Getting Started

To get set up, do five things: set your profile (career status + target level), add a few search keywords and at least one location, wait for the matcher (or import a job), set a weekly cadence rhythm on Insights, and pick a couple of goals. That's roughly 15 minutes and leaves a personalized job radar running in the background.

TL;DR — Settings → Profile, then Settings → Keywords + Locations. Jobs appear in Job Search → Saved within a few hours (or use Find Jobs / Import URL / Add Job to skip the wait). Then set goals and a daily rhythm.

Step 1 — Tell us where you are

Head to Settings → Profile and fill in:

Career status — Unemployed, Actively looking, Passively open, or Market awareness only. Drives the daily-plan suggestions.
Target career level — Manager, Director, VP, SVP, or C-suite. Tunes the tone of AI tips, the self-evaluation question bank, and the goal templates we suggest.
Minimum salary expectation (optional) — used to flag low-bar postings so you don't waste time reading them.

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Step 2 — Define your search

Settings → Keywords is where you tell us what to look for. Common starter set:

2–4 role titles you'd consider — VP Engineering, Head of Platform, Director of Operations
1–2 industry / domain terms if you care — fintech, B2B SaaS

Settings → Locations — at least one. Remote is a real value; so is San Francisco Bay Area or just New York. Free plan caps at 1 location, paid tiers go up from there.

Settings → Exclusion words — phrases that hide a job when they appear in the title (Junior, Intern, Mechanical Engineer if you don't want random adjacency matches). Optional.

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Step 3 — Wait for jobs (or import a few)

WaypointCareer's matcher fires twice a day on the platform-wide schedule (5am and 2pm Pacific). Within a few hours of saving your keywords you'll start seeing jobs in Job Search → Saved (under the Review checkbox — new matches arrive as Pending Review).

Don't want to wait? You have three options:

Find Jobs button on Job Search → searches the shared catalog and returns matches you can accept individually.
Import URL → paste a job posting URL and we'll fetch it.
Add Job → manually paste a title + company + description.

Step 4 — Set your weekly rhythm

Visit Insights. Cadence tracking is cadence-based, not a stopwatch: the This week panel shows the recommended rhythms for your career status (e.g. "5+ outreach per day", "2 search firms per week"), each marked Touched this week or Not yet. Hit + Log activity or a ring's Log to record what you did — the question is whether you did it, not how long it took.

Step 5 — Pick three goals

Goals is where you commit to measurable targets across different cadences. Click From template to browse the exec-focused starter list — we'll suggest 3 picks based on your career status.

Common starter set for active job-seekers:

Daily exec touch — 30 min/day on search
Weekly application target — 3 jobs/week
Monthly book — 1 book/month

Step 6 — (Optional) Bring your own AI key

AI is included in your plan — role tips, prep sessions, fit summaries, and the rest all work out of the box on your plan's monthly AI allowance, with no personal key required. If you run out before the month resets, you can buy more usage from Settings → Subscription (every tier, including Free). And if you'd rather run AI on your own account — unmetered, not counted against your allowance — Settings → AI API Credentials lets you plug in your own Claude / Gemini / ChatGPT key, then flip on Use my own API keys to start using it. The platform never stores your prompts; only your responses are cached.

You're ready

That's the full setup. From here, your day-to-day flow is:

Open Insights to see your goals + today's daily plan
Triage Job Search → Saved (Review checkbox)
Move interesting jobs to In Progress → Applied → ...
Use Goals, Continuous Learning, Self Reflection for the non-search side of your career

Have a question? Check the FAQ or email support@waypointcareer.com.