Show HN: A job application tracker with company reviews, recruiter autoresponder

Congrats for launching the product!

> These days it is common to apply to dozens of positions (some users track over a hundred opportunities).

Honest question: is it that common? I'm an average software engineer in Western Europe. When I was junior (around 2010-2015) I usually got a job after submitting ~3 job applications (mainly, because I was accepting anything at that time). Nowadays, since I have more experience, whenever I want to switch my job, I know exactly to what kind of company I want to apply to, this means I don't send a dozen applications; rather I send usually 1 or 2. But I do my investigation on that 1 or 2 companies I'm applying to. And I never interview with more than 1 company at a time (it would be very stressful for me).

So, I've never had the struggle of "keeping track" of job applications. I've never worked for FAANG, though (not sure if this has anything to do). I thought my situation was more common, but based on your statement perhaps it's not.

Sure it's common and it really depends how picky you are. I have 20 YoE and applied to over 150 places last year, some in Western Europe and some remote jobs in the USA. In the end I only got one offer, which I turned down. But I did gain a greater understanding of the market.

That seems like an insane number for an experienced person--that's almost an application every two days--and a yield of less than 1% which presumably wasn't even a compelling offer.

Online job platforms like Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc. have changed things significantly. If you can apply in one click, or just a simple form, it's trivial to send out 50 applications a day. Those easy-apply jobs will of course get hundreds of applicants, requiring an even wider net to stand a statistical chance.

My job search looked a bit like that. Luckily, I had just a few connections from grad school, which of course immediately led to interviews and offers while my hundreds of one-click applications lead to form rejections or have been ghosted. But without those connections, I'm not sure what choice I would have.

> Online job platforms like Monster, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.

Maybe that's the problem. Those platforms are full of garbage job ads. I've never used such platforms (but again, I could be missing something).

Without a second offer in hand, you're always going to be in a very bad negotiating position when it comes to salary. Avoiding the stress of multiple interviews is almost certainly costing you tens of thousands per year. Over your entire career we're talking about millions of euros.

By that logic, we should always be looking for another job, even when already working. It stops being a game of "having a second offer" and it becomes a "look for who wants to pay me more than what I am making at the moment".

Yes, you always should be available for work outside your current company. Staying in one bubble for long periods of time leads to brainwashing.

Sure. Someone should almost always be open to other opportunities that present themselves. But there's not necessarily anything wrong with staying in one place if it works for them. even if the "cool kids' are hopping around all the time.

Being available to work is not the same as interviewing so much that you need a dedicate webapp to help you keep track of what is going on.

Which probably describes how a lot of the people who hop from job to job every couple of years operate. That's never been me admittedly. And basically every job I've had since grad school has involved contacting someone I knew and ending up with an offer. I've done fine but arguably haven't maximized compensation though that really hasn't been my goal.

Obviously I'm not the target for something like this given that I've applied to three jobs in the past 25 years and none of those were through a regular application system.

I don't think this logic is solid.

> Avoiding the stress of multiple interviews is almost certainly costing you tens of thousands per year

If we are still talking about Western Europe, where almost no one reaches the 100K eur/year salary, saying tens of thousands per year (e.g., 20K? 30K?) implies a power of negotiation of 20%-30% (or even more if we are talking about base salaries of < 100K/year which are the most common ones) when negotiating a salary. Maybe in the US you can negotiate that when applying for a job, but around here I think asking for more than 10%-15% already is basically forcing your employer to pass on you (unless you are the Michael Jordan of software engineers).

That was also my experience as last as last year. However, something has changed. I suspect a combination of factors have depressed the market - my top two guesses are massive layoffs of highly skilled FAANG candidates, and uncertainty about the value of tech skills in general in the age of cheap AIs. The market seems to be recovering as the laid off workers either reabsorb or move on to other things, and the limitations of AI become clear.

> I'm an average software engineer in Western Europe. When I was junior (around 2010-2015) I usually got a job after submitting ~3 job applications

Your situation is actually very rare unless you are accepting bottom of the barrel offers or very well connected landing quick offers. I am also from West Europe and for me with a decade of experience it still takes 30-45+ applications because most companies(except boring ones) do not publish a salary range and doesn’t share anything until the last stage, when I realize that what they are offering is garbage. On most applications, they also ask for expectations and some just outright ghost you after or simply hope that post interview they might be able to find some “shallow experience on this specific tech we use” so I might be willing to “take a bit of cut to work with their wonderful team..”.

Also typically every interview process is loooong, on average a complete process takes 4 weeks to 2 months.

