Interview Question: What tools have you made to help you find a job? | Hacker News Reader

Interview Question: What tools have you made to help you find a job?

1 pointscumola5 comments

Just recently laid off. Applied for unemployment. They want me to track all of my applications for work, so I wrote a tool. I figured that anyone worth their salt would also do something like this. How's that for an interview question? :)

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Just for example, I made a webpage that I can submit an email address, a job title and a job type to. The webpage submits the data to a database. Every 5 minutes, a cron job wakes up and emails an appropriate resume and cover letter to the recipient based on the job type. I use the perl MIME::Lite modules to insert the name and job title into the email. I've got an html and text version of the emails, and it attaches a PDF of my resume to the email. All I do is submit an email address, the title and click on the job type, and I can mass-bomb the job market in a short while each morning. I'm thinking about putting together a followup button. :)

Also, it has a tracking pixel in the html template, so I know if the email was ever opened - which comes in handy to tell if people are actually getting my resume submission.

It works out great, actually (if you mean as an answer to what have you been up too lately).

I find it's always much better to go to an interview when I've been working hard on code - mine or a others.

Also, if you write something useful it's more impressive to the potential employer.

I wrote a simple web-app to help find work last year; I found it to be a pretty effective way to demo my skills to a potential employer too. It's posted here if anyone wants to check it out: http://linkpro.dotglow.com (demo login below login box).

Maybe you should create a website that other people can use to track their applications?

When I was applying to many internships during school, I had an Excel sheet that did the job fine. These days I'm being a bit more discriminatory, so a couple of labels and moderate use of starring in Gmail does the trick.

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