PointedResponse

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.