Help & Guide — Career Backstory

Quick Reference

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.

This is where the app opens, every time. Life Distiller is the landing tab for every account — new or long-established, full library or empty one. The app doesn't try to guess where you left off or send you somewhere different based on what's in your account, so there's no flash of one tab before it switches to another. Click straight through to any other tab whenever you want; nothing here has to be finished first.

Want some pointers? With Guide Me on (Account → Profile), the button at the top of Life Distiller (and of every other tab) opens a panel beside the page with a few tips for where you are, and this guide's section for that tab.

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, or paste a piece of your resume. Shorter and medium-length versions are generated automatically from what you write. Best for a quick brain-dump. Under the box, What is this? lets you say what you pasted (see below).
🧭 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.

Military Service is grounded in real government data, not just AI guesswork: your Branch of Service and MOS/Rating/AFSC are matched against the official U.S. Dept. of Defense Military Occupational Classification (MOC) Crosswalk — the same government dataset O*NET publishes for translating military job codes into their real civilian occupational equivalents. When your code has a genuine civilian match (most administrative, technical, logistics, and support roles do), the platform pulls the actual O*NET occupation title and uses it to ground your resume-facing language, instead of relying on the AI's own general sense of what a role "probably" translates to. A smaller set of combat-arms-type codes (e.g. Infantry) have no true civilian equivalent in the government's own data — those fall back to plain-language AI translation instead of forcing an artificial civilian title onto a role that doesn't have one. Retired and renumbered designations are covered too. If you served under a code that no longer exists — common for anyone more than a few years out — it is still matched: the crosswalk carries roughly 4,400 retired designations alongside about 12,000 current ones. Enter your code the way it read on your orders; you do not need to look up whatever replaced it.

The company description — and why it is only about the company

Choosing Work/Employment in Guided Entry reveals three optional per-employer fields. They are saved once per employer and reused on every future resume, so you only ever fill them in once:

Employer Header Line — how that job prints at the top of its Experience block. This is normally built for you from your job title, the employer name and the location, so leave it blank unless you want it worded differently.
What This Company Does (2–3 sentences) — the company description. It prints in italics directly under the employer header, above that job's bullets.
Key Systems Built — a comma-separated list. The “Key systems built:” heading is added for you, so start with the list itself.

The company description is only about the company — never about you. What it does, roughly how big it is, what market it serves. Your team size, your percentages and your results belong in your bullets; putting them here as well prints the same claim twice on one page, a few lines apart, which is the first thing a reader notices.

Why it earns the space. Most company names tell a reader nothing. A recruiter scanning bullets that describe what you did with no visible sign of what industry you did it in can screen the application out for a mismatch that isn't real. Two or three sentences of company context prevent that, give your bullets somewhere to sit, and give an interviewer an easy opening.

Written it already, or need to add one to a job you entered a while ago? Your Library → Other Entries has an add row for exactly this: pick the employer, write the description, click + Add. You can also edit an existing one there at any time.

Free Form: What is this?

A story about a job, a resume summary and an education line can look a lot alike, so Free Form lets you say which one you pasted:

Let Career Backstory decide — the default. It reads what you pasted and picks one of the three below. The result screen says which it picked and why.
A story or a job — turn it into resume bullets — the usual path: a job header, the line under it, bullets, skills and tools.
My resume summary or profile — keep it as my summary — saved as your Summary, in your words. No job bullets are written from it, because a summary describes your whole career, not one job.
My education — keep it word for word as my Education — saved to Professional Development & Education exactly as you wrote it (a heading line such as “Education” is left off). Nothing is guessed from it: no bullets, skills or competencies. Choosing Education in Guided Entry does the same.

Picked the wrong one? Choose the right option under What is this? and process it again, then remove the extra entry in Your Library.

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 the bullets written. Both of these save immediately when you submit.

Your words are kept. If you paste bullets you already wrote, each one is tidied (past tense, grammar) but not expanded — no added scope, audience or results. The line you wrote under a job's title and dates is saved word for word as that job's company line, and never turned into a bullet.

Below the bullets, the result screen shows two more lists when they apply:

Please Check These — anything saved with words that are not in what you wrote: a bullet with an added phrase, a skill or tool you did not name, or an employer name that looks like two names. Each one says which words were added. Click Keep if it is true, or Remove to delete it from your library right there.
Also Added to Your Life Record — everything else that was saved besides the bullets: job headers, the line under each one, tools, competencies and skills. Edit or remove any of these in Your Library.

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.

