How can we help?

1. Upload your CV and a base cover letter (a PDF, Word file, or plain .txt, or just paste the text) with your personal details removed (see below). Rolebird checks them, and what happens next depends on what it finds: contact details, ID and bank numbers, an address or a profile link stop the upload; a likely name, referees or a driver licence are flagged for you to fix or accept. Employer names and dates aren’t detected at all, so generalising those is on you. Uploading is free and needs no runs on your account.
2. Install the browser extension and pin it to your toolbar.
3. Browse the job boards as usual: Seek (any country, including Australia), Trade Me Jobs, Student Job Search, or Jobspace.
4. On a listing you like, click Add to Interest. Saving a job is free and spends nothing; it just lands on your shortlist. (On a board the extension does not cover, or on your phone, paste the ad into your dashboard by hand instead.)
5. Buy a run when you are ready to apply: pick a pack. One run is one tailored application, and each pack also includes a fixed number of free revision credits for updating what you generate. There is no subscription, nothing renews, and unused runs sit on your account until you use them, so you can build a shortlist first and spend runs only on the jobs you are serious about.
6. Open the job in your dashboard and click Generate application. Rolebird writes the cover letter, CV change list and ATS screening (one to three minutes for a high-quality result), and the page updates on its own. Review and edit, download, then apply on the job site and mark it Applied.

Remove personal info before you upload

Rolebird is designed to hold as little that identifies you as it can. We still need your email address for the account, and a de-identified work history can still point back to a person, so this is minimisation, not anonymity. Before uploading, take these out of your CV and cover letter:

• Your name, and any referee names
• Phone number, email, and home address
• IRD number, driver licence, passport, bank account, date of birth
• Links to personal profiles (LinkedIn, portfolio, socials)

And generalise your employers. Replace each company name with a short description and keep the dates: “Xero, 2019–2022” becomes “a NZ fintech, 2019–2022”. Keep the country and industry in every work and education entry (“a NZ fintech”, “a UK university”): that context, and the time period, are what the tailoring works from; the exact name isn’t needed. The upload screen gives you a one-click tool for this: our automatic check can’t detect company names on its own.

Every job has an ATS check tab alongside the cover letter and CV changes. Many employers screen applications automatically before a person reads them, so the check gives you three honest signals, not one made-up score, because real screening systems vary too much between employers to fake a single number:

• Keyword match: a literal scan of whether the listing’s key terms appear word-for-word in your CV. The bluntest check, and the one an old-style keyword filter does.
• Substance match: a judgement of whether your experience genuinely covers what the role needs, even where you’ve worded it differently. It only credits things your CV actually shows.
• Format & structure: a read of your CV’s text for the headings, length, and clean formatting parsers expect. It checks the text we can see, not your original file’s layout.

Treat it as guidance for where to aim your CV changes, not a guarantee of how any particular employer’s system will score you. It refreshes whenever you regenerate.

Every captured job moves through five lists: Interests when you first save it, then Applied, Interview and Offer as things progress, plus Excluded for the ones you have decided against or that came to nothing.

Change it from the Stage dropdown on the job page, or from the buttons in the extension popup, which offers the next step along. Nothing moves on its own: Rolebird never detects that you applied, because it never submits anything for you.

The date you marked a job Applied is kept, and stays put as the job moves on. Being rejected does not erase the fact that you applied. Move a job back to Interests and that date clears, since you are treating it as fresh again.

Notes

Each job has a timeline you can add dated entries to: “phone screen with the hiring manager”, “rejected, budget was $80k, reapply Q4”. Set the date to when it actually happened rather than when you write it down, and future dates are allowed, so a scheduled interview can go in before it happens.

Notes are for you. They are encrypted like your documents, they are included when you export your data, and they keep working when your balance runs out: your own record of your own search should not disappear because you stopped buying runs.

The extension adds one Add to Interest button to a job listing you open yourself. It only reads the page when you click that button: no background scanning, nothing sent anywhere until you ask. Get it from the Chrome Web Store.

Supported boards: Seek (every country site, so nz.seek.com, au.seek.com and the rest all work), Trade Me Jobs, Student Job Search (sjs.co.nz), and Jobspace. Note the writing itself is still tuned for the NZ market: Australia shares our spelling and CV conventions closely enough that it reads well, but it isn’t Australia-specific.

No extension, or on your phone? You don’t need it. Open your jobs and choose Add a job manually. Paste the title, company, link and job description, and it joins your shortlist exactly like a captured listing. Handy for a board we don’t cover yet, too. Capturing is free either way; you only pay when you generate.

There is a daily cap on captures: 30 a day, the same for everyone. It exists only to stop an empty account filling up the database, and it is set high enough that it should not get in the way of a normal day’s shortlisting.

Everything account-related lives on your account page.