Before you start: what setup is actually for
Setting up a Profiled profile is not filling out a form. It is building a depth-rich profile that an AI can investigate and a recruiter can query in natural language, the kind of profile a resume was never designed to be. That means setup takes real thought, not five minutes between meetings. You are giving the platform enough material to represent your career arc, your specific roles, the projects that mattered, and the judgment calls that don’t show up in a bullet list. Expect to sit with it for a session, not skim it before your coffee gets cold.
The payoff for that time is the point of this guide: a profile that a recruiter can actually investigate, rather than scan and discard.
Step 1: Start the AI Profile Chat
Why voice, not a form
Profiled leads with a conversation, not a text box, because of what happens when you write about your own career under the implicit pressure of a resume format. You compress it. You sanitize it. You deduplicate the parts that sound like every other candidate’s bullet points. Speaking about your career in conversation does the opposite: it produces specific, contextual, judgment-rich content that a form rarely pulls out of you. If you want the deeper case for why the resume format itself fails experienced careers, that’s covered in How ATS filters really work.
What the conversation covers
The AI Profile Chat is a structured but flexible conversation. It moves through:
- Your career arc: the shape of it, not just the job titles.
- Specific roles: what you actually did in each one.
- Key projects: the work you’d point to if someone asked "what are you proud of."
- Judgment calls: the decisions that don’t fit neatly into a job description but define how you operate.
The pace is yours. The output is a transcript and a structured profile that the AI can investigate at depth and a recruiter can later query in natural language.
If you’d rather type
Voice is the default, not a requirement. Profiled includes an unmetered text-input alternative for candidates who prefer typed input. That option exists because the platform’s approach to candidate dignity rejects paternalism: candidates make their own choices about what to share, where to publish, and how to position themselves. Profiled’s job is to give you the tools to be seen accurately, not to decide for you how you should be seen.
Step 2: Write your first Experience Story
What counts as an Experience Story
An Experience Story is long-form narrative about a specific project, decision, or transition, not a resume bullet stretched longer. You provide the substance; the AI collaborates to structure and refine it. Think of it as the moment in your career you’d actually explain if someone asked a real follow-up question instead of scanning your title.
Why you can’t skip this
A profile without at least one Experience Story is, by design, not surfaced as recruiter-ready. This isn’t a bureaucratic hurdle inserted to slow you down. It’s the platform’s substance-over-surface principle doing its job. Onboarding quality gates and AI coaching during setup exist specifically to produce profiles that have meat on the bone before they’re visible to recruiters. A polished-but-empty profile gets flagged and held back on purpose. The friction is intentional: if candidates could publish empty profiles, recruiter investigation would find nothing, and the whole premise collapses.
Step 3: Complete your Skills Matrix
Why gaps are part of the picture
The Skills Matrix is a structured representation of your skills with explicit calibration of depth and gaps. It is honest by design: it will not let you claim universal competence, and it surfaces what you’re weaker in alongside what you’re strong in.
That might feel counterintuitive if you’re used to resumes that let you imply competence in anything you’ve merely touched. But the honesty is what makes the matrix useful downstream. It’s the mechanism that lets a recruiter query the database with confidence that a match against a specific competency actually means something. A Skills Matrix that only ever says yes is a Skills Matrix nobody can trust, including you, since it’s your signal being evaluated.
What happens to your voice recording (privacy, plainly stated)
If you’re going to talk through your career for the AI Profile Chat, you should know exactly what happens to that recording. Profiled’s commitments here are locked, not aspirational:
- No persistent voiceprints are created under any circumstance.
- No emotion inference is performed on your voice.
- Audio is deleted within 24 hours of the session ending.
- Transcripts are retained for 12 months and are user-deletable at any time.
These aren’t marketing lines. They’re architectural choices. Voice AI regulation is moving fast: the EU AI Act’s Article 5 prohibits workplace emotion-recognition AI, and that prohibition has applied since February 2, 2025, meaning it is already in force (Wolters Kluwer). You’re not signing up for a black box.
Free vs. Pro: what setup costs, and what changes
What’s included on Free
Free is not a stripped-down trial of the real product. On Free, you build a genuinely depth-rich, AI-queryable profile that the platform can present to recruiters searching against the categories you fit. You go through the AI Profile Chat, write your Experience Story, and complete your Skills Matrix, the full setup sequence described above, without paying anything.
What Pro adds
Pro is where setup gets more room to breathe. It includes a full 40-minute voice cap per month (Free’s cap is lower), with $5 per 15-minute top-up packs if you go over. Pro also adds priority placement in the directory, deeper AI coaching during onboarding and ongoing maintenance, and access to recruiter-visibility analytics, so you can see how your profile is actually performing once it’s live, not just assume.
How you’ll know your profile is "recruiter-ready"
"Recruiter-ready" isn’t a badge you earn arbitrarily. It’s the point where your profile has cleared the substance threshold: voice-captured narrative in place, at least one Experience Story, a completed Skills Matrix. Once you’re there, your profile becomes something a recruiter can actually investigate through the Honest Fit Tool.
Here’s what that investigation looks like in practice: the recruiter expresses a need in natural language, and the AI returns candidates whose profile content matches the intent of that need, not just the keywords. Critically, the fit verdict includes "this candidate is probably not your fit" as a first-class output where that’s true. That’s not a flaw in the system; it’s the feature that makes a positive match mean something. For the full mechanics of how that verdict gets calculated, see How Profiled scores fit honestly.
Why this is worth the extra effort compared to a resume
A recruiter spends roughly six to seven seconds scanning a resume before deciding whether to keep reading (hcareers, corroborated by ERE). Six seconds cannot hold a 15-year career, a hard judgment call, or the texture of a project that mattered. It can hold a title and a date range. That’s the whole problem.
It’s not just candidates who feel the mismatch. 88% of employers and hiring managers acknowledge that their automated tools filter out qualified candidates ("Hidden Workers" research, TrueScan HR). The system is failing on both sides of the interface at once.
The setup process on Profiled takes longer than uploading a PDF because it’s building something a six-second scan structurally cannot: a profile with enough depth that a recruiter can investigate it instead of skim it, and enough honesty (including disclosed gaps and a verdict that can say no) that the investigation actually means something when it says yes. That’s the trade you’re making. It costs you a real session of thought up front. It gets you found for who you actually are.