Questions people ask first.

Candidlyst is not a job board, and it does not search for jobs for you. You still bring in the roles you find yourself.

What Candidlyst solves is the next problem. Once you have bookmarked, saved, copied, or collected a pile of interesting jobs, how do you decide which ones are actually worth your time?

That is how the product started. The founder had the same practical problem. Step away from applications for a few days, keep bookmarking roles, then come back to a messy list and wonder, “Which of these should I prioritize?” and “Which ones actually align with what I want next?”

The first problem was prioritization. But solving that well required something deeper than keyword matching. The tool needed a way to compare each job against the candidate's real goals, constraints, background, and preferences. That led to one of Candidlyst's core ideas. Your application materials should not be built only from your most recent resume.

Most people's latest resume was tailored for a specific kind of role. It may leave out achievements, skills, metrics, projects, industries, systems, or leadership examples that matter for a different opportunity. Candidlyst helps you build from a broader Master Resume Bank, so the tool can draw from your full career of achievements, while still tailoring the final materials to the specific job.

Many job tools focus on just one piece of the process, finding jobs, rewriting a resume, checking keywords, generating a cover letter, or tracking applications. Candidlyst is built around the messy middle where candidates actually spend a lot of time, figuring out what is worth applying to, why it fits or does not fit, what strengths to emphasize, what concerns to watch, and how to turn your real experience into a focused application package.

It is also built to collect as little about you as possible. Many job-search and resume tools store your resume, work history, and preferences on their own servers to power matching and generation. The only personal information Candidlyst stores is the email address you log in with, nothing else.

In short: Candidlyst does not find the job for you. It helps you know the fit before you invest the time, then helps you build stronger materials from your actual background. And because job seekers are often navigating uncertainty, transitions, or periods without income, Candidlyst is designed to make that support affordable, transparent, and tied to the actions you actually use. You are not paying for a broad subscription full of features you may never touch. Instead, you build easy, self-curated intelligence about your own career, then spend credits only when you choose to run a specific action.

First of all, not everyone is comfortable working directly with AI chat tools, and Candidlyst is built so that friction never gets in the way; everything happens through forms and buttons, with the AI work handled entirely behind the scenes. That said, you could ask ChatGPT or Claude to review a job posting or draft a resume directly, and plenty of people do. What Candidlyst adds is structure and memory built specifically for a job search: a persistent Master Resume Bank and Background Digest that both grow and improve every time you use them, instead of you re-explaining your career from scratch in every new chat. It also handles the parts a raw chat interface was never built for: scoring and ranking a batch of jobs at once against criteria you actually weight, running platform-specific ATS simulations, and tracking every version of every application in one searchable library. And because every action shows its exact credit cost before you run it, you always know what a specific task actually costs, rather than an open-ended conversation with an unclear cost. If you already use ChatGPT or Claude for other things, the artifacts Candidlyst builds (your Digest, your Bank, your Writing Rules) make those conversations sharper too, since you can paste them in instead of starting from nothing.

No. Candidlyst does not search the web for jobs, scrape job boards, or decide what opportunities you should pursue. You bring the jobs. Candidlyst helps you evaluate fit, tailor credible application materials, run ATS checks, and track what happens.

No. Everything is guided: you fill out forms and click buttons. The AI work happens behind the scenes. And if you are an experienced AI user, the profile artifacts Candidlyst builds will make your own prompting elsewhere faster and more accurate too.

Start in the Tools tab. Build your Job Preferences (what you're looking for and how to weight it), your Background Digest and Master Resume Bank (your career history, so scoring and generation both work from real material instead of a blank page), and your Writing Rules if you want a consistent voice across applications. Each has a guided builder that turns your answers into a properly structured document. Once that foundation is in place, head to Analyze, drop in a batch of jobs, and get your first ranked results.

Prefer to watch it first? The how-to videos walk through this same setup step by step.

The Digest is a compact summary used only for scoring jobs, so the AI doesn't unfairly flag a skill gap you don't actually have. The Resume Bank is a much larger, detailed document used only for generating resumes and cover letters. Keeping them separate keeps both jobs accurate and fast.

