Using Career Backstory

1. ✨ Life Distiller

Turn any life or career experience into structured entries in your Life Record — the library every resume gets built from.

Everything you add here becomes the raw material Resume Assembly pulls from later, so the richer this library is, the better your resumes will be. There's no wrong entry to add: a job, a certification, a volunteer role, a project, even an unexplained gap all count.

Four sub-tabs

This tab always opens on Guided Entry — it doesn't remember whichever sub-tab you were on last, so don't be surprised if you don't land back where you left off.

• 🎯 Guided Entry — pick a story type (Work/Employment, Military Service, Education, Volunteer/Community, Certification/Training, Gap Period, Project/Invention, or Something Else), fill in a few short fields plus a free-text narrative, optionally add themes, and submit. Best when you already know exactly what you want to capture. Military Service captures branch, rank/rate, MOS/rating/AFSC, unit, and clearance, and translates rank/MOS language into civilian-equivalent resume terms — grounded in the official U.S. Dept. of Defense/O*NET Military Occupational Classification Crosswalk (see below), not just an AI guess.
• ✏️ Free Form Entry — skip the type picker and just write in one open text box. Shorter and medium-length versions are generated automatically from what you write. Best for a quick brain-dump.
• 🧭 Guided Interview — a step-by-step Q&A that walks you through work history, education, certifications, volunteer work, and projects one at a time. Built for a brand-new account with an empty Life Record. Saving works a little differently here — see below.
• 🪪 Resume Header (Required) — the contact block that appears at the top of every resume the platform builds for you. See "Resume Header" below.

What happens after Guided Entry or Free Form Entry

The pipeline runs five steps — Type Detection, Metadata Extraction, Bullet Generation, Version Compression, and Writing to your Life Record — then shows you the story type, seniority level, job families, and number of bullets written. Both of these save immediately when you submit.

Guided Interview — saving works differently

Each step has an Add & Continue → button (the final step reads Save & Review → instead) — but nothing is actually written to your Life Record at that point. Every entry you add during the interview is just held locally while you work through the steps. Only when you reach the review screen and click Submit All to Life Record → does anything get saved to the server. You can remove any queued entry from the review screen first, so it's safe to add more than you end up keeping.

Resume Header

This is not your work history — job stories live in the other three sub-tabs. Resume Header is just the basic identifying details: your name exactly as you want it shown, plus how to reach you.

Click Save My Details and it's saved to your account immediately. Update it anytime — nothing else needs to change when you do.

2. 🔍 Job Posting Analyzer

Paste a posting, get a fit score, build out the company record, and — when you want to cast a wider net — generate a ready-to-paste Boolean search string.

Like Life Distiller, this tab always opens on Analyze Posting — it won't remember if you were last on Boolean Job Search.

🔍 Analyzing a posting (Required)

Paste the full job posting text and its URL, then click Analyze posting → (the button relabels to Analyze another posting → once you've run one this session). An 8-module scoring pipeline reads the posting, scores your fit as a Hybrid Match Score out of 100, extracts keywords/skills/seniority signals, creates or updates the company's record, and looks for recruiter or hiring-manager contacts — all in about 30–60 seconds.

"Hybrid" means the score combines two different comparisons, not just one: keyword overlap (the words your background and the posting actually share) plus semantic matching — comparing the actual meaning of your background to the posting, so a bullet about "leading a system migration" can still surface for a posting that says "change management," even with no shared words.

Everything is saved automatically as soon as the pipeline finishes — there's no separate save step. The results screen ends with a "Full results saved" banner that links straight into Reports.

If you paste something that looks identical to the posting you just analyzed, you'll see a same-session warning with Analyze anyway / Cancel — a safeguard against accidental double-submits, not a hard block.

Company Enrichment — two ways to run it (Optional)

Analyzing a posting already creates a basic company record on its own — enrichment goes further, adding LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and contact details. Skip it and your analysis and score are unaffected; come back and run it anytime.

• Right after analyzing a posting — click Enrich Now → on the results screen to fill in company profile, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and contact fields via web research.
• Standalone, anytime — use the Enrich an Existing Company card further down the same sub-tab. Type any company name already in your records and click Find & Enrich → — useful when a company record is missing contacts or profile details that weren't captured the first time around.

