Daily Workflow

This is your daily loop with JobCtrl: set up once, then repeat Discover → review → Apply. The web app is the main way you work; the command line stays available for maintenance and diagnostics. For a screen-by-screen walkthrough of each page below, see the Product Tour.

Blue steps are yours; green steps are JobCtrl's. Setup happens once, the loop repeats. Under the hood, Discover runs Enrich, Score, and Materials for each eligible job. Live submission approval is bound to the current materials, profile version, application URL, and dry-run evidence.

1. Build The Candidate Profile

Use the Profile page or the resume import flow to create structured profile data. The profile includes personal details, work authorization, experience, education, skills, target search preferences, writing style, resume rendering settings, and tailoring controls. It is the source of truth every later stage scores and tailors against.

Profile and settings forms autosave after a short delay. The explicit Save buttons use the same save path.

The Profile page collects personal information, resume baseline, experience, skills, and voluntary equal-opportunity (EEO) fields alongside the baseline resume editor.

2. Configure Discovery

Use the Discovery page to set:

• target roles and role tracks;
• target locations and work models;
• source registry controls;
• minimum fit score and automation preferences;
• manual capture and quarantined source decisions.

The optional browser extension's Save job action also lands here: it records the active page as a user-mediated manual capture, then the normal discovery import path dedupes, snapshots, and surfaces the job in Jobs.

Target locations are validated before they can drive discovery. Discovery uses exact and broader recall role queries, then filters and scores the results downstream.

The Discovery page configures target search, seniority floors, locations and work models, minimum fit score, job boards, and the source registry.

3. Run Discover

From the web app, open the Pipelines page and start Discover. From the command line:

uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl run discover

Starts a Discover run from the terminal — the same workflow the Pipelines page starts.

The Pipelines page starts a Discover run with limit, worker count, and a dry-run toggle.

Per-stage commands (jobctrl enrich, score, tailor, cover) and the single-job path (jobctrl job <url> --dry-run) start the same underlying workflows when you want a narrower run.

Discover owns the preparation path:

• source crawling or ATS/API fetches;
• detail enrichment;
• scoring;
• tailoring eligibility;
• material generation, or suppression, for eligible jobs.

Internal stages such as Enrich and Score, and material generation (the tailor and cover commands), stay visible in job detail and diagnostics, but the user-facing preparation stage is Discover.

4. Review Jobs

The Jobs view supports filters, sorting, pagination, deep links, deleted and hidden views, fit-score ranges, stage state, source provenance, compensation evidence, and job detail drawers.

The Jobs table ranks discovered jobs by fit score with filters, compensation columns, and bulk triage actions.

Use the job detail drawer to inspect:

• score, confidence, blockers, gaps, and score policy metadata;
• the requirement-fit report when present;
• audit history;
• source and enrichment evidence;
• generated artifacts;
• apply readiness and blockers.

The job detail drawer shows the audit triage: ranking, requirement fit, matched and transferable requirements, keywords, and compensation evidence.

Failed preparation work can be retried per job or in bulk without automatically starting apply automation.

5. Inspect The Evidence Map

Open Evidence from the main navigation, the Profile page, or a job detail drawer. The Evidence map shows the canonical profile achievements and declared skills currently reused by generated resume bullets, requirement-fit decisions, keyword coverage, and recorded gaps. Links in the usage lists return to the owning artifact or job detail so you can audit the source before editing profile evidence or re-running materials.

6. Generate And Inspect Materials

Eligible jobs receive tailored resumes and cover letters during Discover. You can also generate materials for a single job from the job detail drawer.

Generated material records are kept as audit history. Re-generation does not destroy the accepted material already in use; a replacement becomes active only after it validates and you approve it.

7. Generate Interview Prep

From a job detail drawer, use "generate interview prep" when you want stored pre-interview notes for that job. Prep is generated only after you ask for it and uses JobCtrl's grounded data: profile evidence, requirement fit, accepted materials, employer analysis, and evidence-map usage.

The drawer shows the latest accepted prep as themes, STAR-story drafts, gap drills, and company notes. Each item keeps its evidence IDs, requirement IDs, and profile source snippets visible, with evidence links back into the Evidence map. Regeneration keeps the last accepted prep visible until a replacement is accepted.

After the interview, record reflection notes from the same prep panel. Each reflection is saved as a normal manual interview outcome linked to that prep generation, so it also appears in the job's application outcome timeline.

Interview prep is not live interview assistance. JobCtrl does not provide in-session answers, transcript upload, microphone input, websocket streaming, or real-time interview participation.

8. Review And Edit The Resume

Apply Review opens the generated resume in an in-browser editor. The editor keeps the final PDF link, the source behind each line, risk flags, JobCtrl's line comments, and your draft together.

Apply Review pairs requirement evidence and the verbatim job post with the tailored resume preview, JobCtrl line comments, and approve or dry-run controls.

Typical review actions:

• edit the generated resume text or formatting;
• reply to JobCtrl line comments;
• save or autosave a draft revision;
• validate and render an edited draft into replacement artifacts;
• compare the accepted artifact with the rendered draft using stored coverage, validation, judge, template, and risk-label rows;
• approve only after the edited draft is saved, valid, and rendered.

Failed validation stays as audit history and does not hide the last accepted artifact.

