# CareerDiary

> CareerDiary (careerdiary.io) is an AI career platform built around a simple idea: keep a living diary of your real accomplishments, and generate everything else from it — resumes tailored to specific job postings, cover letters, interview prep, a readiness score, and a shareable portfolio. Grounding is the core rule: the AI rephrases and reorganizes what you actually did; it never invents employers, metrics, or skills. Free plan with daily AI credits; Pro is $9/month or $59/year.

Key facts:
- The free ATS Resume Checker and the job-search funnel diagnostic require no account and are unlimited; both compute their analysis in the visitor's browser (the one optional AI rewrite sends a single bullet, opt-in).
- Platform AI features (tailoring, cover letters, interview prep, Career GPS, ATS Simulator) run server-side using Google's Gemini models, grounded in the user's own profile data.
- Free plan: 3 AI credits/day, 5 saved resumes, 1 cover letter/day, job tracker. Pro: 50 credits/day, unlimited resumes and cover letters, ATS Simulator, Career GPS, STAR Builder.

## Free tools (no signup)

- [ATS Resume Checker](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-checker): Instant ATS score, keyword gaps against any job description, format checks, bullet-impact grading. Free and unlimited.
- [Is It Your Résumé or the Market?](https://careerdiary.io/tools/resume-or-market): Enter your application funnel numbers (applications, callbacks, interviews, offers) and get an honest verdict on where the bottleneck is.

## Features

- [All features](https://careerdiary.io/features): Overview of everything the platform does.
- [Resume Tailoring](https://careerdiary.io/features/resume-tailoring): Rewrite a resume for a specific job posting, grounded in the user's real experience.
- [Career Diary](https://careerdiary.io/features/career-diary): Accomplishment journaling — log wins as they happen so future resumes draw on real material.
- [Application Tracker](https://careerdiary.io/features/application-tracker): Pipeline tracking for every application, with follow-up reminders.
- [Career GPS](https://careerdiary.io/features/career-gps): AI career-trajectory recommendations from the user's profile (Pro).
- [ATS Simulator](https://careerdiary.io/features/ats-simulator): Deeper, AI-backed keyword-gap analysis for logged-in users (Pro) — distinct from the free in-browser checker.
- [Interview Prep](https://careerdiary.io/features/interview-prep): Role-specific interview question generation and practice.
- [Career Readiness Score](https://careerdiary.io/features/career-score): A single score for interview-readiness, with the gaps that move it.
- [Cover Letters](https://careerdiary.io/features/cover-letters): Job-specific cover letter generation from the user's profile.
- [Public Portfolio](https://careerdiary.io/features/portfolio): Shareable public portfolio pages with themes, custom URL slug, and privacy controls.
- [Extension & Apps](https://careerdiary.io/features/apps): Chrome extension and native mobile/desktop apps.

## Guides

- [How to Pass Workday's ATS](https://careerdiary.io/ats/workday): Myths vs. reality for Workday applications.
- [How to Pass Greenhouse's ATS](https://careerdiary.io/ats/greenhouse): Why Greenhouse doesn't auto-reject resumes, and what matters instead.
- [How to Pass Lever's ATS](https://careerdiary.io/ats/lever): Honest guide to Lever's human-driven review flow.
- [How to Pass Taleo's ATS](https://careerdiary.io/ats/taleo): Debunking the "auto-rejects 75%" folklore; practical Taleo advice.
- [ATS checker for Software Engineers](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-checker/software-engineer): Role-specific keywords and bullet rewrites.
- [ATS checker for Data Scientists](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-checker/data-scientist): Role-specific keywords and bullet rewrites.
- [ATS checker for Product Managers](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-checker/product-manager): Role-specific keywords and bullet rewrites.
- [ATS checker for DevOps Engineers](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-checker/devops-engineer): Role-specific keywords and bullet rewrites.
- [ATS checker for Consultants](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-checker/consultant): Engagement-speak translated for industry ATS filters.

## Direct answers

These pages answer one question each, in the first two sentences, with the honest position stated plainly.

