The setup wizard

The first thing a new account sees is a page headed Get started, with a checklist of three steps. All three are required, and they run in this order because each one depends on the one before it.

1. Upload your CV

Choose a file — PDF, DOCX or plain text. It is read into your profile and seeds your search titles, so everything after this builds on it. When it has imported, the step ticks and the wizard moves on.

If you have imported a CV before, a second button offers to re-extract from the one already on file. That overwrites the current profile fields, including anything you edited by hand, so it asks you to confirm first.

2. Check what we read from it

This step shows what was actually pulled out of the CV: your name, headline, seniority, years of experience, the roles and education it found, and your skills. Read it properly. An extraction that has gone wrong affects every fit score and every tailored document, and this is the cheapest place to catch it.

If it looks right, choose Looks right — continue. If it does not, Something's wrong — edit my profile takes you to your profile to fix it, and you come back here afterwards. If almost nothing could be read out of the CV, there is no confirm button at all — the step points you at your profile to fill the details in by hand first.

3. Tell us what you're looking for

This is the search preferences card. Search titles are the part that matters most: they are what the searches actually run on, and with none set nothing gets found. Type a title, choose Add, and repeat — up to six. Titles read out of your CV are already filled in, so this is usually checking rather than typing from scratch.

The rest of the card is optional: Salary floor (£), Home postcode, Max commute (min) and Distance (km). Leave one blank and that filter does not apply. A postcode that resolves shows its coordinates underneath. The Search enabled switch turns searching on and off for the account.

You are shown this step even when your CV supplied titles, so the guessed ones get looked at once before anything runs on them.

Finishing

Choosing Save on that card completes setup and queues your first search straight away, rather than leaving you waiting for the next scheduled run. You are then taken to the Overview page. If everything happened to be filled in already, you get a short panel with a Finish setup button that does the same thing.

If the first search could not be started, the wizard tells you why and offers Continue. Setup is complete at that point either way, and the next scheduled run picks you up regardless.

Next: your first week.