🔎 Boolean Job Search (Optional)

Not a search of your own data — this builds a search string to run on job boards. Pick a job family (pulled from your Life Record), optionally narrow by location, and optionally describe anything different you want to explore, then click Generate search string →. You'll get a ready-to-paste Boolean string (with a one-click Copy), a handful of suggested adjacent job titles, a short rationale, and quick-launch links: Open in LinkedIn → and Open in Indeed →.

3. 📄 Resume Assembly

Builds a tailored resume — and optionally a cover letter — straight from your Life Record, following the platform's tailoring rules. No manual copy-pasting bullets together.

This tab has four sub-tabs — Assemble, Guided Assembly, Application Guide, and Interview Prep Q&A — and, like Life Distiller and the Job Posting Analyzer, always opens on Assemble. It won't remember if you were last on one of the other three.

📄 Assemble — Step 1: Choose a mode (Required)

Three mode tabs at the top of the panel — pick one (they're mutually exclusive, same as any other sub-tab group in the app):

• Create Resume & Cover Letter (default) — builds both together.
• Cover Letter Only — skips the resume pipeline and generates just a cover letter for a posting you pick.
• Create Resume – No Posting — skips picking a job posting entirely and builds a general-purpose resume straight from your Life Record. Good for keeping a resume on file, or a first pass before you've analyzed a specific posting.

1. Find the posting (skipped entirely in No-Posting mode) — type part of a job title into the search box and click Search →; only postings you've already analyzed show up. Pick the exact one from the results list. Don't remember the exact title? Click Browse recent postings instead to see your last 10 analyzed jobs without typing anything — whichever posting you picked most recently (in Assemble, Application Guide, or Interview Prep) is pinned at the top as a one-click Continue with shortcut, and it's remembered across days.
2. Set the employer order — defaults to newest-to-oldest automatically. Use the up/down arrows to reorder which employers appear and in what order, and toggle off any employer you'd rather leave out of this particular resume.
3. Pick the resume type — or leave it on Auto-detect resume type (see the table below).
4. Click Assemble → — the pipeline runs five stages: Finding job record → Loading Life Record modules → Analyzing keywords & role type → Running the tailoring engine → Assembling the preview.

The five resume types

The preview and download

The finished preview includes your header, professional summary, skills, core competencies, experience bullets grouped by employer, tools & AI stack, and professional development (the last two have their own "Include in download" checkboxes). From there, download the resume as a .docx or a .pdf (and the cover letter in either format too, if you built one), or click Assemble Another to start fresh. "Cover Letter Only" mode shows a simpler preview with just the cover letter downloads and Assemble Another.

Every download is logged automatically — see Reports and Tracking below for where that history shows up.

🎯 Guided Assembly (Optional)

A situation-first way into resume building: confirm which of nine Situation Profiles best fits where you are right now (Entry-Level, Mid-Level, Senior, Director/VP, C-Suite, Career Changer, Military/Veteran Transition, Returning to Workforce, or Long-Tenure/Few-Jobs), optionally pick a posting, then continue into Assemble with that posting already carried over. The dropdown starts pre-filled with a suggestion based on your Life Record — mainly your stories' detected seniority, with any Military Service story taking priority — but it's your call to confirm or change, and it's saved to your account so it's remembered next time.

1. Confirm your Situation — accept the pre-filled suggestion or pick a different one from the dropdown. Saves automatically the moment you change it.
2. Pick a posting (optional) — same search box and Browse recent postings shortcut as Assemble. Skip this if you want to build straight from your Life Record with no posting to tailor against.
3. Click Continue to Assemble → — lands you on the Assemble sub-tab with your posting (if you picked one) already selected, ready for the same steps described above.

📝 Application Guide (Optional)

Turns an online application's own screening questions into drafted, first-person answers grounded in your real Life Record — paste the actual questions from that application (things like "Why do you want to work here?" or "Describe a challenge you overcame"), and get a draft for each one back.

1. Find the posting — same search-by-title box as Assemble, including the Browse recent postings shortcut described above; only postings you've already analyzed show up.
2. Paste the questions, one per line — up to 8 per run. Run it again for more.
3. Click Draft answers → — about 15–20 seconds.

Reopening a posting you've already generated answers for shows that same set again automatically — no need to regenerate just to see what you already have.

