A CV is a snapshot. A profile is the source.
Every CV you've ever exported — as a PDF, sent as a Word doc, pasted into a job application form — is a snapshot: one formatted view of your career, frozen at the moment you generated it, tuned for one format's constraints. Update your experience next year, and that PDF doesn't update with you. You're back to editing a document, or worse, starting over.
Your structured career profile is the thing underneath that never gets frozen: every role, every skill, every education entry and certification, every source you've ever imported or recorded, plus every correction you've made along the way. It isn't formatted for reading. It's formatted for being used — by an export, by a matching system, eventually by an AI agent acting on your behalf.
Why "many CVs, one profile" beats "one CV, edited repeatedly"
Editing a single CV document for every new purpose — one version for this employer, a Europass version for that EU application, a leaner version for a recruiter who only wants two pages — means maintaining several documents that can silently drift apart. Fix a typo in one and the other two don't know about it. Add a new role, and you're updating three files by hand. Or you're not, and now they disagree with each other.
Generating from one profile instead means every output stays current with the same underlying facts. A plain PDF for one employer, Europass XML for an EU application, a version slanted toward one specific job posting — all three read from the same source, updated once, in one place.
What actually lives in the profile
Personalia, work experience (including the life experiences that don't belong on a polished CV but are still worth keeping — a formative volunteer stint, a career break), education, certifications, skills, interests, referees, and every Source row: a permanent record of what document or recording produced which piece of data, kept even after you've edited the extracted result. Nothing in a Source gets silently overwritten by a later import. A conflicting value gets offered as a reviewable alternate instead, never applied automatically.
Related guides
- Voice vs. forms — how the profile actually gets built
- What happens to your CV data after you delete it — what "your data" covers once it's this complete