Also, some one are out right stupid and start asking me about if am open/passionate about focusing on the work instead of “counting hours and going home”(ELI5: they want unpaid off record overtime).

So shifting through many garbages to find the one(or two) golden ones is a good effort.

> So shifting through many garbages to find the one(or two) golden ones is a good effort.

I guess that's my trick, then. Somehow I can filter out garbage by just:

- reading the job ad

- reading the company's website/social media

- checking who's working for such company (e.g., linkedin profile of employees)

It takes around 1-2h for me to check a company. That's why I only submit very few applications: because I know the companies I'm applying for are not the bad ones.

This was my experience until this year. I’m looking for something full time, and despite my decade+ of experience, no one is interested. I don’t think I’ve ever interviewed for more than 5 jobs in my life, but at this point I can barely get an interview. I’m thinking I should have kept my last job at this point.

Although the timing isn’t great, I’m not unhappy about it. The push to improve my presentation and be more thoughtful about these things is ultimately a very good thing. It’s definitely a bit unsettling too, though. Until now I’ve been abnormally fortunate.

And you’re right, interviewing with several companies at once is very stressful. I struggle to keep all of the roles separate in my mind at once, and I’m terrible at knowing which voice on the call is who, and who I asked what, when, why, etc. I have to write absolutely everything down and look over my notes before every call.

10+ years experience here. I used to be like you until earlier this year when I was looking for a new job and thought it would be easy as it had always been.

Oh boy was I wrong. I tracked over 120 applications, had 20+ open processes with multiple interviews and in the end only got 1 offer (which I took).

This looks great I am very suspicious about the company and interview reviews part. Glassdoor destroyed trust by giving incentive to employers destroying trust in reviews. I have a first hand experience about reviews I posted, and the fake reviews and then deletion of bad reviews of a company I worked for.

It seems like any product offering public ratings will end up having fake ratings.

What have you considered to make sure reviews remain legit?

Same here. Glassdoor keeps saying everywhere that companies have no influence on the reviews. But they absolutely allow removal of bad reviews, even going as far as contacting our HR team offering it as a paid service.

What's funny is that these bad reviews actually do show up on the RSS feed, so you can read them even after they're removed.

Which proves the point that Glassdoor is lying :-)

Or they're technically telling the truth - the review hasn't been removed, it's just not visible on the website.

Somehow it could be possible to created a "trusted review" system, based on existing tools. See "Comments & reactions" on https://profiles.joblist.today/companies/, where login is made with Github, and peers can "upvote" comments with reactions.

Whoever pays, has the power, so for Glassdoor that's obvious. Companies can basically "report" anything they don't like, and they do.

My employer keeps asking us to "leave honest reviews" to help with hiring efforts. In practice that means they want us to leave GOOD reviews to raise rating scores on websites such as Glassdoor.

Sorry HR, I'm not going to do your work for you.

At my 100% remote company, we got a negative review from someone saying the bathrooms were dirty in our office. (We've never had an office, but there's another company with a similar name as ours that does)

We eventually got it removed, but it took an extreme amount of effort to convince them to take it down.

I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take a review down that isn't as easy to prove illegitimate.

This was in 2020, so maybe things have devolved since then..

It's very easy, their sales team will reach out and tell you about the paid options to manage your company profile. That's why the whole website is so dishonest. They keep claiming reviews are not influenced by companies and at the same time pressuring those companies to pay to cleanup their profile.

To be perfectly honest, I don't have a great answer here yet. While the US has the Consumer Review Fairness Act, Glassdoor lost an important court case that saw a US court force them to furnish reviewer info to a non-US entity (https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acqu...). Terrible precedent, IMO.

Some of the early thinking I've done is around the system being able to verify that a user did in fact apply to a company (assuming company is a customer of Rolepad). That provides some initial guarantees about the author of the data. With some ATS integration, there could be fairly concrete numbers on "how quickly did X happen" that don't even need to be sourced from the candidate. That said, there is always a bit of a "he said, she said" with reviews, and I haven't fully figured out an obvious way forward here. I think the general sentiment I've seen is that Glassdoor and Yelp reviews should be treated with a grain of salt, but they're still better than nothing.

Another method is to aim for safe harbor. Consider where would folks share this information today, legally, and make your solution legally similar.

How do you verify the "integrity" of a system like this?

I was doing business studies research stuff when blockchain was all the rage. The accounting integrity was a major buzzword around that circle. Nobody came up with anything concrete or utilitarian.

The challenge is that you need to remove malicious reviews or spams. But at the same time that review system cannot be exploited.

Is there a systematic way to do this?

