Getting started

This walks through the first half hour, in the order that makes the least work.

1. Sign in

On a fresh instance, open the site and create the first account: it becomes the administrator. (Or use the one you created with createsuperuser.) Either the username or the email address signs in. The address counts as verified for that first account; for everyone who signs up afterwards, a link is sent to their address and they sign in once they have followed it.

2. Fill in your details

Your name, top right → Your details. The menu under your name also holds Settings and Sign out; everything else about your account, exporting it included, lives under Settings.

Your details is what Postulo knows about you as a candidate: the name, picture and contact block printed at the top of your CVs, and behind them your telephone numbers, postal addresses, links on the web and identifiers — one page, with its parts listed down the side so you can jump to one. It is worth doing first, because every CV you generate reads from it.

How Postulo behaves for you lives under Settings, one section per page:

• Appearance — light, dark, or match your operating system. The switch in the menu under your name cycles through the same three; this is the explicit version. The same page lists the items in the navigation across the top, and you tick the ones you want to see. Everything is reachable another way, so leaving one out takes nothing away — the row is what runs out of room first on a narrow screen. Dashboard is the one most people drop: the Postulo wordmark already goes there, and once the link is gone the wordmark says so to a screen reader and lights up on the dashboard itself. It also holds the accessibility choices that are yours rather than your browser's: whether career entries show their order as a number, and whether a single key on its own does anything — d and j on the capture review, / for the search box. Both are on unless you say otherwise, and shortcuts that need Ctrl are unaffected either way.
• Language and time — the interface language, and the time zone dates are shown in. Each language is written in itself, so you can find yours without reading English, and the flag beside it is a picture rather than an emoji — Windows does not draw flag emoji, and used to show two letters here instead. Postulo speaks every official language of the European Union and, language by language, the rest of the European continent; a few of them fly the flag of a place that is not a state — Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, Wales — because the state they sit in already flies its flag for another language on the same list. A language whose translation is a machine-assisted draft says so in the list until a speaker has reviewed it, and translating is the easiest way to help.
• Plugins — what is running for your account, and who decided it. Anything you may change, you change here; anything an administrator decided for you is shown switched the way they set it, locked, with their name against it. The plugins Postulo itself ships are an administrator's to switch, for you or for everybody, and are hidden here until you tick Show the plugins Postulo ships — except one an administrator decided for your account, which always shows. Switching one off stops it being used and deletes nothing.
• Account — your username, your email addresses, your password, two-factor authentication, and any single sign-on connected to the account.
• Connections — where the plugins that act for you (notifications, document stores, synchronisation) find their services and how they sign in. Empty until the operator installs such a plugin; each one you add is tested, run and reported on from here.
• API tokens — for the browser extension and anything else that acts for you, each allowed only what you tick (see The API).
• Your data — the export.

3. Note what you find, then apply

Postings you notice go into Listings first: capture one from its address, or Add a listing by hand. Only the company and the job title are required; the company is matched by name and created for you if it is new, so you never have to set one up first. From there, each listing is shortlisted, discarded, or applied to — and Apply is what turns it into an application with a timeline. See Listings.

Already applied somewhere? Record an application, on the dashboard or on the Applications page, does both steps in one form.

Two fields are worth filling in even when you are in a hurry:

• The posting text. Paste it. Postings vanish from the web the moment they are filled, and by the time you get an interview the advert you applied to may no longer exist anywhere.
• Status. Set it to Applied if you have already sent something, or leave it on Draft if you are still deciding.

That is the minimum useful loop. Everything below makes it more valuable.

4. Write your career down once

Documents → Your career.

Add your roles, qualifications and skills here rather than in a document. It takes a while the first time and never again: every CV variant you build afterwards selects from this record, so fixing a job title fixes it everywhere.

See Your career record.

5. Build a CV variant

Documents → New CV.

A variant is a selection from your career record, in an order you choose, with optional per-variant rewording. Make one per kind of role you apply for — not one per application.

See CVs.

6. Record what you sent

On an application, Documents → Record what you sent.

Postulo renders your chosen CV and cover letter as they stand at that moment and keeps those PDFs unchanged forever. This is the feature you will not appreciate until three months later, when someone asks about a line on a CV you have since rewritten.

See Files and what you sent.

Seeing it with data first

An empty Postulo is hard to judge. To fill an account with a fictional but believable search — thirty applications over six months, ending every way a search can, with CVs, letters and PDFs of what was "sent":

uv run manage.py seed_demo you@example.org

Everything it creates is obviously invented (the employers are Aperture Science, Black Mesa and their friends), and the timelines are scripted so that the figure widgets have a real story to tell. It refuses to add to an account that already holds a search; pass --reset to replace one, or give it a different address and --password to create a throwaway account. With Docker: docker compose exec postulo python manage.py seed_demo ….

Where things live

Page	What it is for
Dashboard	What needs doing: applications worth chasing, reminders due, recent activity. Made of widgets you arrange — press Arrange to move them, take them off, and add the figures that used to be on Insights.
Applications	Everything, as a filterable table — or, with the switch on the page, only what is still live arranged by status on a board. The filters survive the switch.
Documents	CVs, cover letters, uploaded files, and your career record.
Companies	Employers, their people, the postings you recorded, and a logo if you gave one.
Reminders	Things to chase, with dates.
Calendar	Interviews, reminders, application deadlines and listing closing dates by day: a month, a week, a day, or the next thirty days as a list. The key along the top is also the filter — click a kind to take it off the calendar.