User Guide: Career Profile Management

This guide explains how to build a powerful Career Profile in Kandid.pro and why it is the single most important thing you can do to improve your job search results.

This Is Not a Resume Editor

This is the most important thing to understand before you start: your Career Profile is not a resume.

A resume is a filtered, one-page snapshot of your career tailored for a specific role. Your Career Profile is the opposite — it is your complete, unfiltered career record. Think of it as a private, structured database of everything you have ever done, built, delivered, led, or learned across your entire working life.

You are not trying to write a document here. You are recording your career history as richly and completely as possible — every project, every skill, every achievement, every tool you have worked with, every team you have led, and every result you have delivered. The more you put in, the more the AI has to work with.

Once your profile is built, Kandid.pro's AI engine takes over. For every job you apply for, it:

• Reads the job description and identifies the key skills, experience, and competencies the employer is looking for
• Searches your Career Profile for the most relevant projects, achievements, and skills that match those requirements
• Writes a tailored Resume, cover letter, and email that speaks directly to that specific role — drawing only from what you have actually done

The result is a personalised, high-quality application produced in seconds. But the quality of that output is directly limited by the richness of your profile. A thin profile produces generic output. A detailed profile produces applications that read like they were written by someone who truly understands the role.

The rule is simple: add everything. The AI will decide what is relevant. You should never leave something out because you think it might not matter for a particular role.

Your Profile Powers Every AI Feature

Your Career Profile is not only used for document generation. It is the foundation for every AI-powered feature in Kandid.pro:

• Resume & Cover Letter Generation — the AI selects and tailors content from your profile to match each specific job description
• Job Matching — the AI compares your skills and experience against role requirements to score how well you match and identify gaps
• Interview Preparation — the AI draws on your real projects and achievements to help you prepare relevant, specific answers
• LinkedIn Profile Generation — the AI crafts a compelling summary from your career history
• Email Drafting — the AI writes personalised outreach and follow-up emails grounded in your experience

Every one of these features gets better the more complete your profile is.

Why More Detail Produces Better Output

When the AI generates a tailored Resume, it does not rewrite generic statements — it retrieves the most relevant content from your profile and uses it. If the content is not there, the AI cannot invent it.

The same principle applies to Skills. A skill with no context is just a keyword. A skill with vendors, applied organisations, proficiency level, and implementation notes gives the AI the depth it needs to reference that skill convincingly in your documents.

The Benefit: Your Single Source of Truth

• Enter once, use everywhere: You record your career history once. The AI leverages it for every application, forever.
• Never scramble for details: Dates, metrics, project outcomes, technologies — all stored and searchable. No more trying to remember what you delivered at a job three years ago.
• Consistent and accurate: Every application draws from the same verified record, so your professional story is always coherent.
• Target different roles: Create multiple profiles (e.g., an "Executive Leadership" profile and a "Technical Programme Manager" profile) to let the AI frame the same career history for different audiences.
• Seamless default selection: Your Primary Profile is automatically used as the default when you create a new application manually or import a job via the Chrome extension — no extra steps required.

Creating a Profile: The Profile Creation Wizard

When you create a new Career Profile, a guided wizard walks you through the two essential setup steps.

Step 1: Profile Name

Give your profile a clear, descriptive name that identifies its purpose. Good examples:

• Senior Engineer
• Tech Lead – Fintech
• Executive Leadership
• Startup / Founding Role

The name is for your reference only and helps you quickly select the right profile when starting a new job application.

Step 2: Profile Type

This is one of the most important settings in Kandid.pro. The Profile Type you select is passed directly to the AI generation engine and controls how your Resume and cover letter are written — the tone, emphasis, narrative voice, and what the AI chooses to lead with.

Choose the type that best reflects the kind of roles you are targeting with this profile:

Tip: If you are targeting two distinct types of role (e.g., individual contributor engineering roles and engineering manager roles), create two separate profiles — one set to Technical / Engineering and one set to Management / Leadership. Each profile will produce AI output tailored to that audience.

