What Scout changes — and what it never touches.
Scout rewrites your resume for each job description. But identity facts — your job titles, employer names, dates, and degrees — are locked and can never be altered. This page explains exactly what changes and what doesn't.
The two buckets
- Your full name, email, phone, LinkedIn URL, location
- Every job title — exact wording from your resume
- Every employer name — exact wording
- Every employment date range
- Degree names, institution names, graduation years
- Certifications — exact name, body, and year
- Any section, role, or custom heading
- Bullet point wording — reframed to match JD language
- Summary section — emphasis adjusted per role
- Section ordering — most relevant section leads
- Skills section — JD keywords surfaced where truthfully present
- Bullet ordering within a role — most relevant first
- Bold formatting — JD-matching keywords highlighted
- Trimming older bullets when over 2 pages
The core rule: Scout rewrites emphasis, not facts. If a job description requires a skill or title you don't have, Scout notes the gap — it never invents one.
6 structural integrity rules (v2.4)
These rules apply to every user's resume, on every application, without exception:
Never remove any section
Every section in your source resume — Summary, Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications, and any custom sections — appears in every tailored output. Sections may be shorter, but never absent.
Never remove any employer or role
Every job in your Experience section must appear in every tailored output. Bullets within a role may be trimmed, but the role entry itself is never removed.
Never rename section headings
Section headings are reproduced verbatim from your source resume. A heading like "0→1 AI Product Launches" stays exactly that — it is never flattened to "Projects" or any generic alternative.
Preserve each section's structural format
Bullet-point sections stay bullet points. Narrative sections stay narrative. Sub-headers like Problem / What I Built / Impact are never collapsed into a paragraph.
Trim intelligently — oldest roles first
When a tailored resume exceeds 2 pages, Scout trims from the oldest or least-relevant role first. The most recent and highest-scoring role is the last resort for trimming, and only by 1 bullet at a time.
Fill both pages
If a 2-page source resume produces a sparse tailored version, Scout expands the summary or adds a bullet to a relevant role rather than leaving a half-empty page. A well-tailored resume should look intentional.
ATS scoring — required before every submission
Every tailored resume is checked against the job description across several dimensions before Scout submits anything. It has to clear a high confidence bar for ATS readiness first — ranked here from the factor that matters most to the one that matters least.
| Dimension | How it's weighted |
|---|---|
| Keyword coverage | The dominant factor — how much of the JD's required and preferred keywords genuinely appear in the resume. |
| Keyword placement | A clear second — keywords in the Summary or Skills section carry more weight than ones only inside Experience bullets. |
| Section structure | Roughly equal in importance to format cleanliness, and secondary to the two factors above — whether the standard sections and contact header are all present. |
| Format cleanliness | Roughly equal in importance to section structure — single-column layout, no tables or graphics, standard bullet symbols. |
| Seniority alignment | A minor factor — whether your years of experience and titles roughly match the JD's stated seniority level. |
If the first draft doesn't clear that bar, Scout runs up to 3 improvement cycles automatically — surfacing keywords, deepening bullets, adding implicit signals — before resubmitting. If 3 cycles complete and it still hasn't cleared the bar, the role is flagged in your morning digest for manual review and not auto-submitted.
Tailoring depth by tier
Scout applies different levels of tailoring based on how well a role matches your profile:
Full tailoring + company research
Scout researches the company (recent news, funding, mission), reorganises sections to lead with the most relevant experience, rewrites bullets to match JD language, writes a personalised cover letter, and pre-generates screener Q&A. Full package.
Resume + cover letter
Section reordering, bullet rewrites, and a cover letter customised with the role, company name, and one specific detail. No company research or screener prep.
Resume only — queued for review
Resume tailored and ATS-scored. No cover letter. Queued in your materials folder for one-click review before applying. No auto-submit on this tier.
Where your resume file goes, by host
- On Claude Code, all tailoring runs locally on your computer — your resume file and tailored documents stay on your machine throughout and are not sent to AgentCo's servers
- On GitHub Copilot CLI, tailoring instead runs through AgentCo's servers (the same infrastructure Scout Web already uses) to keep tailoring quality consistent — only your resume text and the job description are sent for that step, and neither is stored
- Your source resume file is never modified — a separate tailored copy is created per role
- Tailored resumes and cover letters are saved to your local applications folder
- Run summaries and application statuses sync to your dashboard — the plugin's TRANSPARENCY.md documents every request it makes