9. Rehearse With A Dry Run

Apply automation can submit real applications, so start with dry runs:

uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl apply --dry-run --limit 1
uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl apply --url https://example.com/job/123 --dry-run

The first dry-runs Apply for one eligible job; the second dry-runs a specific job by URL. A dry run never submits — it shows what would happen without sending anything.

Auto apply is separate from a one-off dry run. When the Discovery automation setting autoApply is on, a running worker keeps one continuous Apply workflow active and the Runs page shows it as the standing apply loop. With applyApprovalRequired still on, that loop live-submits only jobs already approved in Apply Review and parks the rest as awaiting approval. If you also turn approval off, the same loop may submit eligible prepared jobs autonomously, bounded by the minimum fit score, daily spend ceiling, at-most-once submit intent tracking, CAPTCHA fail-closed behavior, and the dry-run guard for dry-run apply paths.

Only approve real submission after inspecting the dry run, final materials, field mapping, blockers, and apply-run history. Submit approval is valid only for the materials generation, profile version, and application URL shown in Apply Review, and requires full dry-run evidence unless you explicitly accept a listed partial dry-run with its blocked channels. The full approval model is on the Security page.

10. Inspect Progress

Useful command-line checks:

uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl status
uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl digest
uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl runs
uv --project workers/automation run jobctrl runs --failed-only

These print your pipeline status, show the local daily digest, list all workflow runs, and list only failed runs, respectively. The digest is read-only unless you pass --acknowledge, which marks the displayed digest as reviewed.

Useful web app views:

• Dashboard for high-level counts and source health.
• Analytics for recorded outcome counts and sample-gated rates by source, score band, fit band, and apply mode. The page reads canonical application outcome rows and projections only; groups below the minimum sample count stay count-only.
• Jobs for triage and per-job actions.
• Runs for workflow history.
• Evidence for profile-evidence reuse, generated-material usage, and gaps.
• Artifacts for generated files and same-job artifact comparisons.
• Apply Review for approval and resume edits.
• Debug for event-level inspection.

The Runs page lists workflow runs with status, mode, timing, and a link into the web interface of Temporal, the workflow engine.

11. Keep Contacts (Optional)

Keep contact records for the people behind an application — a recruiter, hiring manager, or referrer — attached to a company or a specific job:

• Open the Contacts page (the "Contacts" nav entry) or the Contacts panel in a job's detail drawer, and add a contact with a role (recruiter, hiring manager, referrer, warm intro, or other), a link to the employer and/or the application, and facts like name, title, email, phone, or a note.
• Or import a list from a CSV file. Each imported fact is tagged as coming from that file (its filename is recorded as the source); rows that name neither an employer nor an application are skipped.
• Every fact you store shows its provenance — where it came from — in the list and detail views, so you can always see the source of a name or email.

You can also run supervised research from a job's Contacts panel to propose contacts:

• Click run research (optionally pasting one public source URL, such as a company team page). JobCtrl starts a supervised run; with no URL it simply records which sources it could and could not use.
• Research proposes candidates for review — it never stores them automatically (supervised, INV-4). Each proposed candidate shows its provenance (the page it came from, the capture method, and a confidence), and the run shows the per-source outcomes (fetched, blocked by robots.txt, rate-limited, or routed to manual capture because the page needs a login).
• Review each candidate and click confirm contact to promote it into your contacts. Only then does it become a stored fact — with its research provenance preserved and marked confirmed by you. No public page is fetched unless you supply its URL, and login-walled pages are never fetched automatically.

Once you have a contact, you can draft an outreach message to them — a truthful, reviewable message that you send yourself:

• On the contact's detail (the Outreach panel), click generate draft. JobCtrl writes a short message grounded only in your profile and the confirmed contact facts, then runs it through the same anti-fabrication gates as your resumes and cover letters: a deterministic never-fabricate check, a content validator, an LLM judge, and a claim-to-fact provenance record.
• Review the gate results and the claim → fact bindings shown beside the draft. A draft that invents a metric, an employer, or a relationship it cannot support is blocked — you cannot approve it until the gates pass.
• Edit the draft if you want; saving your edit creates a new version and re-runs the gates on your edited text. Earlier versions stay in the generation history, and your last approved message is never overwritten until a replacement is approved.
• Approve the message once the gates pass, then copy it and send it yourself through your own channel (your email client, and so on).
• After you have sent it, log the send: record the date you sent it and the channel you used (for example "email"). This is a record you enter — JobCtrl never sends the message and has no way to; logging simply marks the thread as sent so your history is honest. A send can only be logged against an approved draft, and approving a draft is a separate action that never sends anything.
• Optionally schedule a follow-up. JobCtrl suggests a conservative date — 7 days after the application was submitted for the first nudge, 14 days for a later one if you have had no reply — which you can edit freely. Due follow-ups surface in a Follow-ups list and a badge so you remember to reach out; you then send the follow-up yourself, exactly like the first message. Follow-ups are reminders only: they are never sent for you, and any optional recurring reminder is off by default.

You send every message yourself. JobCtrl drafts, previews, and records; it never sends anything to a contact — there is no email, message, or outreach send transport of any kind, drafts terminate at copy/export, a thread only becomes "sent" through a send you log yourself, and contact, research, draft, send, or follow-up data never affects scoring or apply decisions.