← All guides

Feature guide

How Your Career Vault Works

The vault is a database of your accomplishments that gets smarter as it grows. Understanding what it stores and how it ranks things will make everything downstream of it work better.

What each achievement carries

More than its text. It gets a category (technical, leadership, revenue, and ten others), the skills it demonstrates, whatever metrics you provided, and its context: company, role, and dates. On top of that the system adds two judgments of its own.

An impact score estimates how much the accomplishment mattered, weighing scope and the strength of your numbers. A quality score grades how well the achievement is written, which is a separate question. A huge accomplishment can be written weakly, and the score exists to tell you so. The two scores disagreeing is useful information, not a bug.

Behind the scenes, every achievement also gets a vector embedding, which is what lets the system find achievements by meaning rather than keyword.

What happens when you generate a resume

• The job description is analyzed for what the role actually values
• Your vault is searched semantically, so an achievement about "reducing churn" surfaces for a role asking about "retention" even though the words differ
• The most relevant achievements are ranked and selected
• Each is rewritten to speak the job's language while staying grounded in what you actually did

That last constraint is the important one. Nothing is invented: the tailoring changes emphasis and vocabulary, not facts. If a number is not in your vault, it will not appear on your resume.

What makes a vault strong

Quantity genuinely helps, because more achievements give the matcher more to choose from. Quality matters more: one well-written, well-quantified achievement beats ten vague ones in every ranking. Coverage across categories keeps you ready for different kinds of roles. A vault that is entirely technical will struggle the moment a job description asks about leading people.

And recency counts. The best habit is adding achievements as they happen rather than reconstructing them from memory during a job search, which is exactly the failure mode the vault exists to prevent.

Where to start if the vault is empty

Importing an existing resume is the fastest way in, because it converts work you have already written up into structured entries you can then improve. After that, the highest-yield hour you can spend is going role by role through your last two jobs and writing down what changed because you were there, not what you were responsible for.

Then leave it running. A vault built in one sitting is a snapshot; a vault that gets a new entry most weeks is the thing that makes the next job search a selection problem instead of a memory problem.

What the vault is not

It is not a resume builder, and the difference is worth being explicit about, because they solve different problems and it is easy to assume they are the same product.

A resume builder starts with a blank document and helps you produce one file. It is a formatting and drafting tool, and when the file is done, the tool's job is over. Next time you need a resume, you start from the last document, which is why most people's resumes are a progressively lossier copy of a document they wrote years ago.

A vault starts with the record. The document is a byproduct, generated on demand for a specific job, and the record is what persists and improves. That inversion is the entire idea:

• A builder's output is a file; a vault's output is a file, a cover letter, a performance-review self-assessment, a promotion case, or interview prep, all from the same underlying record
• A builder forgets everything between sessions; a vault accumulates, so the fifth year is better-served than the first
• A builder asks what you want to say; a vault already knows what you did, and asks which parts fit this job

The practical consequence is that the work is front-loaded and then compounds. Building the vault takes longer than filling in a template. Every resume after that takes minutes, and each one is drawn from a record that is larger and better-evidenced than it was the last time.