Throwing an idea here. What if there was a distributable append only database that obfuscated the content (reviews, company, user, company etc) with hash function only showed the action (new review, update review, delete review etc.)?

The database should be shared across multiple stakeholders as single source database is easily corruptible. For each actions to go through, these stakeholder databases need to be verify them. Tis verification process essentially links these databases to a single system. Then once the verification is done the review can be added.

To incentivize the storing and verification we need to offer an incentive of sort that is not money. As money corrupts everything and is the source of all evil it should be a form of token of gratitude that can be essentially transacted with other participants a form of pseudo currency. The value of the pseudo currency derives from everyone believing in the system.

In fact we can probably create an algorithm that automates the verification process using LLM algorithm and historic patterns. Those LLM algorithms can run on the stakeholder machines preferably on GPU.

Would a system like this work?

Really good idea for an app. My only wish is that the data was local only. It seems to me that the temptation to monetize this very valuable data will be irresistible. Although it's been normalized over time, there is something very strange about trusting a perfect stranger with arguably some of the most sensitive data of your life. And yet this has become standard, so I think you're on firm ground. But I ask- should this really be firm ground? I think it's up to us technologists to make solutions that do the right thing even when our users don't know what that right thing is.

So I assume that in the end employers will somehow pay for this product. I encourage you to think long and hard about the alignment problem.

If employers pay for this, when will the candidates experience suffer (and vice versa, the party that pays will always have priority though). How can you counteract this in the long-term?

I think I answered a very similar question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37797516. Believe me, I have been thinking hard about alignment, conflicts of interest, privacy implications, etc. Alienating the candidate side will basically nullify the core premise of the platform, so avoiding short-term thinking and bonehead decisions is top of mind.

Yeah, it’s just that I’ve never been able to trust anything where the employer was the one paying…

Even if I could trust it at the start, it eventually turned bad.

Do you trust job boards? Because employers pay to get listed there

I love this idea. When you're in the hiring process, you're managing an absolute mountain of detail between your various applications. There's so much pain and toil, and a lot of it is lost once you get a job, and if you're ever laid off you need to scramble to gather it all again.

LinkedIn _kinda_ works here but it's a distant afterthought for them.

Looks really good, however another proprietary app which would have all my data.

I just put together a Kanban board with Obsidian, which is Mardown in files, so I have full control over my data forever.

TIL you can create kanban boards in Obsidian :mindblown: thanks!

The privacy statement is brutally honest they can do with your data whatever, sell it, keep it even though you delete, ruin your life.

“Hey google recruiter would you like to know how this candidate did on previous interviews, contact us and reduce the frustration and time it takes to hire”

Little value for a massive selloff of personal information.

Looks great and comes in perfectly in time for me.

One concern: All my data incl. CV is stored plainly in the cloud, correct?

Thanks! I suppose the answer depends on what you mean by "plainly in the cloud" :) It is indeed stored in Amazon's RDS, which is a managed service. I approached this as a real product rather than a weekend project when it comes to security (application and infrastructure) and there is a lot in place protecting the data - Firebase's jwt auth, XSS and SQL injection protection, default passwordless logins, data encrypted at rest, database in private subnet, DB credentials in a secrets vault with automatic rotation, multi-factor auth for all of my access to infra, probably a bunch more. Are there specific concerns not addressed here?

Have you done any penetration testing?

Thank, that sounds great and fairly secure.

I love your tech stack btw - C# backend is Elite (my main stack)!

Looks interesting, I'll probably try it.

I think that the area where I'd love some tool to help me would be keeping track of phone calls - ideally even attaching recordings to a proper company, transcribing them and summarizing. It's easy to get back to an email because stored but in case of a phone call I need to make notes quickly.

When I keep track of things in a text file or spreadsheet it's easy to get an overview quickly - because it's all on a "single page". I can even grep for some key word. I don't think Rolepad UI helps here. The current the company list shows only name, position and stage. I would like to at least see some "comment" for each.

The last time I searched for a job I created labels in gmail for each position and created rules to automatically label incoming emails. It was very easy, just select an email -> "filter messages like these" -> label (set new to jobs/company-name) and done. While I could potentially use Rolepad to store notes about companies I doubt that I would forward emails there because I don't see potential benefits since Rolepad won't automatically update any entries on its own. Maybe if I it aggregated all communication channels? emails, phone calls, linkedin messages, etc

By the way - I use multiple email addresses (wildcard in my own domain) when contacting recruiters but the accounts have just one so the email forwarding won't work.

Some fantastic food for thought here, thank you!

