Show HN: Obsess Jobs – Apply to jobs in your sleep | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Obsess Jobs – Apply to jobs in your sleep

obsessjobs.com

Hello! I got tired of filling out applications so I built a bot to do it for me. I decided it would probably be useful to everyone else looking for a job in this hellish market, so I built a site that applies to jobs for you, completely automatically. It took me about three months to build and I'm pretty proud of how smoothly it works. You can: Click the "Auto Apply" button next to postings in the search results and keep scrolling. It'll get added to a queue and processed within 2-5 minutes Click the Zero-Click toggle in the top right of a search and it will automatically apply day and night to jobs that fit that criteria.

I also added some other cool stuff like real time updates and the ability to see any submitted application and the exact answers that were provided so that you can monitor and self-validate. All applications are completed on the company's actual job board so your application has priority over 3rd party job aggregator sites. It doesn't go straight to the trash like LinkedIn's Easy Apply feature. Lastly, you can still apply manually if you just want to use it as a job search tool!

Happy New Year!

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How does it work, anyway? Under the hood the infrastructure uses LLMs with very clever prompting and a ton of safeguards. It uses your uploaded resume and some info you provide at sign up (in addition to the job description) to intelligently answer whatever random questions the posting has. If it doesn't have a high confidence level in its ability to answer any of the questions, then the application will abort and notify you so that you can apply manually instead. There are also several defense mechanisms to deal with trick questions designed to catch bots. The system is designed to essentially make your applications seem like they are coming from a real human. Applications for all users are processed by a queue system that has built-in guardrails that do a few things:

Prevent applying to any single job board too many times a day to avoid being flagged as spam

Ensure each application is processed one at a time since humans don't typically apply to two jobs at once Double check that you haven't already applied to a specific position before

Spread out subscribed/zero-click applications throughout the day rather than all at once

Ensure any zero-click applications aren't generated for companies that you have already applied 3 times to in the last 3 months

If you subscribe to multiple different Saved Searches with different criteria, then they will be merged, ranked together, and the next best posting will be chosen to apply to

Take a look if you're interested and if you have any feedback you can shoot me a message in the comments, I'd love to hear it! Questions and criticism are welcome as well.

Are you using any kind of job scheduler to do the job for you in the background? Are you using Apache Arrow for job scheduling since you mentioned you need to apply to jobs behind the scene and spread out across day and night.

Conveniently, I decided early on that I would rate limit applications based on the job board, so that any single user doesn't have too many applications sent to a single job board site like greenhouse or lever in one day. So for now, to spread them out I have an ec2 querying applications off the application postgres table every 15 minutes. It takes the next best job posting per board for each subscribed user and puts it into a queue to be processed. 1 application per user, every 15 minutes, with 1440 minutes in a day, means ~96 applications per user to any given job board per day. The applications are then processed off the queue by another ec2 synchronously to make sure only one posting is applied to at a time per user. In addition to the 96 application cap that comes naturally with this method, there is also a hard cap of 150 applications per day per board so that if the user is also going crazy using the "One-Click" applies, those in addition to the fully automated / "Zero-Click" applies won't get them flagged for spam by the board site.

I presume you will have to simulate a user filling in the application on the browser, how is that part done? given all the anti spamming measures.

I’ve already given my opinion of the effectiveness of this. But if you did get through the HR filter and you actually described your project like you did here, there is a strong chance I would hire you.

You put some thought into it.

I wouldn’t. It demonstrates that they haven’t thought enough to realise it worsens a systemic problem.

In the common vernacular “Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.”

He is playing the game to have a chance to exchange labor for money to support his addiction to food and shelter.

When I interview someone, I want to know whether they are the type of employee who is “smart and gets things done”. He has demonstrated both

This is just leveling the playing field between HR which already filters job applications with AI, and candidates who need to painstakingly research and fill out job applications one by one.

Have you personally worked at a company that used algorithmic filters? Because I haven't, and plenty of people here attest that they haven't. I've only ever seen baseless speculation that it's prevalent, with no anecdotes much less data.