Field	Notes
Full Name	Required — exactly as you want it printed on your resume
Email	Required
Phone	Optional
City / State	Optional
LinkedIn	Public profile URL, optional
Portfolio	Optional — only appears on the resume if filled in

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

Do this before your first resume: Resume Assembly pulls this block in automatically. You'll see a reminder banner across the app until it's been saved at least once, and a one-time nudge before your first story if you haven't set it up yet.

Quick Reference

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.

📝 Log a posting (JobCycle, the free tracker)

On JobCycle, the free account, this tab is called Job Postings and opens on Log a posting instead. You type or paste the company name, job title, the posting's URL, the salary as posted, the date you applied, how you applied and where it went, the company's address and phone, and the person you contacted. Only the company name and the job title are required. Nothing is analyzed: the posting is saved exactly as you entered it, and the job site is read from the link.

A posting with a date applied goes straight to Applied - Pending Confirmation, and Tracking starts its check-in reminders from that date; one without a date waits in Ready to Apply. Your address, phone and contacts for a company are saved for you alone, and filled in the next time you log a posting there. You can log up to 100 postings a day. Your details, at the top of the tab, holds your own name, phone, city and state; it opens by itself until you've saved a name, and Account → Profile links back to it. The fit score, Analyze Posting, Boolean Job Search, resumes and the other AI tools are part of the paid plans.

🔍 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. Changing the pay range counts as a real change, so coming back to add one you forgot won't be refused as a duplicate.

💵 Pay range (Optional)

A third field under the posting URL. You usually don't need it — the analyzer reads the whole posting and picks up a published range on its own, wherever in the posting it appears. Fill it in for the two cases it can't cover:

The posting doesn't state a range at all. Roughly one posting in four says nothing about pay.
You know a range the posting never printed — a number a recruiter gave you on a call, an hourly W2 rate, a base-plus-bonus-plus-equity shape, a government grade and step. This is the case nothing automatic can ever reach, and it's the main reason the field exists.

It's free text on purpose — "$140k base + 20% target bonus" and "$85/hr W2, no benefits" are both real answers that two number boxes would destroy. Anything you type here overrides what's in the posting, because if the two disagree, you're the one who has spoken to the employer. It's what Application Guide uses to answer a compensation question, and it's cleared along with the text and URL when you clear the form.

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 →.

Walkthrough

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 five sub-tabs — Assemble, Guided Assembly, Personal 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). Picking a tab doesn't build anything — it only sets what will be built; the Assemble → button at the end of the steps below is what runs it:

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.
Resume Only – 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.

Find the posting (skipped entirely in No-Posting mode) — type part of a job title or a company name 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.
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.
Choose the situation framing (optional) — the dropdown directly under the employer list. It starts on Use my profile situation (default), which uses the Situation saved on your account (the one you confirm in Guided Assembly) and names it in the dropdown so you can see which one is in effect. If none is saved yet it says so, and the resume assembles with no situation framing. Choose No situation framing to leave framing off for this resume. Pick one of the ten Situation Profiles and it frames this one resume — it does not change the default saved on your account. Coming in from Guided Assembly, whatever you confirmed there is already selected here, so the framing in effect is visible rather than implicit, and you can still change it for this resume only. It clears itself after every Assemble Another, so a framing never carries silently into your next resume.
Pick the resume type — or leave it on Auto-detect resume type (see the table below).
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

Type	Best for
Tailored (A)	One specific posting — the default whenever you've picked a posting. Bullets weight toward what's most relevant to that role.
Best Foot Forward (B)	A general-purpose, profile-refresh version, not aimed at any one posting.
Recruiter Full (C)	A recruiter or search firm audience — every employer in your Life Record is included, none dropped for length.
1-Pager (D)	A short, condensed version for networking or a quick overview. Trims to your strongest, most recent points only. Pick it manually — not auto-detected.
Startup / 0-to-1 (E)	Early-stage/startup-flavored postings — reframes your experience toward ownership and building from scratch. Same facts as Tailored, just reframed; nothing is invented.

In No-Posting mode: Tailored can't be used, since it genuinely needs a posting to tailor against. If you leave the type on Auto-detect (or try to pick Tailored) in No-Posting mode, the engine substitutes Best Foot Forward instead — so in practice, No-Posting resumes are B, C, D, or E.

Your cover letter matches your resume type: whichever resume type you pick (or Auto-detect lands on), the paired cover letter reinforces the same angle — a Startup/0-to-1 resume gets a cover letter that leans into ownership and building from scratch, a 1-Pager gets an equally brief 2-paragraph letter instead of the usual 3. In Cover Letter Only mode (no resume built), the type dropdown still shapes the letter on its own.