Definitely will acknowledge that searching the provided data has room for improvement. Re: emails, it actually does have some rudimentary capability to detect which opportunity the email should be assigned to, based on a few factors - this too will be improved in the future. One workflow I've thought about was adding save@rolepad.com to cc/bcc on your outgoing emails to avoid the extra step. I have also kicked around the idea of creating custom Rolepad email addresses to use on outgoing resumes so that all communication is automatically captured in the system. Felt a bit fanciful at the time, curious if there's interest.

The multiple addresses is a doozy, will need to noodle on this. I guess easiest would be manually associating multiple emails with your account. Or the whole custom address thing...

Looks pretty good, i'm wondering how are you planning on monetizing this?

Through employers, not job seekers. Not sure how to put this without marketing-speak, but I do truly believe that there is a win-win proposition here where an amazing candidate experience can be highly beneficial to the hiring org. I wrote down some thoughts on https://rolepad.com/employers as well. As I mentioned in the original post, there is a lot of consider here privacy-wise but I definitely have some concrete ideas that I want to start bouncing off hiring managers and the like (which will likely involve sharing Rolepad job description links that add the position with a bunch of prefilled data to the candidate's account in one click).

What kind of competitive benchmarking would you offer?

Compensation is top of mind for me. An applicant [EDIT: application, not applicant] tracking system is well-positioned to have a solid, up-to-date view into the compensation landscape, unlike sites like Glassdoor and Blind which are more lagging and self-selecting. Balanced with privacy, there is some real opportunity here. Outside of compensation - all sorts of analytics pertaining to interview process, how quickly competitors fill their roles, that sort of data.

Why is an applicant tracking system have an up to date view of the compensation landscape? Would I be required to submit how much I was offered to your system? Why would that be necessary?

That's a fair question - and no, almost all data is optional. But... people do enter this, and companies have roles with open compensation as well. I'm talking about an aggregated view into anonymized data here.

EDIT: Just realized I wrote "applicant tracking system" above. Total slip of the tongue, this is an _application_ tracking platform for job seekers, not an ATS used by companies. Though I do sometimes think of Rolepad as an ATS for the candidate.

Why not just gather all the roles with open compensation out there and aggregate that data then, instead of tracking only the ones your users apply to?

I can see value in tracking offers to see how negotiations are going. so if there's standard fields for this, then that's a way he could track comp data without requiring, and even get offer increase info which is probably even more valuable.

I feel like at this point you're also building glassdoor or levels.fyi in addition to rolepad.

I honestly think you should aim to make jobseekers pay instead of the job offerers.

The automation of job applications means that basically everyone tunes out when they hit 100+ CV's, go post a small wage globally remote job to test and you will see what I mean.

A dollar here or there definitely means your clients will get actual people who are serious about wanting it rather than the current spray and pray system that inundates and overwhelms anyone who puts up jobs today.

I also want to pay for this as a future jobseeker for two reasons: one, I want a platform like this to focus on me as the client, and two, I want it to exist.

But what Grimburger says is also important - employers will hate your platform if it will become spam city.

If a platform helped me track my applications CRM-style and automate some of the process, especially scheduling interviews, I would gladly pay LinkedIn bucks for it.

This platform will not change human behavior. Sorry to say.

Yes.

I think the only way to prevent spewing/spamming of every employer with resumes, would be if there was a crazy high cost to apply to each job. If someone paid $10 per month for 1 application or 100 applications, or 1000, for many the 1000 is going to happen.

If it was $10 per application, you wouldn't be "changing" human behaviour, you'd be leaning into it, by de-incentivizing 1000 applications with "virtual pain". EG, money leaving wallet.

I don't see how to easily prevent this with such a platform, the per-application cost is a no-go, at best you could have hard limits of apps per month.

The problem is the person who selectively applies to a job or three doesn't need this. The target is the person who has dozens of applications in various stages of flight and is "casting a wide net" to put the strategy charitably.

I suppose so. I tend to apply to a few jobs a year, but mostly because it seems like a neat place to work, or a change of pace.

One thing I have noticed, as I'm extremely skilled at this stage in my career, is that there are logically fewer jobs.

Spray and pray is more, I think, a junior thing.

Certainly applying for jobs out of school--at a time when nothing was online--it was very much a mass snail mail exercise for the most part as augmented by on-campus interviews. A lot of companies basically hire warm bodies. One job offer I got out of grad school was sight unseen. I had to ask them to invite me to see the place and talk to people.

Everything I've gotten since then (just a few) was sending an email to someone I knew at a company.

>Spray and pray is more, I think, a junior thing.

