you're looking for once. From then on, every job you save gets a score out of 100 and a clear verdict, so you spend your time on the roles worth applying to instead of the ones that were never going to fit. The whole flow goes from importing jobs, to setting up your profile, to reviewing a ranked shortlist.

Built with: React, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Express, Gemini API, Vite

It starts where most job hunts already happen. A companion panel sits on LinkedIn and pulls in the jobs you've saved, so there's no copying links or pasting descriptions by hand. It also works the other way: when Lodestar prunes a job, the panel unsaves it on LinkedIn, so your saved list stays clean and only holds roles that are still in the running.

Filling out a long preferences form is the fastest way to lose someone at setup. So instead, you upload a CV or a few notes about what you're after, and Lodestar uses them to draft your career profile for you. You start from something that already sounds like you, and only tweak what's off.

Every job is scored against your career profile, and you can tune each part of it. Seniority, salary and location add or take away points, so a role that's too junior or underpaid drops down the list on its own. You mark the skills you want to use and the ones you'd rather avoid, so a job's stack counts for or against it. Then you decide how picky to be: every job gets a score out of 100 and lands in strong, consider or prune, and you set where those cut-offs sit. I laid it all out as plain, labelled controls rather than hidden settings, so you can always see what's shaping your scores.

Once everything is scored, the compact view puts every saved job in one list, sorted from best fit to worst. It's built for scanning: title, company, score and verdict on one line. You can get through dozens of roles in a minute and only open the ones worth a closer read.

A score on its own isn't much use if you can't trust it. Open any job and the score is broken down point by point, showing what helped it and what held it back. That makes it easy to spot when your profile needs adjusting, and it makes the final call on each job yours, not the tool's.

Lodestar started as a tool for my own job search and grew into a full product, designed and built by me from first sketch to working app. That's how I like to work: design and development in the same hands, so nothing gets lost between the mockup and the code. If you've got a product that needs that kind of care, I'd love to hear about it.

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