🎤 Interview Prep Q&A (Optional)

Predicts the kind of questions a specific posting and company are likely to ask in an interview, spread across four categories — Behavioral, Role-Specific, Motivational/Culture-Fit, and Company-Specific — with a suggested answer for each, grounded in your real background.

Pick a posting the same way as Assemble and Application Guide, then click Generate interview prep → (about 20–25 seconds) for 8–10 questions with suggested answers. Like Application Guide, reopening a posting you've already generated prep for shows that set again automatically.

4. 📚 Your Library

Browse, filter, and fine-tune everything the platform has stored about you — bullets, tools, skills, competencies, and the smaller supporting details — without waiting on the AI pipeline.

Life Distiller is where new material gets created; Your Library is where you go back and manage what's already there. Opening this tab always lands you on Life Library.

Five sub-tabs

• 📖 Life Library — your experience bullets. Add one directly (pick an employer, write the bullet, click + Add), or filter what's already there by employer, job family, and a "no employer set" toggle, then sort by rank, employer, or date.
• 🔧 Tools, 🤝 Skills, 🎯 Competency — each works the same way: a quick add row plus a filter/sort bar.
• 📋 Other Entries — everything that doesn't fit the four banks above (Headline, Sub-Headline, Story, Business Header/Description/Detail, Key Systems Built, Summary, and more). There's no add row here on purpose — this sub-tab is for finding and cleaning up content Life Distiller already generated, not for typing new entries from scratch.

Filter, not Search

Every text box in Your Library is labeled Filter…, not Search — that's deliberate. It only narrows down what's already loaded on your screen; nothing is queried from the server as you type. (Reports' job-title box, by contrast, is a real server search — see below.)

Editing and removing entries

Click the pencil icon on any entry to edit it in place — text, employer, type, rank, and job family, whatever applies — then Save or Cancel. Click the × icon to remove an entry entirely.

5. 📊 Reports

One place to see every posting you've analyzed, filter and export it, and update its status and key dates without leaving the table.

Saved reports

Pick one from the dropdown at the top, or build your own. Fields to show and Filters are collapsed by default (each toggle shows a live count of what's selected/applied) — expand either one, make your picks, and click Run Report →. Name it and click Save As New Report to reuse it later, or Delete This Report to remove a saved one. Five built-in reports come standard:

The one real search box in Reports

Inside Filters, "Filter job title…" is a genuine server-side query — unlike Your Library's client-side Filter boxes, it only takes effect once you click Run Report →.

Updating status and dates — two ways

Both save automatically the moment you change something — there's no separate "save" step for the table view.

• Row by row, right in the table — if Status or any date field (Date Applied, Interview Date, Offer Date, Rejected Date, Application URL) is one of your chosen fields, each cell is directly editable: a dropdown for Status, date pickers for the dates. Change it and it saves immediately, with a quick green flash to confirm (red if something went wrong). This is the fastest way to flag several postings in one sitting.
• Open a posting for the full picture — click any job title in the table to open its detail view, the same one used by Tracking. A Status & Tracking box at the top has all the same fields in one place — see the Tracking section below for the full field list.

Status options

Analyzed · Ready to Apply · Applied · Interviewing · Offer · Rejected · Closed.

Exporting

Click Export CSV → above the results table to download exactly what's on screen — your chosen fields, current filters — as a spreadsheet.

6. 📋 Tracking

A phase-by-phase view of your whole pipeline, plus a flagged list of anything that needs action.

Phase summary cards

Six cards show a running count for each stage of your pipeline: 📥 Intake, 🔍 Evaluation, 📤 Application, 💬 Interview, 🤝 Offer, ✅ Terminal. Click any card's count to open a scoped table of every posting currently in that phase, right on the page — click Close × to collapse it again. Counts refresh each time you open the tab, not continuously while it's open.

Needing Attention

Below the phase cards, postings get flagged red or yellow when they've sat too long without an update, or a Next Action Date has passed. Each flagged row shows its status, next action and due date, and how many days it's been since the last update — click View → to open it directly in the shared detail view.

