Fit tells you if you match. Winnability tells you if you can win.
Every job tool scores the same thing: how well your experience matches the description. That is a useful number and it is only half of the decision, because a perfect match you will never get costs you the same afternoon as an average one you might.
Winnability is the other half: an estimate of whether this particular employer, on this particular posting, is still in a position to say yes. It is read from the posting’s own history rather than from your CV, which means it is knowable before you spend an hour on an application.
This page is about the score itself. Where it sits in the rest of the product — how roles are found, how the list is released, and what happens once you pick one — is on how jobdownup works.
What the posting’s history tells you
Four observations, all of them public, none of them requiring anything from inside the company:
How long it has been open. Measured from when the employer first published it, not from when a job board re-listed it. Boards reset that clock constantly; the career page does not.
How many times it has been reposted. A reposted role is one where the first attempt did not work. That is bad news for the employer and good news for a candidate who is not the imagined perfect hire.
How that compares to this employer's own median. Some companies simply take four months to hire. Ninety days open at that employer is normal and means nothing; ninety days at an employer who usually closes in three weeks means something.
How that compares to the market's median for the role. The same ninety days is a different signal for a Registered Nurse than for a Head of Engineering.
The counter-intuitive part
Most candidates read an old posting as a warning: it has been up for months, so hundreds of people must have applied and I am late. That reading is usually backwards.
A role that is far past its market’s median is not over-subscribed. It is under-filled. The employer has been through a pipeline and has not said yes to anybody in it, and every week that continues, the definition of an acceptable hire gets a little wider. That is the moment a CV that is not a perfect match gets read properly — and it is invisible if the only number you have is fit.
Worked through
Illustrative arithmetic on made-up inputs, so the method is legible. These are not measurements of a real employer.
When it is wrong
Three cases, and they are the reason winnability is shown beside fit rather than instead of it:
Evergreen postings. Some employers keep a req open permanently to collect CVs — high-volume retail, agencies, some consultancies. Age means nothing there, and reposts mean less than they look.
A req that is open but frozen. Budget pulled, hiring manager left, reorganisation. Nothing on the career page says so, and the posting ages exactly as if the search were live.
A genuinely hard, genuinely senior search. Some roles are open for six months because there are forty qualified people on the continent. Long-open is real, and it is not an opening for a near-match.
The employer-median comparison is what defends against the first case, because an employer who never closes a req has a median that says so. The other two are not solvable from outside the company, and a score that claimed otherwise would be lying about what it can see.
Why it cannot be copied quickly
Not because the arithmetic is clever — it is four numbers and a division. Because all four are history, and history cannot be back-filled. A tool that starts watching career pages tomorrow can tell you a posting exists. It cannot tell you the posting changed its salary band in June, or that this employer has re-advertised the same role three times since spring, because it was not watching. That record only exists if somebody was already keeping it.
See it on your own market.
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Published 2026-08-26. The market figures quoted elsewhere on this site are listed with their citations on the sources page; the worked example above is illustrative and is not one of them.