The Primary Profile

When you have multiple profiles, one is designated as your Primary Profile. This is the profile Kandid.pro uses automatically in two key workflows:

• New Application (manual): When you create a new job application through the application form, your Primary Profile is pre-selected as the default. You can change it to any other profile before submitting.
• Chrome Extension import: When you capture a job directly from a job board using the Kandid.pro Chrome extension, the application is automatically created using your Primary Profile, so the AI generation process can begin immediately without any additional setup.

Tip: Set your most-used profile as Primary. For most people, this is the profile that covers the broadest range of roles they actively apply for. If your job search shifts — for example, you move from targeting individual contributor roles to management roles — update your Primary Profile accordingly.

You can change which profile is Primary at any time from the Career Profile management page.

The Career Profile Editor

When you open a profile for editing, the page is organised into three key areas.

Career Timeline Ribbon

Across the top of the editor sits a full-width visual timeline of your career. Each of your roles appears as a coloured bar spanning its date range, and your qualifications are shown below the role bars in a separate education lane.

• Colour coding — each employer is assigned a distinct colour so overlapping or concurrent roles are easy to distinguish at a glance.
• Click to navigate — click any role bar to instantly jump to that role's detail card in the main content area.
• Current roles — active (no end date) roles are indicated by a dashed right edge, extending to today's date.
• The ribbon is scrollable horizontally on long careers; a "now" indicator line marks the current date.

Left Navigation Panel

A fixed panel on the left lists all profile sections — Summary, Roles, Career Highlights, Skills Portfolio, and Qualifications — along with item counts for each.

• Click a section name to jump directly to it in the content area.
• Role sub-items — your individual roles are listed beneath the Roles entry for direct one-click navigation to any role card.
• Quick-add button — hover over any section row to reveal a + (or pencil) icon. Click it to immediately open the add/edit form for that section without scrolling.
• The currently active section is highlighted in the nav.

Section Content Canvas

The right side of the page contains the profile sections, each in its own collapsible card. Only the active section is expanded; all others collapse to a compact header row. Click any collapsed row to expand it and begin editing.

How to Build an Effective Career Profile

Your goal is completeness, not brevity. Unlike a resume, there is no page limit here. Record everything — you can always add more later, and the AI will select only what is relevant for each role you apply for.

Navigate to the Career Profile section of the application and open a profile to begin editing.

1. Personal Details

Fill this out first. It includes your name, contact information, and a link to your LinkedIn profile. This information is used to populate the header of your generated CVs.

2. Career Roles

Add every role you have held — not just recent ones. Older roles may contain skills, industries, or achievements that are highly relevant to certain applications, and the AI will surface them when needed.

• Add Each Role: For every position you've held, create a "Career Role" entry. Include the company name, your title, and the start/end dates.
• Be Accurate with Dates: The AI uses these dates to construct your professional timeline and can condense older roles automatically, so accuracy matters.
• Include everything: Volunteer roles, contract work, part-time positions, and interim roles all count. If you developed a relevant skill or delivered a meaningful outcome, record it.

3. Career Activities — The Heart of Your Profile

For each role, add Activities — these are the records of what you actually did, built, solved, led, or delivered. This is where most of the AI's raw material comes from, so the more you record here, the better every AI output will be.

Think of each Activity as a project or achievement entry in a database, not a bullet point for a resume. Write freely and completely. The AI will extract and distil what it needs.

• Cover every significant project or responsibility — don't filter based on what feels "relevant." Add it all. What seems unrelated to one role may be exactly what another employer is looking for.
• Write in paragraphs, not bullet points: The AI retrieves and uses full narrative blocks. A rich paragraph describing the context, your actions, the challenges, and the outcomes gives the AI far more to work with than a terse bullet point. More context always produces better output.
• Quantify wherever you can: Numbers are powerful signals for the AI and make your generated documents far more compelling. Include specifics like:
  • Increased revenue by $1.2M in the first year of deployment...
  • Reduced deployment time by 45%, cutting release cycles from fortnightly to weekly...
  • Led a team of 15 engineers across three time zones...
  • Supported over 20,000 global users with 99.95% uptime...
• Use the STAR Method as a guide: Frame each activity around the Situation (what was the context?), Task (what were you responsible for?), Action (what did you specifically do?), and Result (what was the outcome?). This structure gives the AI clear, outcome-driven stories it can draw from for any application.
• Don't edit for length: Write as much as you need to capture the full story. A single well-written paragraph about a complex project is worth more than five vague one-liners.