I'm at least intermediate, I've done senior work before, and this is still my strategy. Applying to one or two jobs isn't going to do anything. It takes at least a calendar year to find a job that wants me. I can't imagine applying for less than 5 positions a week, and usually it's at least triple that.

I'd love to hear a different strategy for a developer that doesn't specialize in any given language or technology. Most of the employment gates seem locked for me. Yet I hear of other people doing things just like that and making bank from it. Who knows, maybe people don't like me as much as I don't like them.

Although I've never been primarily a developer, it's always been about the people I know and have worked with in some manner. My network, if you would, although that term tends to get conflated with things like "networking events." Job-seeking hasn't been about about applying to posted jobs for me since I've been working professionally for decades.

Even in school I wasn't applying to multiple positions per day on average. Probably a more focused strategy is indicated than sending applications into the void.

Fair, yeah. I don't have a professional network. I find the folks I work with to always be insufferable. Guess it'll be launching resumes into the void. Thanks for the perspective.

As a currently not employed person, one interesting thing to note about me is that I have no income, which means not much money to pay for things.

I see this argument a lot, yet it falls apart upon closer inspection, I'm talking a few dollars a month to put your best foot forward at jobs that suit you rather than spray at basically every single open position and take whatever you can get.

Try to see this from the other side of the equation.

> I see this argument a lot, yet it falls apart upon closer inspection

But does it, though? I don't think so.

> I'm talking a few dollars a month to put your best foot forward (...)

No, it really is not, and your portrayal really feels like a fraudulent way to frame the service.

No job applicant becomes better suited for a position if they apply through service A or B. Moreover, the only thing that this sort of service enables is throwing your hat in the race, and it's up to the candidate to successfully pass all subsequent tears. This sort of service does absolutely nothing to help you with those stages of the process, which are the ones that matter.

> Try to see this from the other side of the equation.

This is one of the many mistakes you're making. For the job seeker, there is only one side: the job seeker's side. There a already N services out there that allows them to apply for a job. None of them charges them a cent. Some companies even go through the trouble of posting the same job ad in multiple services. Some companies even hire multiple recruiters to find them the job applicant they are looking for. A job applicant can already apply through N services for free. Why would a job applicant suddenly feel the need to pay for the N+1?

It's stupid to confuse "have money" with willingness to pay, and mentioning vacuous statements like "sides of the equation" changes nothing.

> your portrayal really feels like a fraudulent way to frame

This an an incredibly offensive thing to say, there's definitely a fraud here and it is not me, you should probably try harder next time with your sigint thing :) Good luck with it mate, please don't ever again.

> This an an incredibly offensive thing to say (...)

I'm pointing out a fundamental trait of a system: if a service charges users for each job application, regardless of their nature, then there's a perverse incentive for service operators to maximize the number of job ads a user applies to.

This includes but is not limited to creating fake job adverts.

Do you disagree?

> then there's a perverse incentive for service operators to maximize the number of job ads a user applies to.

Is that not an incentive for the service operators to find more employers? No one is forcing you to apply for a job hopefully.

When the cost for applying is zero all you get is:

- puffed up resumes

- laughable experience in the stack that doesn't last a few minutes upon (time consuming) inspection

- bad cultural fit

- fake human beings who aren't even real and are actually just devshops in third world pretending to be Europeans with fake personas and everything

- the list goes on...

These things are expensive on the other end, yet it costs a person exactly $0.00 to send that resume, it's the bullshit asymmetry principle at work, there's so much time and effort required to refute job applicants that you basically have to give up.

Again I'm asking you to go post a remote job and see for yourself. Please, try to see this from the other side, it might even benefit you as a jobseeker to do so :|

Sure, and you certainly have future money. if the app is that good that is.

I have thought about this because I've wanted such a platform as a candidate, and I think an interesting angle would be having the jobseeker's loved ones buy it for them as a gift. Many times, I've been sad that I wanted to "help someone " with their search but I did not myself have a role and didn't feel effective. Friends who are unemployed usually won't accept cash from you but they might accept a subscription to a job search service.

> I honestly think you should aim to make jobseekers pay instead of the job offerers.

If I was a job seeker, specially if I was out of a job, I would never ever spend a single cent on a job application service, particularly one that does not work as a job board.

All job boards such as LinkedIn already support some job application tracker features, including through third-party services. If you have access to a text file/spreadsheet, you can easily fill in the blanks to track your own job applications. Any third party job application service ends up being only the n+1 webapp you'll be using anyway,so why pay for the one out of n+1 particularly if it doesn't add any value?