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.

"Applying to this role?" nudge: once a resume or cover letter finishes (for any posting-based mode — not "Resume Only – No Posting"), a banner offers one-click links straight into Application Guide and Interview Prep for that same posting, no re-searching needed. Click Skip for now to dismiss it for that result — it reappears fresh the next time you assemble something.

🎯 Guided Assembly (Optional)

A situation-first way into resume building: confirm which of ten Situation Profiles best fits where you are right now (Early Career, Mid-Level, Senior, Director/VP, C-Suite, Late Career, 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.

Confirm your Situation — accept the pre-filled suggestion or pick a different one from the dropdown. Saves automatically the moment you change it. Leaving it on — not sure yet — is a valid answer: nothing is saved, and Assemble behaves as it does with no framing chosen.
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.
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.

Your Situation changes the resume in two ways. The first is section order — the on-screen preview, the downloaded .docx and the downloaded .pdf all reorder to match. A Career Changer resume leads with Skills ahead of Core Competencies and Experience, to put transferable strengths first. The second is content rules: two Situations now change what the writing itself is told to do, not just where sections sit. The table below is the whole picture, and it is the same whether you set the Situation in Guided Assembly or in Assemble's own dropdown.

What each Situation does

Situation	What changes
Early Career	Professional Development moves high on the page — at the start of a career that section carries your education, so it is treated as load-bearing content rather than a footer. Skills and Core Competencies do more of the work, and the summary runs shorter. Thin experience is stated plainly and never padded: fewer bullets means a shorter resume, which is the correct output rather than a problem to fix.
Mid-Level, Senior, Director/VP, C-Suite	The standard section order — Summary, Core Competencies, Experience, Tools, Skills, Professional Development. These four share one order today and add no content rules of their own; the resume type you pick is what differentiates them.
Late Career	The most differentiated of the ten. Experience leads straight after the summary, because at this stage the depth of the record is the argument. It also caps the employer list at four — applied visibly in the employer picker before you assemble, never silently on the server, so you can see exactly who was set aside and put any of them back. When the cap actually drops someone, the summary is replaced by a Career Accomplishments section of three paragraphs drawn first from the roles the cap removed, so that experience still reaches the page instead of disappearing with the employer.
Career Changer, Returning to Workforce	Skills lead, ahead of Core Competencies and Experience, so transferable strengths are read before the chronology.
Military/Veteran Transition	Standard section order. The real differentiation is in translating your record into civilian language, which happens in the Life Distiller and Analyzer pipelines rather than in section order.
Long-Tenure / Few Jobs	Experience leads, ahead of Core Competencies and Skills — the same order Late Career uses, reached for a different reason: with few employers, the depth within each one is what carries the resume.

Situations are about who you are right now; resume types (A–E above) are about who a particular resume is for. They stack — a Late Career 1-Pager gets both sets of rules, and where the two genuinely conflict the Situation's rules win.

✏️ Personal Assembly (Optional)

Choose which sections your resume has and the order they appear in, then build it on the same tab. Only the sections you choose are built from your library, so a section you switch off is never written.

Choose the situation for this resume. It starts on your saved situation; pick another, or No situation framing, for this resume only. Tick Also make this my saved situation to change your saved one. The tab then tells you what that situation does here: Late Career keeps your most recent employers and can turn your Summary into Career Accomplishments; Early Career keeps the summary short. If a situation only sets an order, the tab says it changes nothing here.
Choose your sections. Switch a section off to leave it out, and use Up and Down to change the order. Your name and contact details always come first. The tab tells you as you go if leaving something out has a knock-on effect, or if your library has nothing yet for a section you switched on.
Build your resume on the same tab: find the posting, set the employers and resume type, and press Assemble. The preview shows only your sections, in your order, and the downloads match it.

Saving a format

After your resume appears, Personal Assembly asks whether to save the format: your sections and their order, never the resume itself. A name is filled in for you, and you can change it. Next time, pick it from Start from at the top of your sections. If you started from a saved format and changed it, you can Update it or Save as new. Start from also offers a few starting points (Skills first, No summary, Education first, Experience first) and your situation's own order. You can keep up to 20 formats.

A Personal Assembly counts as one resume, the same as Assemble.

📝 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.