4. Skills Portfolio

Your Skills Portfolio is your professional skills library — a living record of what you know, what you have used, and where you have applied it. Every skill you add here becomes part of your career intelligence, used by Kandid.pro's AI to match you to job requirements and strengthen your tailored documents.

Navigate to the Skills Portfolio section within your Career Profile to get started. If you imported a Resume, Kandid.pro will have attempted to pre-populate your skills — review, confirm, or remove entries as needed before adding anything new.

Adding a Skill

Click + Add Skill to open the skill editor. Each skill entry has the following fields:

• Skill Name (required) — The name of the skill, tool, certification, or area of expertise. Examples: Stakeholder Management, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Project Management, Adobe Creative Suite, Infection Control, Financial Modelling.
• Category (required) — Group your skill so your portfolio stays organised. Choose from existing categories or create your own. Suggested categories include:

• Proficiency (optional) — Rate your depth of experience with this skill. The proficiency level is shown as a colour-coded badge in your Skills Portfolio and is included in the context passed to the AI, so your generated documents can reflect your actual level of expertise accurately.

• Vendors / Platforms (optional) — If the skill is tied to a specific platform or vendor, add it here. Examples: Microsoft, Oracle, Atlassian, AWS, Workday.
• Where You've Applied It (optional) — List the organisations where you have used this skill. This helps the AI contextualise your experience when generating tailored documents. Examples: Medibank, ANZ Bank, Department of Health.
• Detail / Notes (optional) — Add context about how you have applied this skill — specific implementations, scope, or outcomes. The more detail you provide, the more targeted your AI-generated documents will be.

Viewing Your Skills Portfolio

The Skills Portfolio supports two display modes, toggled via the grid/list icons in the toolbar:

• Tile view (default) — Skills are grouped by category and displayed as cards. Each card shows the skill name, proficiency badge (if set), vendors, and where applied.
• Table view — All skills appear in a compact table with columns for Name, Category, Proficiency, Vendors / Platforms, and Where Applied. Useful when you have a large portfolio and want to scan or compare entries quickly.

You can also filter by category using the Category dropdown in the toolbar to focus on a specific area of your portfolio.

Tips for a Strong Skills Portfolio

• Aim for depth over quantity — a detailed skill entry is more useful than 50 blank ones.
• Set a Proficiency level on every skill — this signals to the AI how confidently to present each capability in your documents.
• Include skills even if they feel obvious — the AI uses everything.
• Don't limit yourself to hard skills; leadership styles, communication approaches, and methodologies are equally valuable.
• Revisit your portfolio after each role or major project to keep it current.

5. Qualifications & Certifications

• Add Your Education: Include your degrees, universities, and graduation dates.
• List Your Certifications: Add any professional certifications you hold (e.g., "PMP," "AWS Certified Solutions Architect"). This provides the AI with "Differentiator" skills that can give you an edge.

Importing Your Career History

If you have an existing Resume or LinkedIn profile document, you can import your career history directly into a Career Profile rather than entering it manually.

Accessing Career Import

Open any Career Profile and look for the Import Career button (gold AI gradient style) at the top of the page.

Supported Formats

Import Workflow

1. Click Import Career.
2. Select your file using the file picker.
3. For JSON or XML files (previously exported from Kandid.pro): the import completes immediately and a summary notification confirms what was imported.
4. For DOCX or PDF files: the file is sent to a background AI processing job. You will see a "Processing in background" message. Continue working — the page updates automatically when processing is complete.

What Gets Imported

A successful import populates the career profile with:

• Roles (work experience entries)
• Activities (bullet points within each role)
• Skills Portfolio entries
• Qualifications
• Certifications

The import summary notification tells you exactly how many of each were created.

Note: Importing from a DOCX or PDF uses AI to parse unstructured text, so results may vary depending on how the original document was formatted. Review the imported data afterwards and make any corrections — particularly to dates, role titles, and activity descriptions — before using the profile for document generation.

Exporting Your Career Profile

To back up your career profile or transfer it to another profile, use the Export button next to Import. Choose Export as JSON (recommended for re-importing) or Export as XML. The file downloads immediately.