There are plenty of job application tracking services out there already, but from the applicant's pov the only issue worth fixing is how you end up using a different service for each company you applied for. Job boards such as LinkedIn kind of mitigate this problem due to its massive adoption, but still some companies only use LinkedIn to route applicants to their own service. Adding yet another job application tracker to the mix solves nothing, and is definitely not worth paying for as an applicant.

> If I was a job seeker, specially if I was out of a job, I would never ever spend a single cent on a job application service

Find this very hard to believe. You really wouldn't spend $1 to submit a job application to a position that is your bread and butter while unemployed? Even if it meant there wasn't hundreds of others spamming the same endpoint? Taking such an ideological high ground over a few cents rarely works out well.

I've seen/been on both ends long before covid/wfh stuff and the worldwide remote market is a complete fucking mess today due to automation, it's bots all the way down and not a single bit closer to good client/contractor relationships, you really have to wade through the weeds to find anyone half decent.

Again, I ask you to post a job online and see the results for yourself then reconsider my comment.

> Find this very hard to believe. You really wouldn't spend $1 to submit a job application to a position that is your bread and butter while unemployed?

No, it's a stupid concept, and one that turns posting fake job ads into a profitable scam.

> Even if it meant there wasn't hundreds of others spamming the same endpoint?

Take a minute to think about that nonsense. Do you really think a company will want to risk losing the ideal candidate to fill it's position just because some mastermind decided to charge for each application?

Specially when every single company out there already has no problem posting their own job ads without charging applicants.

> Taking such an ideological high ground over a few cents rarely works out well.

Nonsense. It's a stupid move that goes against the best interests of all parties involved. But don't take my word for it. Go ahead and invest your cash on yet another job tracking service and put a paywall on applicants. Best of luck.

This is already how it works for renting an apartment in the US (and often up to $75 per applicant, so each roommate has to pay!), the fact that companies don't charge you an application fee is merely convention. I'd be horrified but not surprised if we see a day where minimum wage jobs start charging an application fee to "cover the cost of background checks" or some other nonsense like that as corporate greed stretches ever further.

> turns posting fake job ads into a profitable scam

God forbid that the average software developer actually does 5 mins of research into the company before shooting off a resume, even worse before loading 700 npm packages and running build scripts on their computer for a quick "test" assessment?

All I see in this thread is reactionary stuff from people who get kneejerk offended by the idea of paying to apply to jobs. The market is getting entirely automated from end to end and some who want to hire don't particularly want that.

I'm confused. Are you honestly selling to the CEO?

If someone down the ladder, who exactly?

So it looks like you have no clue really why an employer would pay? Maybe when things become tight you would consider selling some user data? Or we can just trust you 100% as you are a solid guy?

Love the progress visualizations as sankey diagrams. Reminds me of the many posts on r/dataisbeautiful about job application progress, e.g.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/13if21g/oc...

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vrdcfz/oc_...

You could build pretty cool statistics around this once you have enough data.

That's where I got my inspiration :)

This is absolutely gorgeous! Would you ever consider having a self-hosted version for job-seekers?

How about a 'pay what you think it's worth' or 'pay what you can' model for applicants?

I object to paying for LinkedIn pro when they're making money off me being recruited but for a tool I can use to manage a stressful process, this feels different.

This is a great idea! I remember facing similar pains when applying to dozens of companies last year and talked about a similar idea with a friend - glad to see someone building it. Wishing you the best of luck, and I’ll hopefully try and provide feedback soon

Looks impressive! Would I use it? Probably not. I never have found I needed to track everything in a spreadsheet. Either they offer me a job or they don’t. All data is in gmail and searchable. Google calendar for interview times although most likely I will just remember. Most companies will reject (because each company value’s orthogonal things so no candidate can get then all) so why keep data?

But I al not a FAANGer or US based so ymmv and something like this may be attractive during recessions when you need to apply more and chase up harder.

This looks good.

How does the email addresses work? When I foward to sales@rolepad.com (or no@rolepad.com), how does it know that the message came from me[1]? Do you send back a confirmation I need to click on? Do I need to include a secret key in the subject line/body?

[1] I assume that you already know that email from/reply-to headers are trivially spoofed (i.e. the email client will let anyone set any value for from or reply-to).

Yeah, this one I went back-and-forth a lot during initial implementation. It's not easy to find a balance between making it dead simple and preventing abuse. I kept it simple as far as forwarding goes - an account must exist for the sender address or else the email is not processed. For save@, I was mostly worried about covertly updating/creating opportunities based on emails alone, so there is a step where the user has to take a manual action to confirm the email note assignment. For no@, all the same outcomes, but also the sender is bcc'ed on the decline email.