A good starting point is 10 to 12 resumes, but there's no strict cap, and more genuinely helps. The real value comes from variety, not just volume: resumes from different roles, different industries, even ones you haven't touched in years all add detail that a single recent resume alone would leave out. Don't hesitate to toss in older resumes you might otherwise discount, some of your best material may be buried in something from years ago. The more complete a picture your Bank and Digest have of your full career, the more accurate your fit scores will be, and more importantly, the stronger the application packages Candidlyst builds for you.

Yes, treat them as living documents, not a one-time setup. As you gain new experience, finish projects, or pick up new skills, use the Resume Bank Builder and Background Digest Builder in Tools to add resumes reflecting your most current work. Just as important: every time a generated resume introduces something genuinely new (a new metric, project, or capability), use "Reconcile with Resume Bank / Background Digest" on that Library card to fold it back in. That way your foundation keeps getting stronger every time you apply, without you needing to remember to update anything by hand.

No. Candidlyst works with job postings from any source. The demo videos happen to show LinkedIn because that is where most people find roles, but the tool does not care where the posting came from. Paste text directly, screenshot a posting from any site, or copy content from a company careers page, a recruiter email, a PDF job spec, or anywhere else. If you can read it, Candidlyst can process it.

Anthropic's API doesn't currently support direct Word or Pages document uploads for this kind of processing. Pasting text or uploading a clean screenshot is what it can reliably read today. If that changes, direct upload of either format is expected to become supported. In the meantime, the workaround is quick: open your Word or Pages document, select all, copy, and paste the text directly. Takes a few seconds and avoids any parsing risk entirely.

No. Candidlyst tailors from your real career history. You build a Master Resume Bank once (there's a guided builder for this), and every generated resume pulls from that real material. It doesn't invent experience, it helps you express experience you've actually had more effectively for each specific role.

Yes, and you should always review generated content before using it. Candidlyst's prompts instruct the AI to work only from your actual Resume Bank and Background Digest, never to invent employers, titles, dates, or metrics, but no AI system is perfectly reliable, and mistakes can still happen, especially with numbers, dates, or company names. Always read every generated resume, cover letter, and ATS analysis carefully before submitting it anywhere. It's also worth occasionally reviewing your Resume Bank and Background Digest themselves for accuracy, since every generated document draws directly from them, so an error there can quietly show up in everything built afterward. If something isn't accurate, edit it directly in the Library or in Settings before exporting or submitting.

Yes, always, and encouraged. The builders create a helpful starting framework, but every resulting document lives in an editable field in Settings. You can adjust anything by hand at any time, whether that's a quick fix or a full rewrite. As with any AI tool, you will also want to do a once-over for accuracy and framing to be sure you are comfortable with the inputs being used for analysis and generation.

Not recommended, at least not without a few minutes of your own review first. Check everything for accuracy: dates, numbers, and specifics should match what you'd actually say out loud. Enrich it with details only you would know, a specific team size, a name, a detail that makes it unmistakably yours. Put it into a template you're genuinely comfortable presenting. This is exactly what the Word/Pages export is built for. And most importantly: be sure you can speak confidently, in an actual interview, to anything the materials claim about you. Candidlyst gives you a strong, accurate starting point built from your real history. It's not a substitute for making the final version genuinely your own.

No tool can guarantee that. What it gives you is an honest, specific simulation of how your application would likely be evaluated, so you can fix real gaps before you apply, instead of guessing.

Every job is scored across eight categories: Role Alignment, Salary Fit, Location Match, Seniority Match, Mission Fit, Remote Flexibility, Industry Fit, and Travel Fit. Each category is evaluated independently on a 0-100 scale, where 100 means an ideal match and 50 means the job didn't provide enough information to judge. Your overall fit score is a weighted average of those eight category scores, where the weights reflect how much each dimension matters to you personally.

