What are the nine profile tabs, and do I have to fill them all?

Profiled’s nine tabs help you build a complete profile. And no, you only have to fill the five tabs that gate publishing. The rest add depth.

The tabs are Basics, Narrative, Experience, Skills, Gaps, Values, FAQ, AI Instructions and Portfolio, in that order. You can publish with your name on Basics, Experience, Skills, Gaps and Narrative satisfied plus a quality score of 50%, then keep filling the others afterwards.

This page is the overview of how the builder works: what each tab holds, how the score and the publishing requirements are calculated, who can see what, and how saving behaves. Each tab has its own guide, linked in the table below.

The nine tabs at a glance

#	Tab	What it holds	Who can see it	Points	Blocks publishing?
1	Basics	Name, title, photo, public URL, targeting, compensation, location, three links	Mostly public	10	Yes: full name
2	Narrative	Seven free-text fields including your elevator pitch	Public	20	Yes: elevator pitch
3	Experience	Each role’s public half, plus eleven private reflection fields	Mixed	25	Yes: depth
4	Skills	A Strong / Moderate / Still developing matrix, with evidence and private notes	Public columns, private notes	15	Yes: breadth
5	Gaps	Broader experience gaps and why they are gaps	Public	10	Yes: at least one
6	Values	Must-haves, dealbreakers, five "how you work" reflections	Entirely private	10	No
7	FAQ	Question-and-answer pairs you write	Public	5	No
8	AI Instructions	Directives steering your visitor chat	Not rendered; shapes what the chat says	5	No
9	Portfolio	Links to your work	Not yet shown publicly	0	No

The five that gate publishing are Basics (your full name), Experience (one role with two or more private fields), Skills (three Strong plus one Still developing), Narrative (elevator pitch of 100+ characters) and Gaps (at least one entry). Everything else is optional.

Two worth filling even though they are optional. Values is entirely private and feeds your fit assessments, so it sharpens the tool hiring managers actually use. FAQ is public and the visitor chat draws on it, so pre-writing your hardest answers lets the chat field them consistently.

One worth knowing about before you invest time: Portfolio items are not currently scored, are not yet shown on your public profile, and are not read by the AI. Add the links if you like, but today they will not lift your score or be seen by visitors.

Each tab except Portfolio ends with a button that names the next tab, such as "Continue to Narrative →", and the active tab is carried in the page address, so you can bookmark where you stopped. Portfolio is the last tab, so it has no Continue button.

How the quality score is calculated

The score is a fixed set of weights totaling 100.

Tab	Points	How you earn them
Basics	10	Three fields only: full name, current title, location. Roughly 3.3 points each. Nothing else on the tab scores.
Narrative	20	The elevator pitch alone. 100 or more characters earns the full 20; a shorter pitch earns a proportion of it. The other six fields score nothing, but the AI reads them.
Experience	25	Roles that have a company name, a job title and at least one private context field filled. Three such roles earn the full 25; two earn about 17; one earns about 8. A role with no private context earns nothing.
Skills	15	Up to three Strong skills at about 3.3 points each (10 at most), plus 5 points for having at least one skill in the Still developing column.
Gaps	10	Two or more gap entries earn 10. One earns 5.
Values	10	Seven items counted: the five text areas, plus must-haves and dealbreakers when each has an entry. Scaled to 10.
FAQ	5	Three or more complete FAQs earn 5. A complete FAQ has both a question and an answer.
AI Instructions	5	One written instruction earns the full 5.
Portfolio	0	Not scored.

A card you added but never filled in earns nothing and passes no requirement, on any tab.

Where the points hide

• Experience is the biggest single block at 25 points, and it depends on private context. Three roles with perfect public bullets and no private notes score zero for Experience. One private field per role is what makes a role count.
• Narrative’s 20 points sit entirely in one field. By score, the elevator pitch is the highest-value text box in the builder.
• Values is worth 10 points for seven short entries, is entirely private, and takes about ten minutes.
• AI Instructions is 5 points for one sentence.

For the detail behind each weight, see How does the quality score work?.

The publishing requirements

Score and gates are separate. You need all five gates and a score of at least 50. Click Publishing checklist in the status bar to see a live pass or fail for all six.

