How matching works

Matching needs Solo plan.

The platform suggests people, organisations and opportunities by comparing your profile against theirs. This page documents what is compared, which determines how a profile should be completed.

Match explanations

Each match carries a score, a breakdown of its components, and a list of signals stating the specific reasons in plain terms — for example, “You share four interests”.

Where a match appears incorrect, the signals identify the profile field that produced it.

The prompt the product shows when matching has little to work withOpen /a/network/matches in the app

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What the score is made of

Four parts, weighted:

Part	Weight	What it measures
Overlap	60%	Shared terms across interests, match tags, focus areas and specialty
Meaning	30%	Semantic similarity of your written text
Distance	10%	How close you are geographically
Prior outcomes	up to +0.15	Connections with this person that you actually completed

The first three form a weighted blend summing to 1.0. The fourth is added to that total, which is then capped at 1.0.

Concrete overlap carries the greatest weight by design. It is explainable, stable over time, and more readily verified than a similarity judgement.

Field weights within overlap

Overlap is itself a weighted average, and the fields do not weigh equally:

Field	Weight	Applies to
Interests	3	People
Match tags	2	People and organisations
Focus areas	2	Organisations
Specialty	1	People

A field is scored only where both parties have completed it. If one party has a specialty and the other does not, specialty is excluded from the average rather than scored as zero. An empty field therefore does not reduce the score; it removes a route by which the member can be found.

The consequence: two well-suited members who have each completed only one field, and a different one, score zero against each other. Breadth across fields is beneficial, whereas breadth within a field is not.

Completed connections raise future matches

The bonus comes from connections you marked completed, and how much depends on the outcome you recorded:

Outcome	Bonus
Collaborated	+0.15
Opportunity	+0.12
Knowledge exchange	+0.10
Connected	+0.05

The bonus is added rather than weighted because the other three components predict a match while a recorded outcome confirms one. Confirmation is evidence of a different kind and therefore raises the score rather than competing for a share of it.

In practice, completing connections is the one matching input determined by recorded activity rather than by profile content.

Breadth dilutes overlap

Overlap is scored as shared terms divided by combined terms, not by the absolute number shared.

Two members each listing five interests and sharing three produce a strong match. Two members sharing the same three from lists of fifty produce a weak one. Adding interests to increase coverage weakens every match, including strong ones.

Be specific and concise. A small number of interests you actively work on outperforms a long list.

The same applies to tags on opportunities, and to an organisation’s focus areas.

Distance

Distance is banded rather than continuous:

Distance apart	Contribution
Up to 50 km	Full (1.0)
Up to 200 km	0.8
Up to 500 km	0.5
Up to 2,000 km	0.2
Further	0.05

The bands are measured in kilometres, not by national borders. Two members at opposite ends of a large country fall into the lowest band, while a cross-border pair 40 km apart falls into the highest. Shared nationality is not what is measured.

Where only a country is known, its centroid is used, so a country-level profile is scored from that country’s midpoint.

The floor is 0.05 rather than zero so that a relevant match on another continent still appears. As distance accounts for 10% of the score, it acts as a tiebreaker rather than a determinant.

Weak matches are hidden, not ranked low

Matches below a relevance threshold are excluded rather than ranked low. A short list therefore indicates that few candidates met the threshold.

When your matches update

You change	Refreshed
Your profile — interests, bio, specialty, location	Within about half a minute
Your organisation’s profile	Within about a minute, along with affected people
Nothing	Everything is recomputed nightly regardless

So editing your profile and reloading is a reasonable way to test a change. You do not need to wait for the nightly pass.

If you are not getting matches

In rough order of how often it is the cause:

1. Your profile is thin. Matching reads interests, specialty, focus areas and your written text. Empty fields produce nothing to match on.
2. Your interests are too broad. See above — breadth actively lowers scores.
3. Your tags are unique to you. Tags are a shared vocabulary; one nobody else uses connects to nobody. Prefer an existing tag that nearly fits over a precise one that stands alone.
4. There genuinely is not much nearby yet. Distance is only 10%, so this is rarely the whole story.

Note that connection matching and opportunity matching are the same machinery pointed at different things — improving your profile improves both.

My MatchesNetwork → My Matches