A package is what Second Reader builds from your resume and one job posting. It holds five documents:
- Tailored resume. Your real history, reordered and reworded for that posting. Built from the resume you uploaded and nothing else.
- Cover letter. Written for the same posting, in your own material.
- Why this job. A short paragraph you can paste into an application box that asks why you are interested.
- Job Matrix. Every requirement in the posting on its own row, with where in your history you meet it. Spreadsheet download.
- Recruiter outreach email. A short note you can send to a person rather than a form.
Every package also carries an ATS score and an integrity check report. The Job Matrix and the recruiter email are Pro deliverables; see Which parts need Pro.
Usually about a minute. You watch it happen: reading your resume and the posting, drafting the resume, checking every claim against your history, writing the cover letter and the rest, removing anything unsupported, making it read like you wrote it, and scoring it against the posting.
A generation is allowed up to five minutes before the server gives up. If one fails, the credit is returned to you automatically.
Every new account is created with one package credit. You do not need a card for it. Spend it on a real posting, read what comes back, and decide from there.
Yes. A coach account gets the same one credit, and it can be spent on a client package before the practice has a coach plan.
Four things, in this order:
- Your resume is the only source. The writer works from the document you uploaded and the profile you filled in. It does not go looking for anything else about you.
- Nothing is invented. After the draft, an integrity check reads it back against your source resume and removes claims it cannot find there. What it removed is shown to you.
- Strengths first. The documents lead with your strongest relevant experience.
- No gap disclosure. They stay silent about a requirement your resume does not evidence, rather than writing a sentence that names it as a gap.
That last one is a writing choice, not a claim that you meet the requirement.
Because the check is a review pass, not a verification of your history. It works from the resume you gave us, so it cannot know what you left out, cannot confirm a date, and can miss things. AI output can also misread a date, drop a qualifier, or restate something imprecisely.
The documents are also written to lead with strengths and stay silent about what your resume does not evidence, so a finished document may not answer everything the employer asked.
Read every document before you send it. You are the author of what reaches an employer.
A short notice you confirm once, on your Profile page under Documents and accuracy, or the first time you download a document, whichever comes first. It says:
"Check every document before you use it. Second Reader writes from your resume and profile and may omit or misstate things. You are responsible for what you send."
It belongs to your account, not to a package, so you confirm it once and are not asked again. We record when you confirmed it, which wording you confirmed, and whether you did it on the web, in the app, or in the extension. You cannot finish your profile without it.
A true story that explains why a certain kind of job matters to you: two years volunteering at a hospice, a parent who ran a restaurant, a side business you built. You write the trigger as a kind of role or company ("healthcare", "mission-driven nonprofits") and the angle as you would say it out loud.
When a posting fits the trigger, the writer may work one angle into your cover letter or your "why this job" paragraph. Never the resume, never more than one, and never when the fit is a stretch. Add them on your Profile page.
Real experience that only belongs on some applications: a nonprofit board seat, a side business, a certification that reads as overqualified elsewhere.
Each block is treated as verified history that the writer may draw on only when the posting matches the rule you set. When it is included it appears on the tailored resume exactly like the rest of your history, and it passes the same integrity check.
An angle is a reason, and it can only reach the cover letter or the why-this-job paragraph. A conditional block is experience, and it goes on the resume itself when its rule matches.
Change the inputs and build it again. The writer only ever sees your resume and your profile, so:
- Wrong emphasis or a missing achievement: upload a better resume on the Resume page.
- The letter says nothing about why you want this kind of work: add a personal angle.
- Real experience is missing from the resume: add a conditional experience block, or put it on the resume you upload.
Then generate the package again. Editing the finished file by hand is fine too; it is your document.
The Job Matrix and the recruiter outreach email. Pro also runs the reviewer pass on every package rather than only when it is needed, and unlocks in-app prefill on mobile.
Free, Starter pack and Plus all build the tailored resume, the cover letter, the why-this-job paragraph, the ATS score and the integrity check.
Both are on the package page. Many applicant tracking systems parse .docx more reliably than PDF, because Word carries headings, list numbering and tabs as structure rather than as ink. Send the DOCX where the form takes it, and the PDF where you want the layout to survive exactly as you saw it.
A score for how well the tailored resume answers that specific posting, generated with the package and shown on the package page. It is our own measurement, not a number an employer sees, and it is not a prediction that you will be contacted.