You set those weights in Job Preferences. If location is everything and travel is irrelevant to you, your weights should reflect that, and the score will too. If you haven't tuned your weights yet, the defaults give a reasonable general spread, but the scoring gets meaningfully more useful once it reflects your actual priorities.

Two other factors influence the score beyond the eight categories: posting age and repost status. A job that has been open for many weeks scores slightly lower, on the theory that fresh postings are more active opportunities. A job flagged as a repost gets a small additional adjustment. Both are minor, but they keep the ranked list from surfacing stale listings at the top.

After the eight-category score is calculated, the AI identifies specific strengths and concerns from comparing the job description against your background. Strengths explain why a category scored well. Concerns are things the AI flagged as potential gaps or friction points.

Each concern comes with a correction budget: a number of points that can be recovered in that category if you dismiss the concern. If you disagree with a flagged concern, or you know your real experience addresses it even if the AI couldn't tell from your materials, dismissing it recovers those points and updates the score. The budget is calculated per category, so clearing a concern in a heavily weighted category moves the score more than clearing one in a category you've given low weight.

You can also add your own custom flags, both strengths and concerns, with a defined severity. If you know something about this specific employer or role that the AI couldn't surface from the job description alone, add it and it factors in the same way.

Dismissals and custom flags apply only to that one job. Each new job starts fresh.

They are a useful starting point, not a verdict. The score reflects how the AI interpreted the job description against your stated preferences and Background Digest, which means it is only as accurate as those inputs. A vague job description will produce a less confident score. A Background Digest that doesn't yet fully reflect your experience will produce a score that underrepresents your fit.

The transparency is deliberate: you can see the category breakdown, the rationale behind each category's score, and the specific strengths and concerns that influenced it. If something looks wrong, you can correct it, dismiss a concern, add a flag, or reanalyze with updated preferences. The score is meant to be a sharp, editable first opinion, not a number you are stuck with.

Scoring is only as precise as the preferences and Digest you give it to work from, so the two are designed to reinforce each other over time.

Keep your Background Digest current. The Digest is what the AI checks before flagging a skill gap. If it doesn't know about a tool, framework, or credential you genuinely have, the AI will flag it as missing. Adding it to the Digest fixes the problem at the source, so every future job scores more accurately without you having to dismiss the same concern repeatedly.

Tune your Job Preferences, especially the free-text fields. The guided builder gets you started, but the real precision comes from editing the preferences document directly in Settings. If you find the same concern keeps surfacing across many jobs, that is often a signal that your preferences need to be more specific about what you actually consider acceptable. For example, if the AI keeps flagging a seniority concern for roles you consider a strong match, you can clarify in your preferences how you think about seniority for the types of roles you are targeting. The more specific your preferences, the less you will need to manually correct individual scores.

Use Reanalyze after updating either document. Reanalyzing applies your current preferences and current Digest to an already-analyzed job, so results stay in sync without starting over.

Yes. For any requirement flagged as a Gap or Partial fit in the ATS scorecard, you can expand a text box directly under that requirement and describe in your own words what real experience you have that addresses it. A quick AI pass then phrases it professionally, impact-forward, and without fabricating anything beyond what you actually provided. It also suggests exactly where in your resume to insert or modify a bullet to capture it.

Once you have made the edit to your resume, you can re-score just that one requirement without running the full ATS analysis again, so you can immediately see whether the gap has moved to Partial or Strong. The overall ATS score reflects the last full analysis run, and a new full run will pick up all your changes at once when you are ready.

If you change your Job Preferences, your scoring weights, your Background Digest, or your location or salary settings after a job has already been analyzed, that job's score won't reflect your new settings until you reanalyze it. Reanalyzing also re-checks how stale the posting is: a job's score factors in how long it's been posted, and that calculation only runs at the moment you analyze or reanalyze it, it doesn't update on its own as time passes while the job just sits in your results. A job that looked fresh three weeks ago may be quietly stale now, and reanalyzing is what catches that. Reanalyzing lets you re-score already-analyzed jobs against your current preferences and current posting age, without starting over, at a reduced credit cost.