Find the posting — same search box as Assemble (job title or company), including the Browse recent postings shortcut described above; only postings you've already analyzed show up.
Paste the questions, one per line — up to 8 per run. Run it again for more. Copying out of an application form often drops the line breaks and runs every question together on one line. The box will usually still separate them, and it shows a running count of how many questions it can see — check that count before you generate, and put the line breaks in yourself if it disagrees with you. Don't number the questions; paste each one as it's worded.
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.

Grounded, not generic: every answer only draws on what's actually in your Life Record — it won't invent an employer, metric, or accomplishment that isn't there. Treat each draft as a strong starting point to personalize, not a final answer to paste unedited.

Compensation questions: include them, and expect one of two answers. "What are your compensation expectations?" is worth pasting in like any other question, and which answer you get depends on the posting rather than on you.

If you filled in the Pay range field when you analyzed the posting — it's the optional third field under the posting URL — that is what the draft uses. It beats anything in the posting, including a published range that disagrees with it. Didn't fill it in? You can re-analyze the posting and add it; changing the pay range doesn't count as a duplicate.
Otherwise, if the posting publishes a range, the draft anchors to that range as the posting states it — including when the range sits far down a long posting, past the point most of the description gets read.
If the posting publishes no range, the draft contains no figure at all, on purpose. It answers in terms of the level and scope of role you're seeking, that total package matters alongside base pay, and that you're ready to discuss specifics. It will never invent, estimate, or infer a number — a figure you can't stand behind is worse than no figure, because you then have to defend it or walk it back.

If you want to name a number, that number is yours to add. The draft is the frame you put it in, not the decision.

🎤 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.

Same honesty rule as Application Guide: suggested answers only lean on real background — where your Life Record is thin on a topic, the answer coaches you on how to approach it rather than inventing specifics.

Quick Reference

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). This sub-tab is mainly for finding and cleaning up content Life Distiller already generated rather than typing new entries from scratch, and it has one add row: the company description (see below), because that one line prints on every resume and there was otherwise no way to write it without running a whole story through Guided Entry.

Your timeline: Check my timeline for gaps

You add jobs and education at different times, so no single entry can see a gap between them. Check my timeline for gaps, near the top of Your Library, reads your whole library at once and lists any stretch of six months or more that nothing covers:

between two jobs,
between finishing school and your first job after it (the last year on your education line counts as your graduation year), and
since your last job ended.

Each stretch has two buttons. Add what this was opens Life Distiller's Gap Period form with the dates filled in — you choose the words, and you can leave the reason out. No need to explain tells Career Backstory not to ask about that one again. A stretch you have already entered as a Gap Period is not listed.

It asks once, too. When your library has two or more jobs with dates and a stretch you haven't answered, Your Library shows the list when you open it. The button checks again any time — use it after you add more jobs or education. It never guesses why a gap happened.

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.

Thin-library nudge: if your Competencies (under 8), Skills (under 8), or Tools & AI Stack (under 5) banks are running light, you'll see a banner with an "Add some →" link — resumes lean on these banks too, so it's worth topping them up.

Walkthrough

5. 📊 Reports

What your search is telling you, and one place to see every posting you've analyzed, filter and export it, and update its status and key dates without leaving the table.

Two sub-tabs: Insights and Postings report (and, on JobCycle, a third: Work-search report). The tab always opens on Insights.

📈 Insights

Patterns across every posting you've analyzed, refreshed each time you open Reports. It appears as soon as you've analyzed a posting. Three numbers sit at the top: Postings analyzed (with how many rated Strong or Moderate Fit), Applied, and Interviews (with the share of your applications that became interviews).

Below them, three tables split the same postings three ways:

By job family — which kinds of roles fit you best, and which ones turn into interviews.
By where you found it — which sources (a job board, LinkedIn, a recruiter, a referral) bring you the best-fitting postings.
By rating — whether your Strong Fit postings really do turn into interviews more often than your Stretches.

Each row has two halves. How they rated: Good % is Strong plus Moderate as a share of the rated postings, Strong % is Strong alone, then a count for each rating (Unrated last, and left out of both percentages). What happened: Applied, Interviews and the Interview rate.

“Too few to read”: an interview rate needs at least 5 applications behind it. Below that, one lucky interview would look like a trend, so the table says so instead of showing a number.

Where you found it comes from the optional Where did you find it? field when you analyze a posting. Leave it blank and it's read from the posting's link, which says where the posting lives — not always where you found it. If a posting landed in the wrong job family, correct it in that posting's detail view and Insights follows.