I'm currently participating in a hiring panel that is still working on sifting through hundreds of junk AI applications by hand to try to give the honest players a fair shot. I can certainly see the temptation to resort to algorithms now that the spam is so awful, but the causality there is reversed.

For reference, I’ve been successfully finding jobs quickly since 1996, I’m on my tenth job and I have every resume I’ve used since 2008 (leaving my second job).

I’m very qualified in my niche:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559488

I did use ChatGPT rewrite parts of my resume this time to be more inline with the job I applied for. It didn’t make a difference since I replied to a recruiter who reached out to me based on my LinkedIn profile.

But how is it “dishonest” if I didn’t lie about my qualifications? I didn’t just take the ChatGPT output and copy and paste it. I did reword it slightly to sound like me.

Well if that last step is what made it feel honest, many of these tools are basically a way to bypass that. I think it crosses into dishonesty when you include an AI cover letter that says you want the job/would be good at it but you haven’t even looked at the post or evaluated the company. For example if you don’t actually want the job (have seen this).

I think you misunderstand what most people want out of job. Like I said, I’ve had 10 jobs. All of them were targeted because they had money and I needed to exchange labor for some of their money.

I didn’t have “passion” about any of them. I “wanted the job” because they had money. The only evaluation I cared about was was would I get paid on time.

I’m exaggerating slightly. I did care about other things. But I wasn’t desperate like many people are in today’s market. That is the attitude I would have if it came to that.

No one reads cover letters by the way. They barely read resumes.

my hypergrowth hiring days are a few years behind me but fwiw I did read cover letters. Including one was an easy way to get to the top of my ATS pile. At the time, there was no AI generation so it was a decent signal someone actually wanted the job vs was just spamming. I was sifting through thousands of applicants for the few who would give a shit about our product and customers. That signal is no longer useful and you now have to use some AI countermeasures to cull the stack of applicants (or as you mention, ignore the stack and only interview referrals... 100% agreed that is the most effective way in).

Using ChatGPT to require part of your resume and looking over it before submitting it to a recruiter you're already in touch with is one thing.

Mass applying for hundreds of jobs while you sleep is something entirely different that will almost certainly lead to lying on the submitted resumes.

We’re going to start requiring all applicants send video based job applications in 2025 unless they are a direct referral. Sorry to say but there is a very narrow window of time where a tool like this will probably be useful, if it isn’t useless already.

I'm not sure if you're saying this tongue-in-cheek but as someone whose looking for a job, this is a requirement already with some employers.

Yea, that’s where we got the idea.

This seems fair as long as someone at your company actually watches all of the videos …

Until the company uses AI to transcribe the applicant's video to text and then further summarize the text into bullet points.

This already exists for conference calls with clients. Our sales team uses it.

https://www.gong.io/call-transcription-software/

I am not in sales. But I am sales adjacent.

I remember having to do that once in like ~2017 for a job, and it felt really dehumanizing. Hopefully AI video gen tools can fix that!

I wouldn’t have done this pre 2020 when I was targeting local companies seeking candidates for I office work and I had a strong network where I use to live.

But now looking for remote jobs, I would do it. I think it would filter out a lot of the candidates who weren’t qualified.

Looking forward to all the "Show HN: Automated AI video job applications" post coming in 2025.

I wouldn’t mind this at all as an employee. This would be even more logical for me as a customer facing consultant. It’s actually relevant to my job.

While I am a minority (Black) and never personally spent time worrying about discrimination in almost 30 years of working, I would be concerned about the discriminatory affects of this on English as a second language speakers.

If people won't add a cover letter, then why would they submit a customized video? Then, now you have to wonder if the candidates are just the ones willing to jump additional hoops as opposed to who's the most qualified and ready to get to work.

> Hello! I got tired of filling out applications so I built a bot to do it for me

How many offers did you end up getting from using this method?

That’s always the key information missing from the sales pitch.

