Job search diagnostic
Are you applying too narrowly?
The answer above holds regardless of your situation. The questions below narrow it to the one cause your own answers point at, which is a different and more useful thing than a list of possible reasons.
Am I applying to too few kinds of jobs?
A search can be too narrow, and the symptom is specific: you cannot find enough roles to apply to, rather than applying and hearing nothing. Those two problems look similar from inside and have opposite fixes. The usual causes of a too-tight funnel are matching on an exact job title rather than on the work, a geographic constraint tighter than the role requires, and stacked preferences — remote, plus a sector, plus a level, plus a size of company — where each is reasonable alone and the combination leaves almost nothing. The fix is to relax the constraint that costs you least.
- The symptom is scarcity, not silence
- Too narrow means too few roles exist to apply to. If plenty exist and none reply, the problem is different and narrowing further will make it worse.
- Titles are the tightest filter
- Searching one exact title excludes the same work under other names, and title vocabulary varies enormously between employers.
- Preferences multiply
- Each additional criterion cuts the pool, and four reasonable ones can leave a handful of roles a month.
- What this page will not do
- It will not tell you to abandon your requirements. Some constraints are not negotiable, and the point is to know which are costing the most.
Source and method
RoleSprint, from the structure of the job-search process rather than from a dataset. Verified 2026-08-30. This page carries no third-party statistics, because the honest ones for this question do not exist in a citable form. What it holds is a decision tree over facts you report about your own search, and the reasoning behind each branch is stated on the page so you can disagree with it. Nothing you select is transmitted anywhere.
Narrow it down
3 questions you can answer without looking anything up. Nothing you select leaves your browser.
What this page will not claim
Stated here rather than in a footer, because the value of a diagnostic is entirely in knowing what it cannot see.
- This page cannot see your market or count the roles available to you.
- It reasons from what you report about your own criteria.
- Whether a constraint is worth relaxing is your decision, not a diagnosis.
Every outcome this page can reach
Published in full so the tool cannot be a black box. If none of these describes your situation, the page is the wrong one and says so rather than forcing a fit.
Your funnel is not too narrow
Leave the targeting alone and look at what happens after you apply. Adding more targets to a search that already has enough is how applications become generic.
Searching by exact title is hiding most of your market
Take three postings you liked and list every title they were advertised under. Search on that set and on the two or three skills that actually define the work.
Your constraints are multiplying against you
Rank the constraints by what you would actually give up, and relax the cheapest one for a month. Measure whether supply changes before relaxing a second.
The market for this specific role may be genuinely thin
Look at adjacent occupations that use the same skills. Where a specific market is thin, the realistic move is a nearby one rather than more search effort.
What to do next
This page narrows one symptom. The full diagnostic looks at the whole search at once, which matters when more than one thing is wrong.