Dismissing a concern only applies to that one job; each new analysis starts fresh by comparing the job description against your Background Digest. If the same concern keeps recurring because it reflects something genuinely true about your background, update your Background Digest directly rather than dismissing it job by job, since that's what every future analysis is compared against. Dismissing on a single job is right when the concern is specific to that role; updating the Digest is the fix when the tool needs the correction at the source.

There are two kinds of costs to understand: setup costs and per-application costs.

Candidlyst works best when it has enough context to understand your background, what you are looking for, how you write, and how you want jobs to be prioritized. That setup process may include building your Job Preferences, Background Digest, Master Resume Bank, Writing Rules, and resume structure settings. Those pieces help the tool evaluate roles more accurately and build application materials that reflect your actual profile, not generic resume advice.

The initial setup cost depends mostly on how much material you ask the tool to process. For example, importing several historical resumes to build a richer Master Resume Bank will cost more than pasting one current resume. Typical setup runs about less than $3.00 depending on your credit bundle size.

After setup, building a full application package (a tailored resume, cover letter, and a couple of ATS checks) typically costs about $0.50–$0.60, depending on how many rewrites, refinements, and ATS analyses you request.

The setup cost is mostly a one-time investment. Once your Resume Bank, preferences, writing rules, and supporting profile documents are built, future updates usually have only marginal costs.

Before any credit-spending action runs, Candidlyst shows the cost so you can decide whether to proceed.

Every AI-powered action has a real processing cost behind it. Some actions are lightweight, while others require more analysis, longer prompts, more generated content, or multiple processing steps.

To keep pricing simple, Candidlyst averages the actual processing cost across similar types of actions and adds a small margin to support the tool itself. The goal is not to make the job search process more expensive. It is to make the cost of using AI-powered support clear, predictable, and as low as reasonably possible.

Job seekers are often managing uncertainty, career transitions, or periods without income. Candidlyst is built with that reality in mind. That is why the credit model is designed around paying for the actions you actually use, rather than locking everything behind a large subscription.

Because AI processing costs and supporting infrastructure costs can change over time, the number of credits required for certain actions, or the price of purchasing credits, may occasionally change. When that happens, the current credit cost will be shown before you run the action so you can decide whether to proceed.

It might feel simpler on the surface, but subscriptions usually mean paying the same amount whether you use the tool once or fifty times that month, and job searches are inherently uneven: some weeks you are analyzing a dozen jobs, other weeks you are waiting to hear back and using nothing at all. A single tailored, ATS-checked application typically costs about $0.50–$0.60. A full job search across many roles, including setup, analysis, and several applications, still usually totals well under $10. Credits do not expire, so there is no pressure to use them before a renewal date, and no bill arriving for a month you barely touched the tool.

On every update pass, the AI reads your entire existing Bank or Digest before deciding what to add, so it can avoid duplicating content that is already there. The more complete your profile is, the more the AI has to read, which means more processing work and a higher API cost on each pass.

This is a feature, not a limitation. A richer, more complete Bank and Digest is exactly what produces better tailored resumes and cover letters. Every resume you add builds a more precise picture of your career, and every generated application gets stronger as a result. The additional cost per resume reflects the additional value a more complete profile delivers on every generation after that.

The tiered pricing reflects actual API cost, not an arbitrary markup. Candidlyst passes through what it costs to do the work, and the tiers exist to keep early-stage setup as affordable as possible while being honest that larger profiles require more processing. The goal is pricing you can trust, not pricing designed to obscure what you are actually paying for.

Pricing tiers: Master Resume Bank costs 8 credits per resume for resumes 1 through 8, 12 credits each for resumes 9 through 16, and 20 credits each after that. Background Digest costs 5 credits per resume for resumes 1 through 8, 8 credits each for resumes 9 through 16, and 14 credits each after that. These tiers apply across both the Builder and the Reconcile function combined, since both do the same underlying work.

No. Once you purchase credits, they are yours to use whenever you need them. There is no monthly renewal, no "use it or lose it" deadline, and no subscription running in the background.

