Job descriptions are wish lists written by committee. Half the bullet points are copy-pasted from three different roles that left the team last year. If you treat every requirement with equal weight, you will spend all your time rewriting your CV for skills you will never use on the job.
The signal is not in the list. The signal is in the repetition.
When an engineering manager sits down to write a requisition, they rarely know what they want. They know what hurt them yesterday. They know the specific database migration that failed at two in the morning, or the specific handoff between teams that dropped a release. Those pain points leak into the text. They show up twice in the summary, once in the responsibilities, and again as the primary interview focus.
Read for the problem, not the requirements.
Count the verbs related to a specific domain. If a role mentions asynchronous Python twice in the first paragraph and once in the requirements, that is the core loop. If Kubernetes is listed tenth in a string of twenty buzzwords with no supporting context, it is tax to satisfy the recruitment database.
Two minutes spent counting repetition density beats two hours of keyword matching against every bullet point. You match your experience to their recurring pain, not their entire inventory of tools.
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