Sometimes there is no score, and the package says "Not scored". The score is measured against the requirements we can read out of the posting itself. A posting that is very short, or written as one unbroken block, or that describes the company rather than the job, does not give us enough to measure against, so we say so instead of inventing a number. It says nothing about your resume, and nothing about the package: every claim in the documents is still checked against your history, and on a not-scored posting that honesty review always runs. A "Not scored" package is complete and ready to send.
From the Chrome Web Store, in one click: Second Reader Apply Assistant. It works in Chrome and Edge and updates itself.
Pin "Second Reader Apply Assistant" to the toolbar so you can see the badge, then connect it to your account.
Developers can load the source unpacked instead: build apps/extension, open chrome://extensions, turn on Developer mode, click Load unpacked and pick the dist folder. An unpacked copy does not update on its own. The extension page has both routes.
Click the toolbar icon and choose Connect account, or open Browser extension on your Profile. Both land on the same page. If you are not signed in you are sent to the login page and back automatically. The page then says "Connected as ..." with your email.
The device token that pairs the browser to your account is held by the extension's background worker and is never handed to a web page. Reconnecting revokes the old token before storing the new one.
A small panel the extension puts in the bottom right corner of a job page. It shows the job it detected and gives you the actions that make sense there: Prefill, and either Build package or Open package. The toolbar badge shows a dot for a detected posting and a tick when you already have a package for it.
Nothing about a page leaves your browser because the pill appeared. Detection runs entirely in the page.
Only empty fields, and only when you click. It fills what your profile answers: name, preferred name, contact details, address, LinkedIn, GitHub link, website or portfolio link, university attended, field of study, work authorization and screening answers, and the voluntary self-identification answers you saved. It attaches your tailored resume, and the cover letter PDF when the form has a place for one. Fields it does not recognize are sent to our mapper as labels only, and it opens a review panel listing what it filled, what it deliberately left alone, and what it could not place.
Four more it answers, and where each answer comes from:
- Citizenship and employment eligibility. "What is your citizenship / employment eligibility?" and "Are you a U.S. citizen?" are a different question from work authorization and sponsorship, and they have their own answer on your profile. It starts on Prefer not to answer, and while it says that, nothing is filled. It is also what we fall back on for work authorization and sponsorship when you have left those two blank.
- "Are you 18 or older?" Answered Yes, from the box you ticked when you created the account. Never answered No, and never worked out from anything else.
- Preferred name. A "Preferred first name" or "Nickname" box gets the preferred name on your profile. Leave it blank and that box gets your first name.
- Links. GitHub and website or portfolio boxes get the two links on your profile. A box that asks for LinkedIn, even one that also mentions a portfolio, gets your LinkedIn. A Twitter box is left alone.
- Education. University attended and Field of study on your profile come first. Leave them blank and they are read off your resume instead, along with degree, did you graduate, and is this your highest. On a site with an Add Education block, it fills the first entry and stops there: it does not press Add. Press Add yourself and click Prefill again for the next one.
- Pronouns, wherever a form offers them as a list. It never ticks Custom or Use name only, because those are yours to write.
It never overwrites an answer you already typed.
- Passwords, Social Security numbers, government IDs, card and bank numbers. These are detected, skipped, and counted so the review panel can tell you how many it left alone. Detection is careful but not perfect, which is exactly why it reports the count.
- Questions that are a judgement about you rather than a fact from your profile. "Were you referred by someone? If so, enter their name" is not your name. "Have you previously been employed by this company" is not a box we answer. Nor is "if a family member works here, give their name". Those stay empty for you.
- Dates, anywhere on the form. A self-identification block often ends with "Name" and "Today's date": the name is yours and we fill it, and the date is what makes that block a signature, so it is left for you. The review panel lists it under Left for you so a blank we chose does not read like a blank we missed. Your date of birth is separate, and is in the list above: we do not hold one and never ask for one.
Voluntary self-identification and pronouns are filled only where a form asks for them, only from what you saved, and they are never sent to the AI model.
No. There is no code path in it that can submit a form, click a submit control, or advance a multi-step application. That is enforced by a test that scans every shipped file. You review, and you click the site's own Submit button.
Narrowly, on purpose:
- It fills only inside an application dialog you opened. While the Easy Apply modal is closed, a click writes nothing.
- Once the modal is open the pill reads "Easy Apply open, Prefill this step" and a click fills that step's text fields.
- It never advances a step. You click Next and you click Submit.