In other words, theoretically spoofing could occur, but there are compensating controls in place to minimize any damage. Given a very low likelihood of an attack in this direction, that felt like a reasonable compromise. Would love to get feedback on that though!

> In other words, theoretically spoofing could occur, but there are compensating controls in place to minimize any damage. Given a very low likelihood of an attack in this direction, that felt like a reasonable compromise. Would love to get feedback on that though!

I don't have good recommendations right now[1], but I think not having a way to opt-out for those who are security conscious is a turn-off for some people. After all, having opt-out[2] doesn't impact the existing users who don't care (they won't even notice), while those who care can turn it off.

I mean, as a user I disagree with your assessment of the probability of an attack using this vector, but I don't want to argue with you about it, I just want to turn it off for my account.

After all, if I said something similar about an exploit in my product, I can expect to get roasted by the users. For example, if there is a well-known buffer-overflow in my product, and I said something like this:

"In other words, theoretically users could send a value for the 'email' field larger than 255 bytes and smash the stack, but there are compensating controls in place to minimize the damage from overwriting the return address. Given a very low likelihood of a user sending more than 255 bytes for an email address, it felt like a reasonable compromise."

With security you can't really tell in advance how an exploit might be escalated. The only damage you see from allowing spoofed emails is "attacker causes candidates to reject a position they don't want to reject". Could there be others?

Could a coworker who knows I am on the prowl send an email to no@ with my address set in the 'from:' field and his set in the "forwarded" email? At the very least this sounds like a leak of account email addresses.

Still, see my point [2] below - maybe the return on implementing controls for attack prevention won't help your product at this stage. It might make more business sense to rely on mitigating the damage than preventing it.

[1] Simple: Don't send anything, place it in an outbox that the user can review before hitting 'send all'. Complex: Require user to upload their public key and process messages signed with the private key. Neither of these are 'good' in the sense of frictionless management via email.

[2] It depends on how much time you have. If this is a thing that would take 4 hours to implement, test and document, maybe you product has more pressing issues that those 4 hours would be better spent on. You'll have to triage the feedback you get and determine which feedback would result in the most takeup. IME, people often don't care about security, so you might find that spending even 5m on this has less positive influence on the business than spending those 5m cold-calling customers.

Just want to say I super appreciate your balanced perspective here. I'm not a security engineer by trade, so getting this sort of feedback is quite valuable.

The no@ scenario is an interesting one. The opt-out would certainly be one clean approach here. Going to give it some thought!

You could also consider a “personalized” no+uuid@ address that only the user knows. Slightly more work, but the user would just add it to their address book anyway.

FYI - I added an "opt out" option for email processing. Any incoming emails for the opted-out address will be silently ignored (same as incoming emails for non-existent addresses).

sorry but I do not see this as useful. I just use a spreadsheet and that is good enough. The hard part of job interviewing is learning all the useless Leetcode and preparing the stories in "STAR format" and interviewing taking up 5 hours and the indefinite period of time for replies. Not the tracking.

To me the hard part is finding a company that doesn’t rely on this when interviewing (I consider it unnecessary and inefficient, I wouldn’t want to work in a place like this). So a tracker with reviews sounds good in theory.

This.

Tracking which job you applied for is the least of the job applicant's concerns when looking for a job. In some circumstances the first step of the job application process is even fire-and-forget, and tracking those only serves to not apply again which is a zero-effort move.

Once you start to get a process going, emails and calendars already leave a good, easy to follow paper trail, and any need you might have is easily fixed with a text file/spreadsheet.

what is your spreadsheet like?

Same, although I appreciate the work OP's putting into this, and would find value in the aggregated statistics (especially stats about the interview funnel.)

For me, I just have a big plain text file where I keep notes and stuff about companies once they get back to me after I send off a resume. I also have two email folders (one of all job search related stuff, the other for messages about upcoming or pending calls) and iCal.

Yeah, the last version of the software that became my YOShInOn RSS reader was an application tracking system. I had a great answer to "tell me about a project you've worked on" that got me a machine learning job in two weeks.

Looks cool - I'll try it out.

Is it possible to export my data if I decide to leave the platform?

Thanks! Not at the moment, but you're the second user asking about it today so that definitely bumps it up on the priority list.

Inspired by your product I started logging my job search into a postgresql db. :)

how's that better than a spreadsheet?

I just know db well. Biggest appeal for me is this system allows me to approach the problem however I want. Currently I am putting all in one table - thinking in terms of (not so) slowly changing dimensions, and using recursive query to find the status of a application or a group of applications for a company.

