Paste both and see, in under ten seconds, which of its requirements your CV answers and what is missing from the rest. Then practise the questions those gaps would get you asked.
The job ad asked for required
Event-driven architecture: queues, outbox patterns, and failure modes not on the CV
They said
“I have not built one. I am comfortable with retries and dead letters, but I have never implemented an outbox or had to reason about exactly-once delivery.”
do not claim this yet
Prepare to discuss direct experience designing or maintaining event-driven systems with queues, outbox patterns, and handling failure modes in production.
The job ad asked for required
Strong PostgreSQL: able to read a query plan and know why an index is not being used not on the CV
They said
“We moved the billing service from MySQL to Postgres 15 last year and the month-end reconciliation went from about 80 seconds to under 2. I read the plan and saw a sequential scan: the predicate wrapped the indexed column in a date function, so the index could not be used.”
write this down
Led PostgreSQL migration for billing service, optimizing slow queries by rewriting predicates and creating partial indexes, reducing month-end reconciliation from 80s to under 2s.
The job ad asked for required
Experience leading code review across a team not on the CV
They said
“At Nordlys I own the review process rather than just taking part in it. I wrote the checklist we review against, set the rule that nothing waits more than one working day, and I pair with the two juniors through their first reviews.”
write this down
Owns and leads the code review process for the Nordlys Logistics billing service, mentoring junior devs and reducing review turnaround time from three days to under one.
Under ten seconds, no account
Paste or link both documents. See which requirements your CV answers and what is missing from the rest.
A few minutes
Written from the gaps it found. Create a free account to see them marked, and the lines to add to your CV.
About an hour, with an account
Around ten questions and the follow-ups they prompt, each marked out of ten with two better answers beside yours.
What the account is for. Every answer marked against criteria it shows you, with the acceptable answer and the excellent one written beside yours.
Describe a time when you had to motivate your team during a difficult project phase.
What you said
“Our delivery slipped about six weeks and the team was pretty demoralised. I ran a session to talk it through, we reprioritised the backlog together, and I shielded them from some of the stakeholder noise. We shipped, a bit late, but the team stayed intact and morale recovered.”
An acceptable answer
“We were six weeks behind on a platform migration and the team was flagging. I cut the scope to what the client had invoiced against, set up a weekly demo so progress was visible, and took the stakeholder calls myself. We hit the revised date and nobody left.”
An excellent answer
“Eight weeks into a platform migration we were six weeks behind and two of five engineers were interviewing elsewhere. I owned the recovery. I cut scope to the three integrations the client invoiced against, moved us to a weekly demo so progress was visible to the team as well as the sponsor, and took the daily stakeholder calls myself so the engineers kept uninterrupted mornings. We delivered the reduced scope on the revised date, kept all five engineers, and the remaining integrations shipped the following quarter.”
Key elements · 3 of 5
Pacing efficiency · 72 / 100
Two minutes forty against a three-minute budget. Room to add the evidence rather than cut.
Overall match rate
Your average question score, the job ad's requirements, your seniority, communication and pacing, combined.
This answer
scored 0–10Why eight
Situation and action are specific and owned. The result is asserted rather than evidenced: “a bit late” and “morale recovered” carry no figure.
Marked against
Ownership of the decision · a measurable starting position · a named outcome · what changed for the team.
Beacon extracts the job ad's requirements, marks which ones your CV already evidences, and weights the question set towards the ones it cannot find. The count and mix come from the role category and the seniority in the job ad, so an intern and a senior applying to the same team get different interviews.
Multi-team delivery ownershipEvidenced
Stakeholder management to director levelEvidenced
Budget accountability over €1MNot evidenced
Vendor negotiationNot evidenced
How many questions you get
A full interview is around ten questions and the follow-ups they prompt; a short one is exactly five. That is the same whatever your level: seniority changes how hard they are, not how many you get.
| Role | Technical | Behavioral | Situational |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical | 70% | 20% | 10% |
| Research | 60% | 20% | 20% |
| Creative | 40% | 30% | 30% |
| Consulting | 40% | 30% | 30% |
| Management | 30% | 40% | 30% |
| Operations | 30% | 40% | 30% |
| Education | 30% | 40% | 30% |
| Business | 20% | 50% | 30% |
Technical
70% technical 20% behavioral 10% situational
Research
60% technical 20% behavioral 20% situational
Creative, consulting
40% technical 30% behavioral 30% situational
Management, operations, education
30% technical 40% behavioral 30% situational
Business
20% technical 50% behavioral 30% situational
Your level sets the difficulty instead: the same question count, pitched at an intern or at an executive.
Record your answer instead of typing it. It is transcribed and marked identically, which is useful because speaking is what you will actually do.
Every session is kept. Answer the same question again next week and Beacon shows you whether the mark went up, and against which criteria.
Checks are free and unlimited, and every job ad you check comes with a free short interview. No card. Full interviews cover every requirement in the job ad and are sold in packs, and are not on sale yet.
It keeps your search
Every check and every interview is kept under the job ad it was for. Each session shows how far it moved the match, so you can see the answers that are working, and the ones that are not yet.
It does not invent you
Names, employers, schools, skills and years are matched to your document, and anything it does not contain is left out and named. A role with no dates says so, rather than guessing a month.
Paste your CV and the job ad. Beacon asks about ten questions, follows up on what you say, and marks every answer against criteria it shows you.