- Your resume and cover letter are held back until you confirm by name on those two hosts, every time. A package you built for the job is not treated as permission to hand documents to a job board's own form.
It fills less, and tells you what is left for you.
- A code emailed to you. Some sites (Phenom-built career sites, among others) verify your email before they will show you the application at all. The extension fills the email box and nothing else, and the pill says: "This site verifies your email first. We filled it, enter the code they email you, then Prefill each step." We cannot see your inbox; the code is yours to enter.
- An account. If the page asks you to register, the extension fills your name and email only. It never creates an account and never types a password. That is enforced by the fill engine, which refuses password fields by type and by label. Use the same email as your Second Reader profile and your Tracker will match up.
- A captcha. reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Turnstile are never read, written, clicked or solved. The pill says so: "The captcha is yours to solve; we never touch it."
Yes. On a multi-page application (Workday, Phenom career sites like Virgin Galactic or EverCommerce, iCIMS, SuccessFactors, Taleo, Oracle HCM, Eightfold) each page is its own form, and the extension only ever fills the page in front of you. The routine on every page:
1. Read the pill. It shows the step you are on, for example "Step 2 of 5, My Experience, Prefill this step". 2. Click Prefill. The review panel lists what was filled on this page and what was left for you. 3. Check the page, add anything the panel left for you (a signature date, an education entry to save with the site's own Add button, a code from your email), then click the site's Next yourself. 4. On the next page the pill re-arms. Click Prefill again.
If you move to a new page and forget, nothing happens: the extension never fills a page you did not ask it to, and it never presses Next for you. The self-identification page (gender, race, veteran and disability status) is a page like any other, so it needs its own Prefill too.
Many large employers (Workday, iCIMS, SuccessFactors, Taleo, Oracle HCM, Eightfold, Phenom) ask for one step at a time: My Information, then My Experience, then Application Questions, then the voluntary disclosures, then a review page.
- The pill says where you are: "Step 2 of 6, My Information, Prefill this step".
- Prefill fills only the step on screen. Nothing behind it and nothing in the site's own header or footer is touched. Very occasionally a site is built in a way that hides where one step ends; when that happens the extension fills the page and tells you it did, in the review panel, rather than quietly pretending otherwise.
- It never presses Next, Continue, Review or Submit. Moving between steps is yours, and so is submitting.
- When you move to the next step the pill re-arms for it and the previous step's review panel comes down. Your package stays with you.
- On a site that reads your resume and pre-fills the step from it, the resume goes on first, so the site's own parser runs and the extension fills only what it left blank. Anything already filled in is never overwritten.
Yes. The minimize control tucks it into a small tab on the right edge, which you can drag up and down; clicking the tab brings it back. Escape tucks it too, and deliberately does not take the Escape key away from the page, so it still closes the site's own modal. The close control still hides it outright for the life of the page.
It also gets out of the way on its own: if a chat widget or a cookie bar lands under it, it moves, and it comes back when the space clears.
Yes. When a package matches the posting, the pill shows a row of buttons for the files that package actually has: Resume PDF, Cover Letter PDF, and on a Pro package the Why Interested document and the Job Matrix spreadsheet, plus a button that copies the recruiter email to your clipboard. Each one downloads on your click and nothing else.
That you have no package built for this exact posting, so Prefill filled the form from your profile only and attached no documents. Use Build package on the pill to build one for it, then prefill again.
The same time a package takes anywhere else, usually about a minute. The pill's status keeps saying so while it runs, and the tucked tab shows a gold dot so you can see it is still going. Only one build runs per tab at a time, and building a package for a posting you already have one for reuses it rather than spending a second one.
Because our servers make no request to LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor or ZipRecruiter at all. That is a policy, not a bug, and retrying the link will never work.
There are three ways to get one of those postings in:
- The extension reads it in your own browser, on the page you opened, and sends us the text it read.
- The phone app opens the posting in a web view inside the app and reads it there. See Connected sites.
- Paste the text. Open the posting, click "See more" so the whole description is on screen, copy it, and paste it into the paste box.
Every other job site, including employer career pages and the usual applicant tracking systems, works from a link.
The app is for capture and review. You capture a posting with it while you are standing in front of it, and you read what came back on it afterwards. Building and managing your material happens on the website, and applying happens in the browser extension on a computer.
