Clear answers about the assessment, archetype profile, plans, career data, privacy, and support.
GiftMatch Compass is a career discovery tool that builds a multi-dimensional profile of how you’re wired and matches you to real careers, with every match citing public U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET® sources you can verify.
Instead of sorting you into a single type or letter code, Compass scores you across seven independent trait domains (28 possible traits total), produces a seven-trait fingerprint, and maps that fingerprint to a named archetype profile with Core Anchors, strengths, built-in tensions, blind spots, a natural habitat, and your gift to the world. From there, it generates a personal narrative, career matches with deep dives, and trait-grounded reflections on your past—all anchored to that profile and to your actual experience.
GiftMatch was designed for anyone trying to get clearer about their direction. That includes:
Nothing about the assessment is age-locked—the traits, archetypes, and career guides read the same whether you’re sixteen or forty-six.
Yes. When your compass is first generated we offer a Guided Tour—a student-friendly walkthrough that spotlights one section at a time and explains it in plain English. You can choose it at the top of the page (“Walk me through it”) or decline (“I’ll explore on my own”).
Either way, the Guided Tour button stays in the hero of your compass page, so you can run the tour anytime—even weeks or months later, and even if you’ve already finished it once. The tour is free for everyone and uses your arrow keys for keyboard navigation. Press Escape to close.
Traditional quizzes collapse you into one bucket (“INTJ,” “Investigative-Artistic,” a color code) and hand back a generic list of careers that fit thousands of other people with the same label.
Compass uses weighted scoring across seven independent domains, each with four possible traits (28 traits total). The highest-scoring trait in each domain becomes one of your anchors—so your result is a seven-trait fingerprint, not a single bucket. That fingerprint maps to an archetype profile with Core Anchors, strengths, built-in tensions, blind spots, natural habitat, and your gift to the world. Two people who’d both be called “introverts” can end up with very different archetypes and very different career matches.
On top of that, every career cites its public U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and O*NET® source so you can verify the figures, and every narrative paragraph is written against your actual resume and experience.
GiftMatch is built on the trait-based framework that underlies modern vocational psychology—dimensions like cognitive style, social orientation, motivation, and risk tolerance. We don’t claim to be a clinically validated diagnostic tool and we don’t diagnose anything.
What we do is give you a carefully weighted, multi-dimensional read on how you work and match that against real labor-market data. Treat it as decision support, not destiny.
About eight to ten minutes for the 49 questions. Most people finish in under fifteen minutes total, including reading the results.
Each domain has four possible traits. Your highest-scoring trait in that domain becomes one of your seven anchors.
Every answer option maps to one of the four traits inside its domain and carries a numeric weight. As you answer, we add those weights into a running score for each trait. When the quiz ends:
Because the scoring is weighted, small differences in your answers accumulate—one question rarely flips your whole profile, and nuance shows up across the full seven.
No. Every answer option maps to a real, valid way of being wired. The worst thing you can do is pick the answer you think is “right” rather than the one that feels most true.
If an option feels slightly off, pick the one closest to how you’d actually behave—not how you wish you would.
Pro, Limitless, and active organization users can retake the assessment up to 2 times per month from the profile page. Retaking updates your traits and can automatically regenerate your compass when regeneration quota is available. Free users keep their original assessment unless they upgrade or receive access through an organization.
Pick the one that feels most true on an average day, not the one that fits your best day or worst day. The assessment is weighted, so the nuance still shows up across the full profile even if one answer feels like a coin flip.
Your seven anchor traits form a fingerprint. Each fingerprint maps to a named archetype profile—an identity that captures how those specific traits interact. The profile includes:
Your archetype sits at the top of your compass and feeds every AI call Compass makes—narrative, matches, reflections—so the writing stays consistent with who you are.
Your seven anchor traits each matter, but three of them usually do most of the work of shaping how you think, decide, and show up. Those three are your Core Anchors—the pillars of your profile. They’re called out specifically on your compass dashboard because they’re what the rest of your strengths, tensions, and blind spots tend to flow from.
On purpose. Your archetype is anchored to your account so it’s stable—refresh the page a hundred times and you’ll see the same profile. If it shifted on refresh, the compass would feel random and you couldn’t trust it.