Requirement	What passes it	Where
Experience depth	At least one role with a company name, a job title, and two or more private context fields filled	Experience
Skills breadth	At least 3 Strong skills and at least 1 skill marked Still developing	Skills
Professional narrative	An elevator pitch of 100 characters or more	Narrative
Acknowledged gaps	At least one gap or weakness entry	Gaps
Your name	Your full name filled in	Basics
Minimum score	50 or higher	Every tab

Note the mismatch that catches people out: the Experience score needs one private field per role. The Experience gate needs two on at least one role. If your score is climbing but Publish is still disabled, this is usually why.

The messages the checklist shows when a requirement fails are covered in Why won’t the Publish button enable?.

Why gaps are mandatory

You cannot publish a profile with no admitted weaknesses. This is intentional. A profile claiming strength everywhere reads as either inexperienced or dishonest, and the AI cannot be honest about gaps it does not know about. Left to infer, it will either invent a limitation or gloss over a real one. Both are worse for you than saying it yourself.

One of Profiled’s demo profiles, Elena Marchetti, is the clearest illustration. Elena lists Kubernetes as a skill she is still developing, which is why her assessment against a backend platform role returns an honest Probably not your person instead of a hedge, and why her Strong fit verdict on a growth product manager role is credible when it arrives.

What "public" and "private" mean

This is the most important thing to understand before you start typing, because it determines how honest you can afford to be. Four surfaces read your profile for visitors, hiring managers and recruiters, and they are given different things.

Surface	What it is	What it is given
Your public profile	Your page at your Profiled address, open to anyone with the link once you publish. Until then the address shows a "not found" page, and you see your draft through Preview in the dashboard sidebar.	Public fields only
The visitor chat	The AI a visitor talks to on your profile	Public fields and your AI Instructions, and no private context at all
The Honest Fit Assessment	The verdict a hiring manager gets when they paste a job description	Public fields plus all private context
Recruiter search	The search recruiter accounts will use to find candidates. Recruiter accounts are not open during the beta.	An index built when you publish, from your public story only: name, title, location, elevator pitch, career narrative, known for, looking for, roles and bullets, skills and gaps. Availability date and salary band act as filters. No private field is used.

The rule that makes honesty safe

The visitor chat is never given your private context. Not a filtered version: none at all. There is nothing in it for a visitor to extract, however they ask.

Your private context is used by the Honest Fit Assessment, the tool a hiring manager uses to check you against a specific job. The profile assistant also reads it while it helps you write it, and shows it only to you. Visitors and recruiters never see it, and the Ask-AI chat on your profile never receives it. Nothing you wrote privately can be repeated back to a visitor or recruiter, and every finished assessment is checked for this before anyone sees it.

AI Activity in the dashboard sidebar shows the most recent fit assessments run against your profile and the questions visitors have asked.

In practice, the private fields are a safe place to be blunt about why you left a job. The blunter you are, the sharper your fit verdicts get, and no visitor will read the words you wrote.

The exact private set

There are 12 private fields plus one entirely private tab:

• 11 per role on the Experience tab: Why you joined, Why you left, Actual contributions, Proudest achievement, Would do differently, Challenges faced, Lessons learned, What your manager would say, What your reports would say, Conflicts & tensions, Quantified impact.
• 1 per skill on the Skills tab: Honest notes. This is the twelfth private field, and it is easy to miss.
• The entire Values tab: must-haves, dealbreakers, management style preferences, team size preference, conflict handling, ambiguity tolerance, failure handling.

Everything else you type is public, with a few exceptions that are not private context but are not shown either: your compensation range and Available from date (recruiter search filters only), Target titles, and Portfolio items (stored only). AI Instructions are a separate case: they are not private context and are not displayed as part of your profile page, but they are given to the visitor chat as rules, and the chat may mention them to visitors.

For the privacy detail, see Is my private context ever shown to recruiters or visitors?. For a field-by-field guide to the eleven, see What do the 11 private Experience fields do, and who sees them?.

How saving works

There is no Save button, and that is deliberate. Every field saves automatically. A small Saving… then Saved pill appears beside the field label as it happens.

• On Basics, Narrative, and Skills cards, text fields save 1.5 seconds after you stop typing, and immediately when you click or tab out of the field.
• On Experience, Gaps, Values, FAQ, AI Instructions, and Portfolio, text fields save only when you click or tab out of the field. There is no save-while-typing. Dropdowns and checkboxes on these tabs save the instant you change them.
• Your public profile URL and your profile photo are the exceptions: the URL has its own Edit and Save URL buttons, and the photo has Save photo.
• Repeating items (experiences, skills, gaps, FAQs, instructions, portfolio items) are created as a new card the moment you click + Add, then saved field by field as you fill them in.