📅 Work-search report (JobCycle)

On JobCycle, the free account, Reports has a third sub-tab, Work-search report, for the weekly record unemployment programs ask for. Pick your state and a week (Sunday to Saturday, named by the Saturday it ends). For Virginia every contact is laid out in the order the VEC weekly form asks for it: company name, complete mailing address, company phone, date of contact, type of work, whether you applied by fax, email or online, the fax number, email address or website, the person you contacted and their title, and the result. Each value has a Copy button. New York gets the Work Search Record (WS5) table. Every other state gets Virginia's layout until we have checked its form.

The line at the top counts your contacts against your state's weekly minimum (Virginia asks for 2, New York for 3) and warns you when the same employer appears twice for the same opening. The result follows the posting's stage (applied, interviewing, closed), and you can change it for any contact. You can also add a job fair, workshop or networking event, and download the week as a CSV or print it as a PDF. Your whole log is in Account → My Data, and it downloads automatically before an account is deleted, because states ask you to keep these records for a year.

📊 Postings report — 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:

Report	Shows
All Postings	Everything you've analyzed, newest first
Active Pipeline	Analyzed, Applied, and Interviewing postings
Applied	Postings marked Applied, with application date & link
Interview Tracker	Postings marked Interviewing, with interview date & fit notes
Offers & Rejections	Postings marked Offer or Rejected, with the relevant date

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.

Shortcut: if you set Status to Applied - Pending Confirmation (or Applied - Confirmed) and haven't filled in a Date Applied yet, the platform stamps today's date for you automatically.

Exporting

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

Walkthrough

6. 📋 Tracking

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

Phase summary cards

Five cards show a running count for each phase of your pipeline: 🔍 Evaluation, 📤 Application, 💬 Interview, 🤝 Offer, ✅ Closed. Every posting ends in Closed, and its status says how it ended (Passed, Ghosted on Application, Offer Accepted and so on). 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, open postings get flagged yellow, then red, when they've waited too long at their stage, or when a Next Action Date has passed. The clock counts from what actually happened, not from your last edit: from when you applied, when they confirmed receipt, or your last interview round. Each flagged row says what it is counting from (for example "23 days since you applied"). When a posting goes red, the row offers the likely close, such as Mark Ghosted on Application. Nothing closes unless you click it. Click View → to open the posting in the shared detail view.

Timeline

Each posting's detail view has a Timeline: every dated thing that happened to it. Stage changes are recorded for you. Add the rest yourself: how you applied (company site, a job site that relayed your resume, a recruiter, a referral), who confirmed receipt, and each screening and interview round, with its type, format and who you met. A job site saying "submitted" is not the company confirming receipt, so record who actually confirmed.

Thank-you letters

Under each screening and interview round on the Timeline, Write a thank-you drafts a short email and a LinkedIn message (300 characters or fewer) to the person you met. There is one button per person, so after a panel each person gets their own. The draft is written from your notes on that round and your own library, so add a line or two of notes about what you discussed: with no notes, the letter stays general rather than inventing a topic. The letter follows where the posting stands: while you are still in the running it says you would welcome the next step; once the company has decided not to move forward, the button reads Write a reply to their decision and the letter thanks them and leaves the door open for future roles, with no talk of a next conversation. Edit anything, then send it yourself. CBS never sends it for you. Click I sent the email (or I sent it on LinkedIn) and the letter is saved on the Timeline exactly as it went out. When they answer, click They replied. Sign as sets the name the letter is signed with (this browser remembers it); left blank, it uses the first name on your profile. You can draft each thank-you up to three times. Thank-you letters are included in your plan and do not use a credit.

Letters are signed exactly as you write it in Name you sign letters with, in your Resume header (your resume keeps your full name). The first time you type a name in a letter's Sign as box, it becomes that signature; with neither, letters sign with the first word of your full name.

Follow-ups while you wait

While a posting waits on them, after you apply or after an interview, the Timeline shows which follow-up is next and when it is due, with a button to write it. There are three: at 7, 14 and 21 days after you applied or after your last round. The first is a light touch, the second a fuller follow-up with one thing from your background, the third a short final check-in. Each comes as an email and a LinkedIn message; you send it and click I sent the email, and the next one becomes the one to write. If nothing comes back by day 28, CBS suggests marking the posting Ghosted. The clock runs from the application or the interview and does not restart when you send something, so it always shows how long they have actually been quiet. When they answer, click They replied and the follow-ups stop.

If they told you when they would get back to you, record it in They said they'd get back by on the application, the receipt confirmation, the screening or the round. The first follow-up is then due two business days after that date, with the same one-week steps after it.