Very cool, and useful! Though I wouldn't trust this for jobs which require clearances etc. Also, I'd be afraid of hiring managers emails being leaked, but from one of your post, your security seems to be decent.

Thank you! Would you mind expanding on the concern around hiring manager emails getting leaked? Curious what you consider sensitive in these emails and how that data might be used inappropriately. Just want to ensure I don't have gaps in my risk assessment.

It's beyond easy to setup unique throwaway email addresses for things like this. Seems an unusual concern.

Please build something that auto fills Taleo/WorkDay application forms.

I've had a good experience auto-filling job applications using this browser extension: https://simplify.jobs/ You need to create an account to use it, but at this point it's saved me so much time that I don't mind.

Phenomenal. Highly needed product. Wish I were a VC and could invest!

Hey, I've got a lot of experience in this space as a recruiter and someone who used to be CTO at a recruitment-tech company. This looks awesome!

This looks really nice and solves a real problem. One of the best niche SaaS ideas I've seen in a while.

May i ask what react tutorial you followed to make this? also, tools used

TBH, I just went through the official docs and that was sufficient - they are fantastic. I wrote a bit about my experience in the top comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35186812

Other tools? Have been using Visual Studio mostly (due to C#) until recently when I switched from a Windows laptop to a Macbook. Now all coding is in VS Code, which is ... good enough so far. Really the only other item worth mentioning is I bought the Tailwind UI component library early on. It's been a total lifesaver. Design does not come easy to me at all, and I was able to get started with semi-decent-looking UI from the get-go. It still requires a lot of effort to get things to where I like what I'm seeing, and there's still lots of iteration, but it was definitely the right move, and the cost was well worth it.

Why isn't someone doing something like this for house hunting?

I love that you gave test credentials :)

Fun fact - dang (the HN moderator) suggested this earlier while we were figuring out why this post was stuck in flagged status (props to him for unblocking it eventually).

Why was it in flagged state?

dang followed up on it and it turned out someone flagged it by mistake

It is nice to see that you mention GDPR in your legal documents. Can you tell me can I export my data in some json, csv or some similar format?

Not yet in an automated fashion. Interesting to see this request pop up a few times now today. I would attempt to provide this manually to comply with the spirit of GDPR data portability clause for now. Note that I don't claim GDPR compliance for Rolepad at this stage, but would do my best to ensure data privacy and security.

You ToS is widely at odds with GDPR though, maybe modify it so it is more in-line?

Have you looked at Duotrope (duotrope.com)? That solves a similar problem - tracking acceptances / rejections for writers. The constraints are a little different in that an author may have many pieces, but usually each magazine will only look at one piece at a time, and they will often request that you not submit a piece to multiple magazines at once.

I have not, will check them out, thank you. One at-a-glance difference is that they charge individual writers, which probably makes sense. I'm fairly allergic to charging job seekers though.

If I were looking for a job, I would gladly pay a couple hundred dollars to use this. There is real value in a streamlined way to track all of my applications' statuses like this. I've used lists on Asana with custom categories in the past, but this is a lot cleaner.

If you'd really rather not go the monetization of job seekers route, one suggestion would be to try and sell this to people running upskill programs i.e. coding bootcamps as a product they could give their students/graduates access to.

Thank you for the suggestion! I've considered the bootcamp/school route and I think there is opportunity there. For now trying not to spread my focus too thin though.

why? job seekers are the ones making money from this. but you obviously must not charge until they have actually made money.. that keeps the incentives right.

If you ever scale up, you might find it difficult for recruiting for that stack, ironically

> The main application uses React with Tailwind on the frontend, C# on the backend

I'm curious what about your experience gave you that stack? I'm sure it works fine, but the "not JS backend" people are usually stuck in older frontend frameworks, and the JS everything world has Next.js and various things to power both the frontend and backend together

Both C# (ASP.NET Core) and React consistently rank pretty high up in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey frameworks section, with both being in the top 5 for 2023 [0].

[0] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-de...

It was a mix of what I already knew (.NET) and what I wanted to learn (React). I love C# as a language and it works just fine with whatever frontend you throw at it (it's just an API after all). I wouldn't touch a Microsoft frontend framework with a ten-foot pole.

yeah, itll be a high performant API server as C#

Have you ever heard of "making people learn tools"? Not every job has to be the cookie-cutter node/react stack... you can also train people to use your stack.

tell that to employers and what they tell recruiters about needing someone to “hit the ground running”

despite having the job open for 6 months