How-to · setup

What to give your proxy so it actually knows your work

By Christopher Clement · October 17, 2026 · askproxy.ai

Give it four things: your résumé, links to where your work lives, notes in your own words about what documents leave out, and a voice interview. Then test it the way a skeptical recruiter or client would, and fix what comes back thin.

A proxy answers questions about you only from what you give it. That is the point: its answers stay grounded in your real material, and it says so when it doesn’t know. It also means nearly every weak answer traces back to a missing source.

Start with your résumé

Upload it as a PDF, .txt or .md file, up to 5 MB. The text is pulled out to build your proxy, and the file itself isn’t stored. Word files aren’t supported yet, so export to PDF first.

A résumé gives the proxy your roles, dates and titles. It rarely says what you actually did, or why. The next three sources cover that.

Add links to where your work lives

Add up to five links: your site, a portfolio, a case study, a press piece, a talk. The proxy reads the text on each page. A link it can’t reach gets skipped, so a dead page never blocks setup.

LinkedIn is the exception. It blocks automated readers, so your proxy keeps the link for your profile but can’t read the page. Copy your About section and your last couple of roles into the notes instead.

Write the notes nobody else has

The notes are where a proxy gets good. Write plainly, the way you’d brief a colleague before they answered questions about you:

• What you want next, and what you don’t. Kinds of roles or clients, full-time or contract, remote or not.
• Two or three projects in depth. Your part, the hard part, the result.
• Numbers you can stand behind, and where they came from.
• The honest answer to the question you dread. A gap, a short job, a career change.
• How you like to work. Team size, pace, what you need from the people around you.

Your résumé and notes together need at least 100 characters to generate a proxy. More is better, as long as it’s true. Everything here is something a visitor can ask about, so leave out anything you wouldn’t say in public.

Review what it drafts

When you generate, your proxy drafts a role or title, an optional tagline and the intro message that opens your proxy. The review step shows all three, and you can change any of them, then or after you go live. Read the intro closely, because it’s the first thing your proxy says. Then choose a photo, a designed card or no image for each project.

Do the voice interview

Documents record what you did. The interview gets at the context around it: why you made the calls you made, what was hard, what you’d do differently. It is a voice conversation from your dashboard. The proxy asks about your professional background, then what you’re like outside work, then your projects, and follows up on what you say.

It takes about fifteen minutes, and voice-interview onboarding is on every plan, including Free. Pro adds re-interviews, so your proxy stays current as your work changes.

Search the web, then curate

Search the Web, on your dashboard, looks for articles, interviews and other mentions of you. Each result links to the real page so you can check it. Add the ones that are about you to your proxy’s context. Mark the rest Not me: plenty of people share a name, and that correction keeps the same page from being suggested again.

Check the instant answers

Your proxy shows suggested questions that visitors can tap. Each one has a stored instant answer that comes back right away. The Instant Answers tab in your dashboard lists every one, and you can edit any of them. Edits are live for the next visitor.

Read all of them once. A visitor who taps a suggested question gets that answer word for word, so it should sound like something you’d sign off on.

Test it like a skeptic

Open your proxy and ask what a doubtful reader would ask:

• What did you personally do on your biggest project?
• Why did you leave your last job?
• What kind of work are you not looking for?
• Paste a real job listing and read the fit assessment, gaps included.

Where an answer is thin, the fix is more source material, not a better prompt. Cover it in an interview, or edit the instant answer if it’s one of the suggested questions. Your own test questions count toward your monthly conversations, so ask the hard ones first.

Once the answers hold up, put the link where people look you up. How to answer “tell me about yourself” when you’re not in the room covers why that matters before an interview.