One set of details, many resumes

What a profile is

A profile is a saved set of your details - contact information, roles, dates, education, skills - kept separately from any one resume. New resumes start from it instead of from an empty page.

It is the difference between writing a resume and assembling one. The facts live in one place; each resume is a view of them aimed at a particular job.

When more than one profile helps

Keep a separate profile whenever the underlying story changes rather than the wording.

• Two career directions - engineering roles and management roles emphasise different history.
• Two markets - a Gulf version with photo, nationality and visa status, and a UK version without.
• Freelance and permanent applications, which describe the same work differently.
• Writing resumes for someone else - a partner, a parent, a friend you are helping.

How to use them

Save any resume as a profile from its card on the dashboard, or build one from scratch under Profiles. When you create a resume, pick the profile to start from and the details are already in place.

Update the profile when something real changes - a new job, a promotion, a certification - and future resumes inherit it. Existing resumes stay as they were, because they may already be out with employers.

Keep the master complete

Let your main profile hold everything, including work you would not put on any single resume. It costs nothing to store and it is the raw material you cut from.

The rule is: the profile is complete, the resume is selective. Trying to keep both tight is what leads to rewriting history from memory six months later.

What it saves in practice

The first resume takes half an hour. Every one after it takes minutes, because you are choosing what to include rather than remembering what happened.

That is what makes tailoring realistic. Nobody rewrites their history for a Tuesday afternoon application; plenty of people will pick from it.

Store more than the resume shows

Keep the detail that never fits: the exact figures, the tools on each project, the names of certifications with their dates, referees, the license numbers regulated roles need.

When an application asks for something specific - a registration number, a precise end date, a supervisor's title - it is already written down rather than being hunted for in an old email.

Review it twice a year

Put twenty minutes in the calendar every six months to add what you have done since. Achievements are vivid for about a fortnight and vague forever afterwards, which is why resumes written in a hurry are so thin on numbers.

The people who find job hunting easy are usually the ones whose details were already current when the opportunity appeared.

Profiles and privacy

Profiles hold personal details, so they live in your account rather than in the browser, and nobody else can read them. A resume becomes public only when you publish a share link for it, and only that one resume.

If you keep profiles for other people, treat their details as theirs: delete a profile once you have finished helping, rather than leaving someone else's history in your account indefinitely.