Status & Tracking detail view

Whether you got there from a phase card, the flagged list, or Reports, you land on the same detail view. The Status & Tracking box holds every field you can update: Status, Application URL, Date Applied, Interview Date, Offer Date, Rejected Date, Next Action, Next Action Date, Interview Contact, and Confirmation Channel, plus a longer Interview Notes field with its own Save Notes to Library button. Make your changes and click Save →.

Resume History

Right below Status & Tracking in that same detail view, you'll see every resume you've built for that posting — its type (e.g. "Tailored (A)") and the date it was created. This answers "which resume did I send this company?" before a follow-up call or interview. Nothing to set up; it fills in automatically every time you download a resume for that posting from Resume Assembly.

7. 🧭 Career Direction

A synthesized read on where your own library and job searches are pointing — patterns, keywords, a "true north" role, and a set of real target roles to go after next.

Available once you've added a few Stories or Experience Bullets to your Life Record — that's what the Blueprint is built from, not a minimum number of analyzed job postings. If your library is still thin, this tab shows a nudge pointing you to Life Distiller or Your Library instead of an empty report.

What goes into it

Click Generate Blueprint and it pulls together your Stories, Experience Bullets, Core Competencies, Skills, Tools & AI Stack, your personalized job-family taxonomy, and — importantly — your own Boolean Job Search history from Job Posting Analyzer, so the Blueprint reflects the direction your own searches are already taking you, not just your resume content. Target roles are grounded in real O*NET occupation data, the same matching used by Boolean Job Search, rather than invented from scratch.

What you get back

Your True North Role archetype, the recurring patterns across your postings and searches, a categorized keyword bank, a strengths summary, primary and secondary target roles to search for next, resume-framing suggestions tied to each pattern, and a short note on what would sharpen the Blueprint further.

Refreshing and downloading

This isn't a live feed — click Refresh Blueprint any time your library or searches meaningfully change to regenerate it. Only your latest Blueprint is kept, not a history of past versions. Once generated, click Download as Word (.docx) to save a formatted copy you can keep or share.

8. ⚙️ Account & Billing

Your plan, usage, billing history, and your own data — separate from the six main tabs, reachable anytime from the top-right corner.

Click ⚙️ Account, next to Log out in the top-right corner of the app, to open it. Five sub-tabs:

• Profile — a read-only summary of your Resume Header details, with a link back to that tab to make changes (it's not a second place to edit them), plus the Guide Me toggle — see below.
• Billing & Usage — usage bars for job postings and pooled resumes/cover letters (used against your limit, any top-off remaining, anything carried over from a plan change). A banner appears once you cross 75% of either limit, with a link to top off.
• Billing History — a combined timeline of top-off purchases and plan changes. Purchases made with a real card show a View receipt link (Stripe's own official receipt — handy for expense reports or tax records); items granted by a code or by our support team don't have one, since no charge occurred.
• Support — send a message and we'll follow up by email; no need to re-enter your name or email, we already have it on file for your account.
• My Data — download your data any time, or delete your account. See below.

Guide Me — the progress tracker

A step-by-step bar above the footer, visible on every tab, tracking six milestones in order: header started, header complete, a Life Distiller entry added, your library filled out (Skills/Competencies/Tools past their recommended minimums), a posting analyzed, and a resume assembled. Each step fills in automatically as you go — nothing to click to advance it. Once all six are done, it shows a congratulations banner instead and stays there.

New accounts start with this on by default; if you'd rather not see it, flip the Guide Me switch off under Account → Profile — it takes effect immediately, no page reload needed, and you can turn it back on the same way anytime. Turning it off or on only affects this bar; nothing else about how the app works changes.

Plan states you might see

Billing & Usage adapts to whichever of these your account is currently in — it's not always the metered usage-bar view:

My Data — downloading your data

Two buttons, no account impact either way: Download Library (CSV) exports every entry in Your Library (employer, section, entry text, both condensed versions, keywords, and more). Download Job Postings (CSV) exports your full job postings list, including recruiter/HR/hiring-manager contacts and everything tracked on the Tracking and Reports tabs. Use these any time you just want a snapshot — nothing changes or deletes when you click either one.

My Data — deleting your account

1. Type your account email into the confirmation box.
2. Click Download my data & delete my account and confirm the warning dialog.
3. Your Library and Job Postings CSVs download automatically first, then your account and all its data are permanently deleted, and you're signed out.