Your archetype updates when your inputs change: Pro, Limitless, and active organization users can retake the quiz (2/month), and your fingerprint is re-matched against the archetype library when the compass regenerates.
The archetype profiles live in a curated library we’ve built and are continuously expanding. Each profile is written and reviewed ahead of time so the strengths, tensions, blind spots, habitat, and gift-to-the-world lines are specific and honest—not freshly generated every visit.
The narrative prose, personal-fit explanations for careers, and reflections on your past experience are generated by a language model—using your archetype profile and your real resume as input so they stay grounded.
Good question, and we’d rather be upfront about it. There are thousands of possible seven-trait combinations, and the archetype library is still growing. When an exact match exists, you get it. When it doesn’t yet, we assign the closest-fit profile from the library, anchored to your account so it stays stable.
As the library expands, matches get more specific. Your narrative, career matches, and reflections are always generated against your actual seven anchor traits and your real experience, so those stay tailored to you regardless.
Free plan: one fully detailed career match with a deep dive.
Pro, Limitless, and active organization access: all six personalized career matches, each with its own deep dive.
Your career matches live on their own page. Click Careers in the header (it appears once you’ve finished the assessment) to see them alongside a summary of your archetype. Your compass page shows your narrative, dashboard, and reflections; the careers page is the matches themselves, so neither gets crowded.
Salary bands, employment projections, and growth outlooks come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Outlook Handbook, OEWS, and Employment Projections). Skill requirements, work activities, and occupation summaries come from O*NET® OnLine.
BLS content is a work of the U.S. federal government and is in the public domain under 17 U.S.C. § 105; where not already proactively published, federal records are obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552). O*NET® data is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0); O*NET® is a trademark of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. GiftMatch Compass is not affiliated with or endorsed by any U.S. government agency. The full attribution notice is on the How It Works page.
Every career card cites its specific BLS and O*NET source so you can verify the figures yourself.
The narrative prose, personal-fit explanations, and reflections are generated by a large language model. We pass your archetype profile (name, tagline, Core Anchors, strengths, tensions, blind spots, natural habitat, and gift to the world), your seven anchor traits, and your actual experience entries into the prompt so the output is specific to you.
The numbers—salary, growth, demand, credential paths—are grounded in real data sources and cited on every card. If a citation URL ever looks wrong, tell us. We don’t ship fabricated links.
Overview, salary bands entry-through-senior, top-paying industries, market outlook, required and preferred credentials, academic tracks with realistic tuition ranges, technical and soft skills, concrete actions you can take now, career progression with salary at each stage, work environment, a vivid day-in-the-life, and links to professional organizations.
Yes. Related-career deep dives let you inspect careers connected to your matches without retaking the assessment.
Free users get three new related-career explorations per week. Pro and Limitless users get 40 per week. Reopening a deep dive that has already been generated for one of your current careers does not consume that weekly quota.
Yes — Ask-a-Question is a Limitless feature. Career questions are grounded in the career detail and your profile, so you can ask practical follow-ups about fit, preparation, tradeoffs, or next steps.
Limitless subscribers get 40 questions per month, shared across every career. Free and Pro accounts see a Limitless upsell in that panel.
Often, yes. Compass deliberately surfaces roles built for an AI-shaped economy and career paths that don’t show up in the usual career-quiz rotation. Each comes with specific things you can start doing right now to prepare.
Pro, Limitless, and active organization users get two manual regenerations per calendar month, triggered by a button on your compass. They also get 10 automatic regenerations per month when they edit experience or retake the quiz.
Free users get one lifetime automatic regeneration the very first time they save experience — after that, updating experience flags the compass as out-of-date but will not regenerate without paid or organization access. Deleting and re-adding experience does not earn a second free regeneration.
Regeneration uses your previous compass as a light reference, so results refresh and deepen rather than swinging to something unrecognizable.
No. You can add jobs, classes, volunteering, and projects by hand. Uploading a resume (PDF, DOCX, DOC, or TXT) just saves you time—we parse it into structured entries automatically.
