1.2.2How to use Lenses

A Lens is where you see yourself next. It brings the jobs that fit that picture into focus, and it reads every posting you score from that position. You already have one: setup built it from your résumé so you could get to a Read without working through a form first — and for a lot of postings, that Lens is enough.

This section is the return trip. It’s for the point where you’ve seen a few Reads and want the frame sharpened: a verdict that didn’t sit right, a second path you’ve started looking at, or a sense that the engine is weighing something you don’t care about. The Lens page keeps its explanations short on purpose. This is the long version — how the answers turn into what a Lens looks for, and which ones you can leave alone.

What a Lens looks for: the ten kinds of work

Every Read shows a posting’s duties under The work, sorted into ten kinds of work in four bands. Every duty line gets one label, and the same ten apply to a lead nurse, a logistics manager and a program director — none of them is a project-management word.

Your Lens holds the same ten, each marked want, like, no opinion or avoid. Scoring the fit is arithmetic: each duty line in the posting carries your mark for its kind, and the score is the average. A posting made mostly of what you want reads well through this Lens. A posting made of work you have no opinion on costs you nothing. Only avoid counts against a posting, and only you can set it.

How your answers add up

You don’t fill the ten in by hand. They come from your answers, applied broad to individual: field, then level, then place, then how you want to spend the day — and last, anything you set yourself. A later answer replaces what an earlier one said about the same kind of work. Two answers to the same question average.

That order is why how you want to spend the day (work shape) moves your score more than any other answer: it speaks last. Here is what each choice says:

Watch the managing-people line. If you love working with people but don’t want to manage them, Lead / Team Lead says the opposite — Senior Practitioner is the shape that wants the reach without the reports.

Level sets very little: Specialist wants the craft; Director and Senior Director want planning and changing how things work, and like managing people; VP and above want planning and working across teams. Field sets the kinds of work the field is made of — Governance / Compliance wants rules, risk and safety, Finance wants money, contracts and vendors. Place sets one or two: Growth & change and Turnaround want changing how things work.

At the bottom of the Lens page, See all ten shows every kind of work, its mark, and the answer it came from. If one is wrong, change it there. What you set yourself stays, whatever you answer above, and it’s the only way to mark something avoid.

Career direction forgives — it doesn’t choose the work

Career direction asks what this move is for. It says nothing about the kind of work you want; that’s the job of the answers above. What it does is stop certain findings from counting against a posting — the ones that are the point of the move rather than a problem with it.

Forgiveness is narrow. Capstone forgives the rung, not the size: a smaller organization than you’re used to can still cost you on scope.

If you genuinely don’t know yet, Exploring is a real answer, not a placeholder — it forgives nothing and reads every posting straight.

Level and work shape are two different questions

These look like the same setting twice. They aren’t.

Level is the seat you want next — where it sits in the organization, not the title you hold now. Work shape is how you operate inside it: whether your value comes from your own judgment and output, from directing a small group, or from managing managers.

The two come apart often, and that’s the point. A Senior Practitioner at Director level is a real and increasingly common shape — organizational reach without direct reports. If you set the level high and work shape to Manager / Supervisor because it felt consistent, you’ve quietly told ArcLens you want people management, and postings that don’t carry it will read thinner than they should.

Spend your field selections on the work, not the industry

You get three fields. The cap is deliberate — it forces you to say what this search is actually about.

Choose in terms of the work itself. Program / Project Delivery, Governance / Compliance, Technical / Engineering / IT are descriptions of what you’d be doing. The sector you’ve spent time in is not a field, and selecting by industry is the most common way to waste a slot.

Field is also how the Read tells the same label apart. “Rules, risk and safety” is a chore in an IT job and the whole job in a lab; the field you pick is what says which one you mean.

Leave place and pace blank if they don’t matter

What kind of place and what pace are both optional, and No opinion is a real answer: the Lens leaves them out. Pick one only when it’s true — a turnaround specialist really does read a stable, optimizing organization differently. Remember they describe the place, not the work: you can want a stable employer and still want to change how it works.