That is the whole of the tab bar: Capture to get a posting in, Review to read the packages that came out, Tracker for the applications you have logged, and Profile for your answers, your connected sites and your settings.
One box, on the Capture tab, that takes either a link or the posting text. You do not have to tell it which.
- Paste the text. Open the posting, tap "See more" so the whole description is on screen, copy it, and paste. The app pulls out the title, company and location for you to check before anything is built.
- Paste a link. Anything except LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter is fetched from the link. For those four you get one row with two choices and no fuss: Open and read in the app, which opens the posting in a web view inside the app and reads it there, or Save for later, which keeps the link on your list to build another day. See Connected sites and Can I save a job and build it later?.
- Share it to the app. Use the share button on the posting and pick Second Reader. You get a small choice: Save for later, which is one tap and puts you straight back in the app you were reading, or Build now, which opens Capture and starts. If what was shared did not include the posting text, it is saved anyway and marked "Needs the reader" so the intent is not lost. Sharing comes with the installed app; the Capture screen tells you which of the two you are running, because a build going through Expo Go registers no share target and should not send you looking for a row that is not in your share sheet.
Once a posting is in, you get two choices: Build now, which spends a package, and Save for later, which costs nothing and puts it on a list you can come back to. See Can I save a job and build it later?.
Under the box is Recent captures, the last ten postings this phone got hold of, each with Build if you have not built it yet or Open if you have. It lives on the phone rather than in your account, because it is a record of what this device did. That is the difference between it and your saved list, which is on your account and on every device.
Every package you have, newest first, with its score, its company, the date it was built and whether it is ready. Anything finished in the last day is badged Ready. Tap one to open it, read the documents, download them or start interview prep.
Two cards sit at the top: Saved for later, with how many postings you have kept, and Activity, with how many things we have told you that you have not read yet. Both open the full list.
Your plan, your remaining credits and the fair use bar sit at the top, with "Manage plan", so you find out you are running low before a build tells you.
The applications you have logged, on the phone. It is the same list as on the website, so an application you logged from the extension on your laptop is on your phone as well.
The Job Matrix as a deck of cards, one card per requirement, for the twenty minutes before an interview. It is on a package screen as Prep for interview, and only on packages that have a Job Matrix.
Each card shows their requirement on the front. Say your answer out loud, then tap to flip and see what you have that meets it. A requirement you do not meet is marked as a gap on both faces, and the note on the back tells you not to claim it, because an interview is exactly where an invented claim gets tested out loud. The counter says how far in you are, and the last card is your recruiter email and your why this job paragraph for one more read.
Swipe to move through the deck, or use the buttons if you would rather not.
Yes, once you have opened them. The first time you open one of a package's documents on your phone it is saved on the device, and every time after that it opens from there. The package screen says Available offline under each file that is saved, so you can check before you leave the house.
Remove downloads on a package screen deletes that package's files from the phone, and Settings, under Your data, shows the total size with Clear cached documents. Neither touches your account, and any file downloads again the next time you open it.
Documents saved on a phone belong to the account that saved them. They are deleted when you sign out, and when a different account signs in on that phone.
Yes, and it is the same list on the app and on the website.
Most people have more time to read postings than to build packages. So every posting you capture offers Save for later next to Build now, sharing one to the app defaults to saving it, and a posting saved on your phone is on the website when you sit down, and the other way round.
Saved for later is reached from the Capture tab and from a card at the top of Review, and on the website it is under the workbench on the Jobs page. Each row says where it came from, shows the first couple of lines of the posting, and offers Build, Open and Remove.
LinkedIn and Indeed links can be saved from the app on their own, with no posting text behind them. Saving one stores the address you handed us and fetches nothing, which is why it is allowed on boards our servers never read. The row is named after its site, shows the link, and is tagged "Needs the reader". Tapping Build on it opens the posting in the app's own reader first and builds from what it reads, so it is one button rather than two errands, and Build all leaves those rows alone and says how many it skipped. On the website the same rows appear with Open and no Build: the website cannot read those boards from a link at all, and the row says so and points you at the browser extension or the app.
Build all builds every saved posting in one go. It goes one at a time and tells you which one it is on. Anything you already have a package for is opened rather than built again, and does not cost you anything. If you run out of packages part way through it stops and says how many it built, and everything it did build is yours. You can stop it yourself at any point, and whatever has already finished is kept.
A posting you build, from either the app or the website, comes off the list once its package exists.