Offers

When a posting reaches an offer, its detail view shows Offer details: the first and final base figures (so you can see what negotiating was worth), bonus or equity, start date, the date you must respond by, and, if you declined, why. The posting's own pay range is shown alongside. Action Tracking turns an offer red two days before its respond-by date. A verbal offer counts: record it and note "verbal" until the written one arrives. When you mark an offer Offer Accepted, the app offers to close your other open postings as Withdrawn, only if you click it.

While an offer is on the table, the Timeline offers to draft your reply: Accept the offer, Negotiate or Decline. Once you have marked it accepted or declined, it offers the letter that confirms that; on a posting you marked Withdrawn, Write a withdrawal note. The numbers in these letters come only from you. An acceptance restates the offer exactly as you recorded it in Offer details, so fill those in first; with nothing recorded it names no figures. A negotiation asks for exactly what you type, in your own words and numbers, and never adds a figure of its own; leave it blank and the letter simply asks to discuss the offer. A decline or a withdrawal gives a reason only if you write one. Like the other letters, each comes as an email and a LinkedIn message that you send yourself.

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.

Walkthrough

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.

Quick Reference

8. ⚙️ Account & Billing

Your plan, usage, billing history, and your own data — separate from the seven 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 resumes (cover letters, application guides and interview prep are included and not counted) (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.

Trying the demo? The public demo signs you into a shared, pre-filled account so you can look around the whole app without entering any of your own history first. On a demo session the top-right control reads Exit demo rather than Log out, and it returns you to the Career Backstory home page instead of the login screen. Everything else behaves like a normal session — including the idle sign-out described next.

Signed out after a while away? If the app sees no activity anywhere on the page (no clicks, typing, or scrolling) for an hour, it signs you out automatically for security — a 60-second warning toast appears first with a Stay logged in button, so you won't lose in-progress work without notice. It only tracks idle time on an open tab; loading the app fresh always resets the clock.

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 and the Want some pointers? buttons; nothing else about how the app works changes.

Want some pointers?

With Guide Me on, each tab has a Want some pointers? button at the top right. It opens a panel on the right side of the screen with up to three tips for where you are right now, and that tab's section of this guide. Nothing opens by itself. Close it with the × or Esc; switching tabs closes it too.

A posting's detail view (from Tracking or Reports) has its own Want some pointers? button. Its tips are about that posting where it stands now — the thank-you, follow-up and offer letters it is ready for — with the Tracking section of this guide. If the panel is already open when you open a posting, it switches to that posting, and back when you close it.

Give a month, get a month

When it is offered, Billing & Usage shows a Give a month, get a month card with your own code and a link to share. You get a code once your email is confirmed and Your Library has at least one story in it.

Your friend gets a free month as soon as they sign up with your link or code. Codes are for new accounts that have not had a plan.
You get your month once your friend has confirmed their email and added their first story. With no plan, or a plan that has ended, that is a free month; on a paid plan, 30 days are added to it; on Try It, the month is added when Try It ends.
You can earn up to 3 months a year. Your friends still get their month after that.
You cannot use your own code, and each account can use a referral code once.

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:

State	What it means
Try It / Monthly / 6-Month Prepay	Full access — job posting analysis, resume/cover letter generation, Career Direction, and everything else metered, up to your plan's limits.
Maintenance (lapsed)	Your plan ended and hasn't been renewed. Your library stays fully viewable and editable, and any unused credits are held for you, but the metered AI tools are locked until you resubscribe.
Active Library	A lower-cost, library-only plan ($20 for 6 months or $30 for 12) you can pick from Maintenance if you just want to keep browsing and editing your library without paying for the full AI toolset. Any Analyzer/Resume/Cover Letter credits you had aren't lost — they're banked, and upgrading to Monthly or 6-Month Prepay unlocks them again immediately.
Community / charity access	If you came in through a community or charity partner code, your account runs on free access instead of a paid plan — Billing & Usage shows what's included and who granted it, with no Renew or Switch-Plan buttons since there's nothing to charge. Contact us if you need it extended.

Have a code? If you were given a code (as part of a community/promo offer, or by our support team resolving an issue), enter it under Billing & Usage — a "Have a code?" field is there whether or not you're currently on a paid plan. A code from support works even while you're an active paying customer; it just adds the credit or extends your renewal date without changing anything else about your plan.

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

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

This cannot be undone: once the account is deleted, there's no recovery — that's why your data downloads first, automatically, before anything is removed. If you just want a backup copy without deleting anything, use the download buttons above instead.