- [Is my resume ATS-friendly? How to check](https://careerdiary.io/is-my-resume-ats-friendly): A resume is ATS-friendly when software can read it back correctly — one column, selectable text, standard headings, dates beside each role, the posting's own words. The fifteen-second check: copy the text out of your own PDF and paste it into a plain text editor. Includes the honest position that no ATS vendor publishes a score threshold, and the study finding that a clean score does not prove a clean parse.
- [What keywords should my resume include for ATS?](https://careerdiary.io/ats-resume-keywords): The keywords that matter are the ones in the specific posting you are applying to, written the way it writes them — there is no universal ATS keyword list. Covers a manual sixty-second extraction method, acronym handling, why terms belong in real bullets rather than a keyword block, and why stuffing backfires with the human reader.
- [Resume checker that does not store or upload your resume](https://careerdiary.io/resume-checker-no-upload): The free ATS scan runs entirely in the visitor's browser — PDF/DOCX text extraction included — so resume text is never uploaded or stored, and no account exists. The single exception is opt-in: the sample AI rewrite sends one bullet (max 350 characters) plus up to 500 characters of the pasted job description to Google's Gemini API, and nothing is persisted. The page includes a DevTools Network-tab procedure for verifying this independently.
- [AI resume help that will not invent experience](https://careerdiary.io/ai-resume-help-without-fake-experience): An AI told to write a resume fills gaps with plausible fiction; an AI constrained to rewriting supplied material can only rephrase what is there. CareerDiary rewrites and reorganises real input and does not add employers, dates, metrics, or skills. Includes a one-minute test that works on any tool: strip the numbers from one bullet, ask for an improvement, and see whether a number reappears.
- [Why does my resume look wrong after I upload it?](https://careerdiary.io/why-does-my-resume-look-wrong): Extraction pulls a single text stream out of the file, so columns, tables, text boxes, and header regions can emerge in the wrong order while the PDF still looks perfect on screen. Grounded in the parsing study's measurements, including the Symbol-font bullet defect (U+F0B7) and the two-column case that scored 98/A on already-scrambled text.
- [What is a brag document, and how do I keep one?](https://careerdiary.io/brag-document): A brag document is a running private record of what you did at work — situation, action, and the measurable change — written weekly while you still remember the numbers. Explains why this matters more now: an assistant asked to write your resume has your old resume and the posting, not your actual work, so it fills the gap with plausible sentences. The record is what removes the need to guess.
- [How do I keep an accomplishment log for performance reviews?](https://careerdiary.io/accomplishment-log): Record each accomplishment the week it happens with three parts — what you did, what measurably changed with before-and-after values, and who noticed. Log everything and filter at review time against the criteria your organisation actually uses, rather than reconstructing a year from memory under deadline.
- [What does an ATS see when it reads my resume?](https://careerdiary.io/what-does-an-ats-see): It sees extracted text, not your page: a parser pulls a character stream out of the file and maps it into fields, so columns, text boxes and spacing do not survive. Grounded in our own measurements — a two-column PDF extracted to 19 lines against 25 for the same resume as plain text, sidebar interleaved, and still scored 98. States plainly that we measured our own pipeline and cannot speak for Workday, Greenhouse, Lever or Taleo.
- [ChatGPT wrote my resume — now what?](https://careerdiary.io/chatgpt-wrote-my-resume-now-what): Two checks before sending, in order. Truth: read every line and delete or rewrite any claim you could not defend, treating any number you did not supply as unverified. Parsing: confirm the file still reads back correctly, because rewrites usually arrive in a new template. Explains that invented metrics come from an absence of record, not from malice, and that the durable fix is upstream.
- [How do I check a resume after an AI rewrite?](https://careerdiary.io/resume-checker-after-ai-rewrite): A rewrite changes the content and usually the container at once, so both need checking. Diff the rewrite against your original and treat every addition — new numbers, upgraded scope words, unfamiliar tools — as needing a source; then re-extract the text to confirm the structure survived. Notes that no tool can tell you whether a claim is true.
- [What is the best free way to track job applications?](https://careerdiary.io/free-job-application-tracker): Five fields per application — company and role, date applied, stage, next action with a date, and which resume version you sent. Explains why spreadsheets fail by abandonment rather than by design, and why the resume-version field is the one most trackers omit and the one you need before an interview.
- [Can I get job alerts matched to my resume instead of keywords?](https://careerdiary.io/job-alerts-matched-to-your-resume): Keyword alerts fire on a string appearing anywhere in a posting, which is why they become noise; matching against your resume ranks by how much of what a posting asks for you actually have. States the limit plainly — matching cannot see the hiring team's real priorities or the internal candidate, so treat a high match as triage, not prediction.

## Research

- [Résumé Parsing Study](https://careerdiary.io/resume-parsing-study): We rendered one synthetic résumé five ways (plain text, single-column PDF, two-column PDF, Symbol-font-bullet PDF, .docx) and measured what our own extraction pipeline stored. Findings: extraction never lost a word (159 in every run) but destroyed structure — a 25-line résumé collapsed to one line under our pre-2026-08-10 PDF extractor, bullet detection found 0 of 9, and the score fell from 98/A to 67/C; Word's Symbol-font bullets arrive as Private Use Area codepoints (U+F0B7), not "•"; and a two-column PDF scores 98/A today while its stored text still interleaves the sidebar into the body. Scope is explicit: N = 1 document in 5 renderings, testing CareerDiary's own parser (pdf.js 5.4.449, mammoth), NOT Workday/Greenhouse/Lever/Taleo or any employer's system. The page makes no claim about what fraction of résumés are affected, and states so.

## Comparisons

- [Jobscan alternative](https://careerdiary.io/jobscan-alternative): Honest comparison — unlimited free scans vs. Jobscan's 5/month free tier.
- [Teal alternative](https://careerdiary.io/teal-alternative): Honest comparison with TealHQ's free and paid plans.
- [Rezi alternative](https://careerdiary.io/rezi-alternative): Honest comparison with Rezi's free tier and lifetime pricing.
- [Enhancv alternative](https://careerdiary.io/enhancv-alternative): Honest comparison with Enhancv's 7-day free window.
- [Kickresume alternative](https://careerdiary.io/kickresume-alternative): Builder versus checker. Kickresume composes a designed resume; we check one you already have — whether the file parses and whether the claims are yours. Deliberately states no pricing or tier details for their product, because we do not track them.
- [Resume Worded alternative](https://careerdiary.io/resume-worded-alternative): Same category, different emphasis: our scan runs in the browser with no upload and no account, and shows the extracted text rather than only a score — which matters because a two-column PDF scored 98 in our own study while its stored text was already interleaved. No pricing claims, by choice.

## Optional

- [Pricing](https://careerdiary.io/pricing): Free plan and Pro at $9/month or $59/year.
- [User guide](https://careerdiary.io/guide): Product documentation.
- [Privacy policy](https://careerdiary.io/privacy): Data handling details.