I got frustrated with job boards showing irrelevant listings, so I built First 2 Apply—a desktop app that aggregates job postings and uses LLMs to filter them based on your exact tech stack.
Instead of relying on keyword matching, the app processes each job description to check if it genuinely aligns with your skills. I use it to find remote React/Node/Express roles while filtering out jobs that require Angular, PHP, or anything outside my stack.
I built this for myself, but figured others might find it useful too. Would love to hear thoughts, especially from those searching for jobs or working on similar problems!
Hey everyone,
My wife and I are working on a job search tool. Yeah I know ... a lot of them popping up lately.
So how is this one different from all the others? First of all it's a job board aggregator. We initially got the idea for it when my wife started job hunting last year and was complaining that it takes a lot of time to manually go through 10-15 open tabs with job searches to see if there are any new listings. She was using LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor and a few other niche sites, searching for 2 types of roles on each. We then had a thought that we could built a tool to "merge" all her open tabs in a single feed. That's how First 2 Apply was born. The app periodically scrapes each saved job listing tab and checks if there are new listings, so you don't have to do that manually anymore. It then sends an email notification for the newly detected jobs.
Anything else? Well, she was also annoyed that quite a lot of jobs were advertised as "remote", but in the job description they mentioned having to go to the office a couple of days per week :/. Or jobs for junior positions where in the description they ask for 5+ years of experience.
We then added a 2nd layer filter to the app. Basically we run each job the app detects through ChatGPT and ask it to exclude jobs from the feed that don't match what the user is looking for. It's really helpful at filtering out jobs where LinkedIn's search results fall short.
In the future we’re also thinking about integrating an AI agent to also automate applying to jobs.
I built First2Apply, an open-source job board aggregator that helps users find and apply for jobs faster by pulling listings from multiple sources like LinkedIn, Indeed, Dice, and 10+ other job boards.
Why I built this:
When I was job hunting, I found it time-consuming to track jobs across multiple platforms. So I created a tool that centralizes job listings in one place and prioritizes speed — getting job alerts quickly can make a real difference in the hiring process.
How it works:
- scrapes jobs from major job boards
- diffs the list of new found jobs with the ones already "seen"
- (optionally) filters out jobs based on user input (using ChatGPT)
- sends an alert if there are any new jobs for the user to check out
I’d love feedback on:
- features you think would make this tool more useful
- ways to improve scraping/integrations with job platforms
- any other ideas or contributions you’d like to see in an open-source job aggregator
That's an interesting idea, but wouldn't it be seen as a bit of a red flag? I thought most devs if they see a license other than MIT they will frown upon it :)
On a more general note, it's often challenging to sell anything to the software developer community, regardless of the licensing terms you choose. I believe you'll gain commercial traction only if your product is closer to the real market. In this sense, using the MIT license may expose your project to the risks you mentioned.
As for community feedback, it doesn't necessarily have to be negative. Recently, I published my project under a non-standard license and received generally positive feedback[1], despite my project being in a very niche field.
Can't speak for myself since I haven't had to search for a job since the market went downhill, but my wife started exactly at the same time. Her experience has been dreadful, looking for a junior dev position fully remote nowadays feels like hunting for unicorns.
So her approach was to basically search through every job board available online (following my advice since I found my last job outside of linkedin). But keeping up with tens of open tabs in chrome is exhausting and very time consuming.
That actually got me an idea to basically automate the search part and webscrape every tab she had open and send a notification when new jobs get posted, this way you only get to see a clean feed with jobs from all sources.
That's how https://first2apply.com/ was born and now she's only using that. Haven't found that fully remote junior role yet tho :/
Thanks, makes sense for the free tier use cases. Regarding Proton, it's kinda hard to compete with them since they are a really well established company, but in case of a one man show, someone else could easily copy the product and start pouring some marketing money into it.