On a phone there is no browser extension, because phone browsers do not run them. So for the four sites our servers never fetch, the app offers to open the posting in a web view inside the app and read it there instead. "Connected sites" at the bottom of your Profile tab is where you sign in once so it can.
You sign in on LinkedIn's own page. Second Reader never sees or stores your password; the login stays in this app on this phone. Nothing of ours is on that screen, nothing you type there is read by us, and the cookie the site gives you back is not synced to your account, never reaches our servers, and does not follow you to another device or to the website.
It does not apply to jobs for you. A connected site is never used to submit anything, message anyone, or act on either site on your behalf. The only thing that ever happens with one of these logins is you opening a posting and tapping "Read this posting", which reads the title, company, location, description and address off the page and drops them into the posting form for you to check.
The status on each row is a best guess: the app loads the site's own home page and looks for a signed-in marker, and it shows you when it last checked. The app cannot clear another site's cookies from the outside, so to sign out of a connected site, open it from that row and use the site's own sign out.
Yes, in the installed app. You get a notification when a package is ready, and one if a build failed, which also tells you that nothing was charged for it. Tapping either one opens that package. While a build is running you can still watch it happen on the screen, the same way you can on the website.
Settings, then Notifications is where you choose what we send. The switches are by group rather than one per message: packages, saved for later, applications, and account and billing. Everything is on until you turn it off, and the choice is on your account, so it applies to every device you sign in on.
The same screen has Activity: everything we have sent you, in order. It is written whether or not a phone was there to receive it, so a notification you missed, or that arrived while notifications were off on the phone itself, is still there to read.
None of this works in Expo Go, and the app says so rather than asking for a permission it cannot use.
Because phone browsers do not run extensions. Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android have no equivalent of the pill, so there is nothing for us to install there. That is why the app reads the four blocked sites in its own web view instead, and why prefilling an application form is a thing you do at a computer.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 package on signup |
| Starter pack | $9.99 once | 5 packages, credits never expire |
| Plus | $29.99 a month | 100 packages a month |
| Plus weekly | $14.99 a week | The same as Plus, billed weekly |
| Pro | $44.99 a month | Plus, and the Job Matrix, the recruiter email, the reviewer on every package, and mobile prefill |
The pricing page is the live version of this table.
Nothing stops. Every subscription includes 100 packages per calendar month as fair use. Beyond that, each package is $0.99, added as a line item to your next invoice. You are never blocked in the middle of a search.
Plus weekly is the same product as Plus, billed at $14.99 a week instead of $29.99 a month. It is for a short burst: a two-week push where a month's subscription would be more than you need. Both renew automatically until you cancel, and both include the same 100 packages a month of fair use.
In the Stripe billing portal, which you reach from your account page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and you keep access until then. Subscriptions are not prorated and partial periods are not refunded, except where your state or country's law requires it.
Credit packs are non-refundable once you have used a credit from the pack. Credits themselves never expire.
Both are on your Profile page, under Your data, and both take effect immediately.
Export gives you a JSON file with your profile, your resume text, every document we generated, your saved jobs and your logged applications. It carries no device tokens and no payment details.
Delete account removes your profile, uploaded resumes, generated packages, saved jobs, logged applications and any extension or mobile device tokens, then closes the login. You type DELETE to confirm and it cannot be undone. An active subscription is cancelled at the end of the period you have already paid for. We keep the billing and tax records the law requires.
To build a package we send Claude your resume text (or the PDF itself when the text extraction falls short), the parts of your profile the writer needs (your name, your personal angles, your conditional experience blocks), and the job description, title, company and location. When you give us a link we fetch, the text of that fetched page goes too. For the extension's field mapper we send the labels, types and options of the fields on the page, never the values.
We do not send your voluntary self-identification answers, your pronouns, your billing details or your password.
Anthropic does not use any of it to train models under our commercial terms. The Privacy Policy has the full detail.
No. We do not use your resumes, profiles or generated documents to train AI models, and we do not sell them. We run no advertising, no ad tracking and no analytics product.
Only if you accept their invitation. A coach who adds you as a client uploads their own copy of your resume and works from that; linking their client record to your own account happens only when you click the link they send you. After that, packages generated for you are visible to both of you.
A coach can also keep private working notes about a client, and those are the coach's record: you cannot see them in the product. If you want to know what your coach holds about you, ask your coach, or write to us and we will route it to them as the controller of that material.
Still stuck? Use the contact form.