Introduction
To be useful, a job search tool needs unusually sensitive material: your full work history, your contact details, sometimes credentials for the boards you apply through. That is a lot of trust to hand to a product, and most people hand it over without asking a single question.
The questions worth asking
Before you connect anything, it is fair to ask a vendor:
- Where does my resume live — on my machine, or on your servers?
- Are my job board credentials stored, and if so, how are they encrypted?
- Is my data used to train models, and can I opt out?
- Who inside the company can read my documents?
- What happens to everything if I delete my account?
“If the answers are hard to find, that is an answer.”
Why local-first matters here
A tool that keeps your documents and credentials on your own machine has a much smaller blast radius than one that centralises them. There is no shared store to breach and nothing to leak on someone else's behalf. It is a meaningful architectural difference, not a marketing line.
Reasonable precautions on your side
Use a unique password for every job board, prefer OAuth over stored passwords where it is offered, and review connected applications occasionally. None of it is difficult, and all of it limits the damage if something goes wrong somewhere else.
Conclusion
You should not have to choose between a search that runs itself and keeping control of your own data. Pick tools where that is not a trade-off.
