Frequently Asked Questions

CareerID is a career story bank. You collect structured accounts of your real work experience — called STAR+ stories — and use them to generate tailored resumes, cover letters, and interview prep for specific roles.

It is not a social network, not a public profile, and not a bulk-apply tool. The story bank is private. You decide exactly what gets shared and with whom.

You start by importing your resume (PDF, DOCX, or JSON). CareerID parses it and suggests normalised skill names, improved bullet points, and a stronger summary — you can accept or skip each suggestion.

Then the chatbot guides you through your first story: a real situation from your career, structured into STAR+ format (Situation, Task, Action, Result, Lesson). Most users collect their first two stories in under 30 minutes.

From there, you can generate a tailored resume for any role in minutes.

CareerID is free to start — no credit card required. We are in early access. Pricing for advanced features (unlimited ProfileViews, job discovery, full interview prep) will be introduced later. Early users will be given fair notice before any free features become paid.

You can import your existing resume. CareerID supports PDF, Word (DOCX), Reactive Resume JSON, and JSON Resume formats. After import, an AI enrichment step normalises skill names (JS → JavaScript, k8s → Kubernetes), standardises job titles, and suggests improved bullet points — all optional for you to accept or skip.

A story bank is a structured archive of the things you've actually done at work — specific challenges you solved, projects you led, decisions you made, and what resulted. Each story is saved in STAR+ format and tagged with competency categories (e.g. system design, team management, cost optimisation). Once collected, each story can be reused across every application you make.

STAR+ is an extended version of the STAR interview format:

• Situation — the context and background
• Task — what you were responsible for
• Action — what you specifically did
• Result — the outcome, ideally with a metric
• Lesson — what you learned or would do differently

CareerID also extracts competency tags, quantified metrics, and scale indicators (team size, revenue impact, user counts) to make stories searchable and matchable against job requirements.

Three to five stories is enough to generate a strong resume and interview prep for a specific role. Ten or more gives you coverage across most common competency areas — so you can tailor every application without collecting new stories each time. The bank grows with your career; you only collect each story once.

No. The chatbot only asks questions to help you recall and articulate what you already know. The STAR+ transformation structures your answers — it does not invent facts, metrics, or outcomes. You review and approve every story before it is saved. If a result section has no metric, it says so rather than fabricating one.

Resume builders start with a blank page and a template. CareerID starts with your stories — structured, specific accounts of what you've done — and generates resume content from those. The difference: a resume builder formats what you give it. CareerID helps you figure out what to say, then formats it. The story bank also travels with you across every job search, so you're not starting from scratch each time.

LinkedIn is a public social network. Your profile is visible to everyone, and the platform controls the data. CareerID is private by default. Your story bank is yours — no employer can see it without a link you explicitly generate and send. We do not sell access to your profile and we are not building a social network.

Bulk applying is self-defeating for three reasons:

1. Employer filters are smarter now. ATS systems flag mass-apply patterns. Companies add cover letter prompts and structured story questions specifically because of AI spam.
2. Generic applications have near-zero signal. A resume that could belong to anyone gets treated as anyone — which means no one. One application with specific metrics and behavioural evidence stands out more than a hundred generic ones.
3. Getting shortlisted is only half the problem. A user who bulk-applies has done nothing to prepare for the interviews they do get. CareerID's value continues post-shortlist — the same story bank powers the interview prep.

CareerID is built on the opposite belief: apply to fewer jobs, win more of them.

No — they solve a different problem. AIapply and similar tools reduce the mechanical burden of submitting applications (filling out forms, tracking applications). CareerID builds the substance behind the application — the story bank, the tailored resume, the interview prep. You could use both: CareerID to build strong application materials, an auto-apply tool to handle the form-filling. They operate on different layers of the job search.

Generic interview coaching tools give you practice questions pulled from a standard behavioural question bank. CareerID generates interview questions from your actual stories — questions a hiring manager would plausibly ask based on the specific claims in your STAR+ narratives. The prep is personalised to you, not to the average candidate.

Nobody, unless you choose to share them. Your story bank is private. The only way an employer sees your content is if you generate a ProfileView link and send it to them yourself. Stories marked as prep-only never appear in any shared view, regardless of your settings.

No. There is no employer-facing search over candidate profiles in the current product. Employers only see what you explicitly send them via a ProfileView link. Even in the future JobRole employer portal (Phase 5), candidates must apply — employers cannot browse unsolicited.

No. Your stories, resume data, and profile information are never used to train AI models — ours or anyone else's. We use Anthropic Claude and OpenAI APIs to process your requests. Both providers offer data processing agreements that prohibit training on customer data.

Deleting your account permanently removes your stories, profile data, and generated documents from our systems within 30 days. ProfileView links you have previously shared will stop working immediately on deletion.

CareerID supports four import formats:

• PDF — AI extracts the data
• Word (DOCX/DOC) — AI extracts the data
• Reactive Resume JSON — directly mapped (v3 and v4+)
• JSON Resume — directly mapped (jsonresume.org standard)

All formats normalise into the same internal schema. The import never overwrites existing data — it adds alongside.

CareerID uses Anthropic Claude for all story extraction, STAR+ transformation, resume generation, interview prep, and enrichment. OpenAI is used only for generating semantic embeddings (for job matching). No other AI providers are used.

Not yet. CareerID is a web app that works on mobile browsers. A native mobile app is not on the current roadmap — we are focused on making the core story collection and generation experience work well on desktop first.