A little bit like the inverse of "this simple one page CV got me 10 job offers" (but it had a Harvard degree front and center)

Well I just finished it yesterday and it usually takes at least a month to go from application to offer, so it would be quite impressive indeed if I already had gotten an offer with it today.

I looked for a job last year around September and again this year. The rules haven’t changed. If you are blindly spamming ATS’s you’ve already lost.

If your skill set is generic , why would your resume stand out among hundreds of other applications? If isn’t, why aren’t you doing careful targeting?

My “Plan B” jobs were ordinary old CRUD C#, JavaScript or Python jobs looking for developers with AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience (according to my resume) and 5-6 years of AWS experience including three working at AWS Professional Services. I was looking for remote only roles. The city I moved to post Covid is tourist heavy. But doesn’t have that many local jobs in software development even if I did want to go into the office.

Between both times, I submitted my resume to hundreds of jobs and heard crickets. According to LinkedIn’s Easy Apply, only maybe four times was my application viewed.

Blindly submitting your resume to an ATS is a fool’s errand.

Of course, at 49 (last year) and 50 (this year) I already knew this. I was in between jobs and I was like “why not”?

What did work both times is the same thing that has worked for me across now 10 jobs. I found the kind of jobs I wanted within 3 weeks each time - AWS + app dev strategic consulting working full time at consulting companies.

1. Reaching out to my network - 2 job offers

2. Targeted outreach to companies where I had a unique skill set.

A “nice to have” was experience with a particular official open source “AWS Solution” for which I was the second largest contributor at the time - 2 interviews, 1 offer.

3. Responding to an internal recruiter that reach out to me - 1 interview and offer.

missed the chance to call it "Dream Jobs"

I'll be awake thinking about this blunder in bed tonight.

just rebrand already

get jobs in your sleep

unlimited better taglines haha

Not sure how you are sourcing your jobs, but fyi you can get a feed of 1M+ jobs here too:

https://xmlfeed.directemployers.org/default

Some of the players (ZipRecruiter, etc) might also give you a feed. They generally just want traffic.

I used to work on the ML system that rated resumes when the applications were submitted. The ATSes are scoring and sorting the applications that come in, so IMO it's better if everyone "applies" and their matching program runs instead of waiting for people to apply anyways.

Good luck!

Software engineers speed running the industry into requiring that all job applications be printed out and dropped off in person. Thanks guys.

As a service.

As an agent

New grads have to apply to 100s of postings to get responses. This is a response to a need.

Or this just makes the job application situation worse for both sides.

Tragedy of the commons at work once again

More like play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

What happened to university job fairs were you can talk to actual people? New grads should be leveraging those first.

A new grad can’t stand out from other new grads regardless. Especially when they are now competing with out of work experienced developers

Undergrads have tons of opportunities to gain experience and make connections, both on and off campus: internships, research, TA jobs, sports, Greek life, volunteering, clubs, etc.

When I review resumes from new grads, it's that kind of extracurricular stuff that stands out. It shows they had the initiative and commitment to pursue things that matter to them. If a resume is only coursework, then sure, that won't stand out.

This still doesn’t answer the second part - why hire a new grad over someone with two or three years of experience? There are plenty of those hungry for a job that would work for the same compensation.

My team has to be in-person, and new grads are far more likely to be open to relocating. I'd rather spend valuable time recruiting and interviewing people who are likier to accept an offer over those who'd balk at moving.

Students have way more advantages in hiring than they realize. Openness to moving is a big one. So is getting experience and connections via extracurriculars. If you're a university student and you take the small steps to build up these advantages over time, you won't need to resort to resume-spamming.

And if they “have to be in person” is that because you are doing programming with specialized equipment?

I can’t imagine hiring a bunch of new grads can actually end up being productive. Back in the day you would open an office in a place where you can get relatively cheap experienced devs like the suburbs of Atlanta (where I use to live).

Yes, specialized equipment, and also restrictions on what systems we can do some of our work on.