Adding any experience at all makes a real difference: your narrative and career matches reference your actual background instead of reading like a generic trait readout.
PDF, DOCX, DOC, and TXT. Scanned image-only PDFs may not parse well—if you have one, the clean text version of your resume will give better results.
Yes, any time. Click the edit button on any entry and it turns into a form right there in place—you can open multiple edits at once, and Save & Continue stays disabled until every open form is saved or cancelled.
When your experience changes, your compass auto-regenerates on your next visit if you have regenerations left. Pro, Limitless, and active organization users get 10 automatic regenerations per month. Free users get one lifetime automatic regeneration on first-ever experience save. Otherwise, Compass flags the page as out-of-date until you regenerate.
Absolutely. Whether you’re a student with classes, clubs, and volunteer work, or an adult with unpaid caregiving, side projects, or a long gap on paper, Compass writes trait-grounded reflections on all of that—not just formal jobs—and uses it to ground the career matches in what you’ve actually experienced.
Free ($0): full 49-question assessment, full archetype profile and compass dashboard, personal narrative, one experience reflection, one fully detailed career match with deep dive, three related-career explorations per week, five career questions per month, experience upload/editing, and the Guided Tour.
Pro ($5/month): everything in Free plus all six career matches with full deep dives, reflections on every experience entry, 40 related-career explorations per week, 40 career questions per month, two assessment retakes per month, two manual compass regenerations per month, and 10 automatic regenerations per month.
Limitless ($8/month): everything in Pro plus the Coach toolkit: Resume Workshop, Interview Coach, real job openings from Adzuna and USAJOBS, and skills development plans.
Pro is $5 per month. Limitless is $8 per month. Both are billed through Paddle. Cancel any time from your subscription page.
The Coach toolkit is included with Limitless. It adds a Resume Workshop with templated PDF export, Interview Coach, real job-opening search from Adzuna and USAJOBS, and skills development plans tied to career goals.
Yes—any time, from your subscription page. When you cancel you keep paid access through the end of the current billing period, then revert to the free tier. Your saved compass stays intact.
If you’re on Limitless and the Coach toolkit is what you’re trying to drop, see the next question—you can step down to Pro instead of cancelling outright.
Yes. On your subscription page, Limitless subscribers see a Downgrade to Pro button alongside Cancel subscription. Picking Cancel first also offers Pro as a softer option before fully cancelling.
Downgrading takes effect immediately:
If something went wrong or the product didn’t do what we said it would, email us and we’ll make it right. We’re a small team and we’d rather have a happy former customer than a grudge.
Yes. Schools, counselors, coaches, workforce programs, and organizations can contact us about group access or site-license options.
Your answers and experience entries are stored in your account and used to generate your compass, career details, reflections, and Coach outputs when you use those features.
We do not sell personal data. We use service providers to run the product, including AI providers for generated text and Paddle for billing metadata. If your access comes through a school or organization, limited account and usage information may be handled under that agreement. See the Privacy Policy for the full version.
Yes. Contact us to request deletion. We remove account, profile, compass, and experience data from primary systems within a commercially reasonable period, subject to limited retention required for billing, legal, security, or backup-rotation reasons described in the Privacy Policy.
Your compass is visible to you when you are logged in. We do not publish results publicly. If you want to share it with a partner, parent, counselor, coach, mentor, employer, or friend, that is your choice.
If you receive access through a school or organization, that relationship may include administrative account or usage handling under the organization agreement, but Compass is not designed as a public profile.
Probably not—first-time generation can take a couple of minutes because Compass is building your narrative and career detail from your profile and experience. Paid users may generate six career matches and six deep dives; free users generate one fully detailed match.
If the progress bar stalls for more than a few minutes, refresh the page. Your partial results are saved and you can resume where you left off.
Any current version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. Mobile browsers work too.
Please email hello@giftmatchcompass.com with the page, what you saw, and what you expected. Wrong citations are especially important because we want data issues fixed quickly.
Use the “forgot password” link on the login page to get a reset email. If that doesn’t arrive, check your spam folder first, then reach out.
The assessment is free. Your first career match is free. About fifteen minutes, start to finish.
Start the Assessment