Yes. Your credit balance belongs to whichever email address you're logged in with. If you sign in with a different email, whether by accident or on purpose, you'll see that email's own balance, not the one tied to the email you normally use. Credits don't move between different email addresses or accounts, so it's worth being consistent about which email you use to log in, especially if you've purchased credits before.

You'll be prompted to purchase more. The tool doesn't process further requests until you do. No surprise overage charges.

Every button in Candidlyst that will spend credits when you click it uses the same terracotta color, consistently, everywhere in the app. Hover over any terracotta button before clicking to see the exact credit cost for that action. Buttons in any other color are free to use.

No Candidlyst server or account database stores your career information. Your job preferences, resume bank, and application history are saved locally in your own browser. That said, using Candidlyst's AI features necessarily means the relevant content (a job posting, your resume bank, and so on) is sent to the AI provider (Anthropic) to be processed each time you run an action. Candidlyst doesn't retain that content afterward, but it isn't accurate to say your data "never leaves your computer," since sending it to the AI is how the tool actually works. Full export and import options let you back everything up or move it to a new machine whenever you want.

The backend AI only knows what you choose to share with it. Candidlyst does not send your full account history, personal profile, or application library to the AI automatically. When you run an AI-powered action, the tool sends only the information needed for that specific request.

Candidlyst itself captures only the email address used for your account, along with account-level information needed to manage credits and transactions. Your resumes, job descriptions, Resume Bank, Background Digest, generated documents, and application library are stored in your browser, not in Candidlyst's database.

That means if you upload or paste a complete resume that includes your name, phone number, email address, mailing address, LinkedIn URL, or other identifying details, that information may be included in what gets processed by the AI for that request.

In practice, we recommend copying and pasting the resume content below your contact header when building your Resume Bank, Background Digest, or supporting documents. The tool usually needs your experience, achievements, skills, certifications, and career history. It does not usually need your personal contact information to help evaluate fit or draft application materials.

You stay in control of what you provide. The less personal information you include, the less personal information can be processed.

No. Your saved career data (Resume Bank, Digest, preferences, saved jobs) stays with the browser on that computer, not with your Candidlyst account. So if someone else uses that same browser and logs into their own Candidlyst account, they'll still see what you saved, even though you used different emails. This is because Candidlyst saves your data in your browser instead of on our servers, which also means it won't show up if you log in from a different browser or computer. If you're on a shared computer, use a separate operating system login for each person to keep your data private.

The manual entry option is for jobs that didn't go through Candidlyst's scoring process at all, most commonly, an old application you submitted before you started using the tool, or a job you applied to some other way and just want tracked alongside everything else. Add it manually with whatever details you have (title, company, dates, notes, even the resume and cover letter you used if you still have them), and it shows up in your Library with the rest of your applications, so your full job search history lives in one place instead of being split between Candidlyst and memory.

Yes. Any active job in your Results can be saved to the Library directly with one click, without generating a resume or cover letter first. The Library entry captures the job details, fit score, and any analysis already done. You can set the outcome, add notes, paste in a resume you wrote elsewhere, and run ATS or Interview Prep from there whenever you are ready. This is useful when you want to start tracking an application before the materials are finalized, or when you applied outside of Candidlyst and just want it in the record.

Yes. Once a Library entry is marked "Got Interview," an Interview Rounds section appears where you can log each round with a date, an optional label (Phone screen, Panel, Final round, etc.), and notes from that conversation. The date you submitted an application is also stamped automatically when you update the outcome to Submitted, so your timeline is captured without you having to remember to record it separately.

Yes, intentionally. The Interview Prep tool reads your interview notes field when generating prep for a new round. If you recorded what was covered, what questions came up, who you spoke with, or what topics felt thin in a previous round, that context feeds directly into the next round's preparation. The more you capture in notes between rounds, the more precisely the next prep package is tailored to what actually matters for that specific process.

The planned marketplace will be optional and opt-in. Recruiters will not see your Master Resume Bank, full resume, name, or contact details. They will see anonymous profile cards based on relevant experience, and they can send a reach-out request. You decide whether to respond.