An aspect of providing job assignment optimization includes creating a feature vector from features extracted from a new job request. Each of the features is associated with a constraint on minimum requirements with respect to a level of experience of a potential candidate. An aspect further includes creating a feature vector for each employee that includes skills attributed to the employee and instances that each of the skills have been completed, searching feature vectors generated from the employee database for the minimum requirements indicated in the new job request feature vector, searching the feature vectors of the database for the minimum requirements indicated by constraints associated with the new job request, modeling aggregate utility of past experience of employees as a weighted sum of applied utility functions, and generating a score indicating a difference between a potential post assignment and a pre-assignment utility. An aspect also includes outputting qualified candidates.