The one habit worth forming: click somewhere neutral after typing in a text area, and wait for the Saved pill. On Experience, Gaps, Values, FAQ, AI Instructions, and Portfolio the click-out is the only thing that saves. If you ever see Save failed, your text is still in the box. Reload the page in another browser tab to check what was stored before retyping anything.

The fastest route to a publishable profile

The tabs are ordered for a reason, and the Continue button walks you through them in sequence. If you are short on time, this is the efficient path.

Pass 1: get to publishable.

1. Basics: name, current title, location. Three fields, 10 points, and your name clears the name gate.
2. Narrative: the elevator pitch, over 100 characters. 20 points and a gate, in one box.
3. Experience: your most recent role, then two private fields on it. This clears the hardest gate.
4. Skills: three Strong, one Still developing. This clears the breadth gate.
5. Gaps: two entries. This clears the gaps gate and earns the full 10.

That is roughly 63 points (10 + 20 + 8 + 15 + 10) and all five gates. You can publish.

Pass 2: make it deep.

• Values: 10 points, entirely private, seven short entries.
• Experience again: the remaining private fields on your top two roles. This is where fit verdicts stop being generic.
• FAQ: three complete question-and-answer pairs.
• AI Instructions: one or two directives.
• Narrative again: the remaining six fields.

Optional: Portfolio. Worth doing for your own records, but it currently earns no points and appears nowhere public.

Uploading a résumé first saves retyping. "Upload a résumé or profile document" on the Dashboard’s Profile Setup panel, or "Import from résumé" on the Basics tab, reads your file and shows every item for review. Nothing changes until you choose "Apply to profile", and only the items you leave ticked are saved. A résumé fills your basics, roles and skills, so you can spend your time on the private depth, the part no résumé contains; a profile document can fill your private context too. See Importing a résumé or profile document: upload, review, apply.

Or fill it with help. "Fill it with help", above the tab row, opens the profile assistant (the button reads "Continue with help" once your profile can be published). It asks about what is still missing, starting with what publishing needs, and drafts the wording for you to tick and save. Getting publish-ready with it is included on every plan; the full interview is part of Pro. See Filling your profile with help: the profile assistant.

Mistakes that cost the most

1. Treating private fields as optional. They are where 25 of your points live, and they are the difference between a generic fit verdict and a specific one.
2. Writing private fields as if someone will read them. Polished, diplomatic private notes are worth less than blunt ones. "Growth lost its mandate when we were absorbed into sales" tells the assessment something. "Seeking new challenges" tells it nothing.
3. Leaving an FAQ question unanswered. An unanswered FAQ is a draft. It does not publish, does not score, and does not reach the chat or the fit assessment on your profile; only your own profile assistant can read it, while it helps you finish it. The card says so: "Hidden from your public profile until answered."
4. Adding a card and abandoning it. Clicking + Add creates a real card immediately. On Experience, Skills, Gaps and FAQ, a card you have not filled in is a draft: it stays in the editor with a "Hidden from your public profile until …" badge, never appears on your public profile, is never given to the chat or the fit assessment on your profile (only your own profile assistant can read it, to help you finish it), and earns no points. An empty AI Instructions card is labeled "Not used by the AI until written", and an empty Portfolio card has no badge at all. Either way it clutters your builder, so fill it in or delete it.
5. Listing gaps you do not have. The gap that earns trust is the one a recruiter would have found anyway. A manufactured gap reads as manufactured.
6. Stopping at 50%. 50 is the floor, not the target. Between 50 and 75, while the profile is still a draft, the status bar warns that the profile "may not sustain deep AI interrogation". A hiring manager asking a third follow-up question will reach the bottom of what the AI knows.
7. Skipping Values because it is not required. Ten points, entirely private, ten minutes.

💡Follow our step-by-step Quick-Start User Guide to learn how to set up your profile quickly and easily.

Related

• Why won’t the Publish button enable?
• How does the quality score work?
• What do the 11 private Experience fields do, and who sees them?

Last verified: 2026-10-21