Reference
Skills Catalog
All 28 skills and what each one does.
CareerRat ships 28 skills under .agents/skills/. Each is a SKILL.md file, a
detailed, executable procedure the agent follows when routed to that skill. Skills
are field-neutral: the same skill serves any candidate because it reads your
private config, not hardcoded preferences.
Apply cycle
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
ingest-profile | Interview a new candidate to produce all user-layer config files: profile, targeting, evidence, honesty boundaries, form defaults, writing style, personalized AGENTS.md, and seed search sources. Run on first setup or any major profile change. |
setup-searches | Build and maintain config/search-sources.yml from candidate targeting — generate a baseline from role buckets, curate enabled sources, add or import individual searches (including pasted board URLs with embedded filters preserved), and tune global filters. Upstream of search-jobs; does not scan. |
search-jobs | Run the top-of-funnel sourced sweep — scan configured sources, dedupe, check liveness, coarse-triage every new entry with fitScore/fitBucket/fitBasis, save JD bodies, write watermarks, and optionally hand top sourced roles to evaluate-job. Does not tailor, fill, or submit. |
evaluate-job | Body-read gate for a single job posting — fetch, save, check limits/comp/fit, emit GATE/FIT/COMP/ACTION, and write calibrated fit back to the tracker. Run before any tailoring or submission. |
answer-question | Draft evidence-grounded answers to one-off application or screening questions, reuse saved disclosure answers, and return NEEDS YOU instead of guessing when the evidence is insufficient. |
tailor-application | Generate finished, honest role-specific resumes, cover letters, short answers, and non-message outreach artifacts from a saved JD, source resume facts, candidate evidence bank, writing style, and form defaults after the job passes the CareerRat gate. Reject unresolved placeholders. |
apply-job | End-to-end job application workflow — gates on app limits and evaluate-job verdict, tailors artifacts, builds the render, prepares supported ATS forms (including LinkedIn Easy Apply), stops for user submission, verifies the reported outcome, and updates the tracker. |
coach-gaps | Turn each named REVIEW fit gap into an evidence-grounded claim draft or an explicit no-close path, then offer re-evaluation only after the evidence firewall confirms the change. |
Intake extraction
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
intake-extract | Backend-only verbatim transcription for PDF and image uploads sent through Universal Intake. It does not summarize, classify, or make candidate-specific assumptions. |
resume-extract | Backend-only structured extraction for PDF, image, and converted DOCX résumés. It emits the onboarding profile and targeting draft without inventing facts. |
Research loop
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
research-company | Web-search a company across six domain-neutral axes and compose a cited .careerrat/workspace/research/<slug>.md artifact that feeds interview-prep and evaluate-job FIT context. |
research-comp | Web-search market comp for a role+location and produce a cited .careerrat/workspace/research/comp-bench-*.md that feeds evaluate-job COMP CHECK/ANCHOR and a confirm-first gate write-back. |
research-boards | Web-search and legitimacy-screen new job boards for the candidate's domain/role families, then propose adding to search-sources.yml confirm-first. |
discover-companies | Web-search companies likely to be hiring the candidate's target roles, resolve each to a scannable ATS careers board, legitimacy-screen and dedup, then propose adding to config/sourced-scan.json tracked_companies confirm-first. Upstream of search-jobs. |
company-health | Score a role-scoped company-risk rating (healthy|watch|risky) from web-searched layoff, hiring-momentum, financial, sentiment, and leadership signals with provenance; persist it to the tracker and feed the fit score only where it cross-cuts a stated candidate need. Cost-gated; an internal signal that never enters an outbound artifact. |
Communications
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
email-comms | Draft, reply to, follow up on, summarize, and track job-search email and recruiter-message threads — including thank-yous, scheduling, negotiation, and cold outreach — while persisting full thread context in the CareerRat tracker. |
schedule-meeting | Handle recruiter / hiring-team scheduling threads — read the proposed slots, the candidate's timezone and availability, and any calendar context; draft a clear availability reply, prepare a calendar-ready hold, and write scheduling state back to the tracker. Confirm-first before any outbound reply or calendar write. |
ingest-mail | CareerRat's in-app workflow reads job-search updates from Apple Mail on macOS or, with separate mail_access consent, Gmail/Outlook webmail; it captures relevant threads and source watermarks locally. The terminal skill provides the same workflow for external agents. Opt-in and read-only at the source. |
ingest-messages | CareerRat's in-app workflow reads LinkedIn and Wellfound DMs through the session browser and captures relevant threads and source watermarks locally. The terminal skill provides the same workflow for external agents. Opt-in, user-initiated, and read-only at the source. |
Interview & outcomes
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
interview-prep | Build interview packets, script live comp answers, and capture post-interview debriefs and durable lessons from a saved JD, tracker record, candidate evidence, and interview invite context. |
track-outcomes | Record application outcomes, execute status transitions in tracker.json, append durable patterns to role-family learning files, check reevaluation thresholds, and write back any mid-flow gate changes stated by the user. |
reevaluate-strategy | Learn from accumulated outcomes — read the funnel, rejections, interview transcripts, and wins, then recommend concrete tuning to targeting signals, comp anchoring, fit calibration, channel mix, and writing-style. Triggered by outcome thresholds or an explicit review request. |
Optimization & sync
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
optimize-linkedin | CareerRat's in-app workflow reads the candidate's LinkedIn profile and proposes honest, evidence-backed rewrites for review. Approval stays local; a separate opt-in and per-field confirmation are required before the terminal skill writes approved edits live. |
sync-status | CareerRat's in-app workflow reads saved ATS dashboards, normalizes each raw label, applies verified high-confidence advances atomically, and leaves regressions or low-confidence labels for review. Terminal agents route confirmed transitions through track-outcomes. Opt-in, user-initiated, and read-only at the portal. |
relationship-sourcing | CareerRat's in-app workflow finds likely recruiters, hiring-team members, or warm contacts through LinkedIn and Wellfound, then saves review-only leads in Network. The terminal skill provides the same workflow for external agents. Opt-in, user-initiated, and local-only. |
Settings & calendar
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
configure | Show current settings and route changes to the validated CLI or owning skill — never a new mutation path itself. |
calendar-sync | Write tracker-derived interviews, assessments, follow-ups, prep blocks, and deadlines to Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, or approved local automation tools. Opt-in, user-initiated, confirm-first. |
Diagnostics
| Skill | Description |
|---|---|
report-issue | When CareerRat itself looks broken — a crash, stack trace, non-zero exit, or clearly-wrong output — separate a real defect from a config problem, assemble redacted diagnostics (no candidate PII, comp, or workspace contents), and, only with an explicit yes, open a GitHub issue on the upstream CodesWhat/careerrat repo under the user's own gh identity. Never auto-files; falls back to a prefilled issue URL when gh is unavailable. |