1.1.1Career History
Your Career History is the foundation everything else builds from. Before ArcLens can read a job for you, it needs to understand your career — not as a document formatted for a reader, but as indexed evidence of what you’ve actually done.
When you upload your source materials, ArcLens processes them into structured Career History. Each role becomes a set of evidence items: specific things you did, delivered, led, or built. These aren’t bullet points. They’re discrete claims extracted from your source material, organized by role, time period, and domain.
What this means in practice: your Career History is richer than any single résumé you’d ever send. It holds more evidence than will appear in one document. When you build for a role, ArcLens draws from this inventory and selects what fits — not what you happened to include in a particular version of your résumé.
The quality of everything downstream — scores, reads, builds — is a direct function of the quality of what went in. A Career History built from a dense, accomplishment-heavy résumé produces different results than one built from a thin duty-statement list. Depth matters. The more specific your source material, the more ArcLens has to work with when a job demands it.
ArcLens never sends your Career History to a recruiter or employer. It’s your private inventory. What gets sent is a targeted résumé assembled from it — selected and shaped for a specific posting.
Everything ArcLens can select from later is bounded by what you put in now, and most people put in less than they have. 1.1.2 — How to improve your Career History is the twenty minutes that changes the quality of every read and every build that follows.
1.2.1Lenses
A Lens tells ArcLens which version of your career you’re presenting for a given search. The same Career History looks different depending on the move you’re trying to make — and a Lens is how you specify the move.
When you build a Lens, you answer a small set of targeted questions: what kind of job you’re targeting, at what level, and what direction you’re moving. Based on your answers, your Career History gets read through that Lens — which domains get emphasized, which evidence surfaces first, which gaps get flagged as meaningful versus irrelevant.
You can have multiple Lenses. If you’re running a VP search and a Director search in parallel, or if you’re targeting both program management and operations jobs, each track gets its own Lens. Every Fit Read and every build runs through a Lens. There is no “Lens-free” mode — if you don’t select one, the system applies a general baseline read, which is coarser than anything Lens-targeted.
The key thing a Lens does is narrow focus. Your Career History contains decades of evidence across many domains. For any given search, only some of that evidence is relevant — and relevance depends on the move, not just the industry. A Lens tells the scoring engine what “relevant” means for this particular search track.
A Lens takes about five minutes to build, and once built it persists until you change it. The quick setup already made you one, which is enough for a lot of postings — 1.2.2 — How to use Lenses is for the point where you want the frame sharpened.