My organization isn't a run-of-the-mill software shop. We're an FFRDC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...) that does applied research for the US government. As such, our culture is to bring people in who we can develop and retain for a long time. A junior staff member's tasking and skill set may be limited to software development. But eventually they grow into technical experts on whole systems and use-cases, or team leads with established relationships with external stakeholders.

I'm in the latter position, and I'm pretty good at identifying, recruiting, and developing people right out of school. To go back to the original topic, resume-spamming isn't the way you end up in an organization like mine.

Fair enough

But then we get into the whole “salary compression and inversion” where because of HR dynamics vs market dynamics, you’re almost always better jumping ship after the first 2-3 years.

As a hiring manager, that’s out of your control. So you know that you usually can’t get more than 2-3 years out of an employee. If they are spending the first year doing “negative work”, is ur worth it?

How is this different than any other job? Experience is experience I don’t see how that justifies pissing off your potential employers with mountains of AI slop resumes.

How would you know if it is AI written? Every article on how to write a resume even before LLMs gave the same advice and mostly read the same.

Non AI driven resumes were the same slop.

What I was trying saying is that a lack of experience isn't some kind of unfair disadvantage that justifies making all our lives worse by using tools like this. Instead one could spend their time, I dunno, acquiring experience? There's plenty of OSS projects out there that could use help, and personal projects are always a great differentiator.

Let me tell you about a story behind the advice of “personal projects” and contribution to open source.

Last year after leaving AWS, I had quite a good open source portfolio. When I was working for AWS Professional Services, it was quite easy to put everything we did after we sanitized it through the internal open source approval process and get it published to AWS Samples

https://github.com/aws-samples

And then I forked it to my own profile. I actually used 5 of the 8 projects at my next job after forking them to our internal repo.

I was also a major contributor to a popular open source AWS Solution in its niche

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/

I had both in my profile. The only company that cared was a niche of niche in AWS where it was their specialty.

Companies barely look at your resume. They definitely aren’t going to take time to look at your private profile.

I’ve done plenty of hiring and I definitely do look at personal profiles and websites. In fact it’s the first thing I look at after experience. I can also say that a personal project of mine was a huge factor in landing a previous job. Showing competency and interest in the industry you are applying for goes a long way.

Sorry your “open source” contributions didn’t get you far. I looked at your examples and it appears to be niche documentation for AWS services, so basically all in the service of amazon? Cool.

There are 6700 repositories showing all types of code

https://github.com/orgs/aws-samples/repositories?type=all

I purposefully didn’t call out my 8.

The “AWS Solution” that I was one of the top 3 contributor to has at least 2700 people/organizations who downloaded it and I know it’s used by at least 8 state agencies - I implemented it for four agencies when I was at AWS.

Every single one of my other projects were used as part of real world six and seven figure implementations.

You think in today’s market where every req has hundreds of applications they are going to take the time to look at open source projects?

I didn’t need to nor do I have any desire to work on open source work or any other projects related to computers when I get off of work. I haven’t written a line of code that I didn’t get paid for since graduating from college in 1996.

They only have to do so because it's nearly impossible for a new grad to stand out from the foam of AI applications. This is part of the trend that created the need—it's a toxic feedback loop.

No problem! I'll be by next week. We can have a coffee and you can tell me what your company does.

Or the way highly competitive PhD applications work: "Have you worked with someone I know?"

The more you try to automate and scale human interactions, the more the in-demand connections will retreat into hard-to-reach private channels.

This is very cool. I’m curious about how it works under the hood. Specifically, how are you handling fetching the job posts and the application submissions on the official company websites? I’ve experimented with scraping in the past, but I always run into blockers that are tough to bypass. Would love to hear how you handled those challenges

The conclusion to this arms race is "captcha" like mechanisms to prevent automated job applications

Captcha solvers as a service are already well developed. The end result is going full circle to in person applications only.

Yeah, that's what I meant by "captcha like" - mechanisms that prevent automated applications such as in person only; doesn't have to literally be captcha. Anything that fulfills the same purpose will do.