Use the two written fields

What kind of work brings out your best? and What to avoid look optional. They aren’t, in any way that matters.

The settings tell ArcLens the shape of what you’re looking for. These two say it in your words. The first is the part of the day you’d keep: “seeing the whole portfolio at once and finding what the numbers aren’t saying” tells the Read more than “strategic leadership”. The second is the job whose title fits but whose days don’t: “principal roles where selling matters more than delivery.” Write what you’d turn down there, not what you hope for — wants go in the first box.

Write them in plain language. They’re read, not parsed for keywords.

Set target titles if yours don’t match the market’s

This exists for a specific problem: your past titles and the titles you’re targeting use different language for the same work.

If you’ve been a Technology Portfolio & Estimation Lead and the market calls that a Portfolio Director, ArcLens has no way to know unless you say so. Fill this in when your history and your target speak different dialects. Leave it empty when they don’t.

Mark your Anchor and Donor roles

The role surface tells ArcLens which parts of your history carry this search and which are there to supply evidence.

An Anchor role is one you want front and center — it makes the case for the move you’re making. A Donor role has useful evidence in it but isn’t the story: the accomplishment still gets used, the role doesn’t lead. Archived means gone from this Lens entirely — from the score and from the résumé.

This differs by Lens, which is the whole reason it’s per-Lens. A role that anchors your governance path may be a donor on your delivery path. Set it deliberately rather than leaving everything as Anchor, or the build has no hierarchy to work from.

Check the Career History window against what you uploaded

The window sets how many years of history come into a résumé build. Roles outside it are dropped unless they carry unique evidence. It’s résumé-only — scoring always reads your whole record.

If you followed 1.1.2 and uploaded sources covering twenty-five years, a fifteen-year window means the earliest decade only appears when nothing more recent covers the ground. That’s usually correct — and it’s worth knowing you set it, so that when older work doesn’t surface you know why.

One Lens per path, not one Lens for everything

A job search is rarely a single view. You can hold up to six Lenses and score through three at a time — one for your current path, one for a step up, one for something else, or whatever paths you’re actually weighing. One is a complete answer if one is all you’re looking at.

What doesn’t work is one Lens averaged across two different moves. It gives you a coarse read on both and a clear read on neither. If you’re looking at both director-level program jobs and senior-practitioner governance jobs, those are two paths and they need two Lenses. Two Lenses cost ten minutes. One blurred Lens costs the discrimination that makes a Read worth reading.

A worked example: one person, four Lenses

One person’s four Lenses, each pointed at a different next step. Same record, same résumé:

Two are the current path, one is a step up, one is a wider mandate. What separates them is managing people — a like on the Stable Lens, a want everywhere else — and level. The Stable Lens also says, in its own words, what to avoid: roles where heavy external selling is involved.

Notice what doesn’t separate them. All four picked Growth & change, so “changing how things work” is a want on every one. A value every Lens shares tells a posting nothing about which path it’s on. If a setting is the same on all your Lenses, it’s worth asking whether it’s true for each of them or just the default you reached for.

Run the same posting through more than one Lens — the spread is the information

This is the habit that gets the most out of the system, and almost nobody does it unprompted.

Take a posting you’re genuinely unsure about and Read it through each path you’re weighing:

Nothing about the posting changed between those three lines. What changed is where you were standing when you looked at it.

A single number tells you where you’d land through one Lens. The spread tells you which path this posting is actually on — and if your strongest Lens is the one you’re least interested in living inside, that’s worth knowing before you apply rather than after the second interview.

When a Read looks wrong, check the Lens before you doubt the score

Most surprising verdicts are a frame mismatch rather than an engine error. A governance-heavy posting read through a Lens that wants to manage people will come back thinner than you expect — through that Lens, it genuinely is.

Open the Lens, open See all ten, and check that it still describes the move you’re making.

Changes apply forward

Editing a Lens doesn’t re-score Reads you’ve already run. Change the Lens first, then re-run the postings you care about.