I'm actively involved in hiring at my company for open roles right now, so I've got pretty good visibility into the other end of this market, and I have some thoughts:

1) We are completely overrun by automated applications right now. We have hundreds of them. When you have hundreds of them, you can start to see the patterns, and we have very high confidence that we will weed out automated applications before the technical interviews.

2) Unfortunately, we don't have as high confidence that we won't eliminate false positives. To work effectively with hundreds of applications we have to use very broad heuristics, and we know some good engineers who would otherwise be worth a shot will likely get caught up in them. But it's better for us to not hire at all than to hire someone who applied while they were sleeping.

Because of (2), I frankly consider tools like this unethical. Yes, the market sucks right now. But it sucks in part because of tools like this. You're getting ghosted because employers can't keep up with the spam any more without using extremely aggressive filters—ours are all still manual (yes, we read every resume) but I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of behavior is turning more and more employers to the dreaded automatic filters.

Automated applications will not get you a job at a place that values its employees, because places like mine won't allow our hiring process to bring in someone who doesn't really want to be here. And what you are doing is making it harder for the people who really did look at our listing and think our company would be a good place to work to get hired at the company of their choice.

I too am a hiring manager and I don't even have a gag reflex, watch this:

When you have hundreds of them, you can start to see the patterns, and we have very high confidence that we will weed out automated applications before the technical interviews.

Plastic surgery isn't easy to spot—bad plastic surgery is easy to spot.

You're not in a position to judge quality unless you're looking at hundreds of applications. If you don't trust those of us who do, that's on you, but I'm telling you: we can tell.

Laying off 150k people and claiming there are no prospects in the market is also unethical. Sounds bad!

Might be that you'll have to build relationships with actual people.

See you on the battlefield.

We haven't laid off any engineers in years.

I don't understand why automated applications is unethical. If most companies won't spend the time to manually look at each application, why expect applicants to manually apply to every company. I don't even use services like those but I think the current system is flawed for today's job market so it's hard to even say what is ethical right now.

I already said: we review every application manually, as do most people who have spoken up on threads like this. All you're accomplishing is burning out those of us in hiring, which makes the market worse for everyone.

It's unethical by Kant's universalizability principle: if everyone did it the hiring market would turn into a complete craps shoot.

> All you're accomplishing is burning out those of us in hiring, which makes the market worse for everyone.

The fundamental difference of course being that the applicant might need the job to eat and put a roof over their head, while the hiring people are employed and doing their job.

I get it, it sucks to be burnt out. But the often forgotten nuance of the job market is that there is a huge power asymmetry in hiring.

And I'm emphasizing that this kind of behavior is not going to get you a job, it's only making everyone's life worse. It's counterproductive in the extreme.

Give me one testimonial of someone who credibly demonstrates that these applications work.

>I already said: we review every application manually,

I would say your company is a rarity.

On what basis? The only people I've seen claiming this is prevalent are frustrated applicants, but I'd love to hear from someone who actually has seen the inside of one of these companies that uses AI filters in bulk.

It's a chicken and egg problem. Companies would likely look at every application if there were only a few. But if there are 1000 for every position and most are automated then companies have to automate filtering on their end too.

The way I see it, most companies already use modern ATS to stack rank every application based on their resume using AI and then just go down the list. If you aren't already using a system like this at your company then you're playing at the same disadvantage most applicants are playing at.

Applicants are already having to send hundreds of applications to get a response and it's not because of tools like this. It's because they spend hours every day sifting through job postings and having to apply to as many as they can, and there are tens of thousand of engineers doing it every day. It's a tough market.

The plea of the recruiter and hiring manager that their job is too tough to sort through "too many" applications from people desperate to put food on their table and pay their rent is hard to empathize with. Especially when you are getting paid to do it and aren't at risk of homelessness like the annoying bugs flying around your prized job postings.

It's also hubris to think you can sit there and easily sort people into passionate and dispassionate buckets with a 100% accuracy like a god. And what? People who don't love whatever random service you work on don't deserve to have a job and rent money? The truth is most of the people you work with every day are only there for the paycheck. If they can get a bigger pay check or better work life balance somewhere else, they'll leave.

> The way I see it, most companies already use modern ATS to stack rank every application based on their resume using AI and then just go down the list. If you aren't already using a system like this at your company then you're playing at the same disadvantage most applicants are playing at.

I already said, as have many others: I don't work at a company like this and never have. I haven't heard this said by anyone on the inside, it's always frustrated applicants. We review every application by hand.

> Applicants are already having to send hundreds of applications to get a response and it's not because of tools like this.

How do you know it's not? The timing is very suspicious.

> It's also hubris to think you can sit there and easily sort people into passionate and dispassionate buckets with a 100% accuracy like a god.

I didn't say that, I said we have high confidence we can eliminate automated applications at the expense of filtering out many sincere ones.

There's a very good algorithm that will do this with 100% accuracy: reject everyone. We're not doing that, but it's a spectrum of how much automation you're willing to let slip in, and the answer for us is "not much".

>The truth is most of the people you work with every day are only there for the paycheck.

Thank you, I need to hear this more.

> The way I see it, most companies already use modern ATS to stack rank every application based on their resume using AI and then just go down the list.

I have never worked anywhere that has done this. Humans have always reviewed every application.

Yeah, the only people I ever see saying this are people who are frustrated that they're getting ghosted.

>because places like mine won't allow our hiring process to bring in someone who doesn't really want to be here.

Tell me what's special about your company?

Will one exception, nearly all companies I worked for were run of the mill, yet they thought they were special in a self deluded way.

> Automated applications will not get you a job at a place that values its employees, because places like mine won't allow our hiring process to bring in someone who doesn't really want to be here

No one to a first approximation “wants to be” at your company anymore than they want to be at any other company that will allow them to exchange labor for money.

Any experienced employee knows how to look up what you do on your website and say they have a “passion for $x”.

I’ve had 10 jobs in almost 30 years ranging from a 30 person Startup to BigTech, they’ve all just been a means to support my addiction to food and shelter.

This is gonna contribute to the large number of low quality/AI-generated responses job postings already get, which will contribute the ghosting and auto-refusal applicants already get, and increase the need for AI, removing the human input at both fucking ends. This bullshit is part of the problem, not the solution.

The genie is already out of the bottle. Right now companies are already using AI to screen their applications which means that people need to apply to 10X more jobs than they used to. This gives employers an unfair advantage in the market if every applicant still has to manually apply to every job they are qualified for. The goal of this tool is to bring power back to the applicant side and even the playing field back to where it used to be.

This is not evening the playing field at all. This is making it more complicated for recruiters which in turn will make it more complicated for applicants. This is hostile, it's bad for applicants and it's bad for recruiters. Again, this is contributing to the problem not solving it. Because you can doesn't mean you should.

I’ve been thinking about this market, and I’d love to talk with you. If you’re interested in discussing, reach out at the email in my profile.

I might some usefulness of this with some tuning if it could be deployed locally.

Is this only for the US? Also can you apply to US remote from elsewhere?

Yeah it is basically just for jobs in the US right now. You technically can apply from elsewhere, but you should specify your location correctly and make sure to set the right answers for the vis/sponsorship questions when signing up.

I can finally be productive 24 hours a day. Thanks!!

Don’t forget to let LinkedIn know.

hey a couple thoughts: you have Typescript and TypeScript and can you make a checkbox that filters out anything crypto-related?

Thanks for catching that, I need to clean up the skills for sure. I could definitely think about adding categories, like frontend, backend, mobile, crypto, etc. that you can enable/disable altogether. That's a good idea.

$45 is a bit out there

Note also that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559344 he's only been using it for a day and therefore has basically no idea if it even works right or if everything gets shitcanned.

It's saves hours of work and a lot of stress. You can basically stop thinking about applying to jobs if you set the search filters up right, so I feel at least for me it would be worth the money. There's also just the unlimited subscription at $20 which makes your life a lot easier on its own by letting you quickly apply from the search results without leaving the page.

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