Thanks for the feedback. I built this as a senior in college, when my classmates and I didn't really have any useful connections to people in the industry. I did try cold-emailing and cold LinkedIn messaging people, but received few to no replies. It's definitely something that can be integrated into this webapp though, adding support for emailing/reaching out directly to hiring managers.
I know you worked hard on this and it solves a perceived need. All I'm saying is that optimizing for quantity won't get the best result.
There's no substitute for meeting people and creating genuine relationships, and there's no way to "hack" or speed up that process. That really is a numbers game: you may make 20 friends, and only one of them results in a job. But each friend requires genuine time and effort.
As far as being a senior in college, what about talking to alumni, especially recent ones? What about connections from internships?
Machines can't do the most important part of finding a job, which is to increase the number of people in the world who know your name and like you.
I don't know about you, but making real friends takes years.
> That really is a numbers game: you may make 20 friends, and only one of them results in a job.
Comparing the difficulty and social capital required to maintain 20 friends to having an app send out job applications is...not even in the same ballpark? People seem to have vastly different interpretations for the word friend, but making 20 friends certainly isn't trivial.
Having to wait that long for a better job shouldn't be necessary. Keep in mind, the goal isn't to get the best result, it's to get a better result than where you currently are.
Regarding job applications: when hiring people the first applications we send to the bin are generic ones. I really despise them because we get so many of them. We spend so much of time reading applications that if an applicant can't have the courtesy of writing a personal email it really leaves a sour taste.
So to actually answer your question - when applying, write why you are interested in the job. Make it at least sound like you know what the company you're applying to does. Ask questions about the job. If it's just some generic "I'm good at this and that" we'll just throw it in the bin even if you seem to have the skills.
I understand and appreciate that -- plus I always write personalized messages. It's a very worthy time investment!
That being said, many firms don't have enough information on their websites -- and even in their job application info page! -- about what do they do technically and what is their current need.
That makes it hard to make a proper addressing to them while doing a sales pitch of your abilities and profile. And I refuse to engage in vague guess-work, too.
Thank you, I realize some people might not have responded because I didn't have enough info to go on to try and tell them why would I like working with them.
That's some good feedback! I will try to think about making sure that our job ads contain enough information about the role. Hadn't thought about that. Thanks!
Depends on your point of view. In terms of amount of applications, no. Loads of people apply, but in terms of finding the right person, yes I think it's very hard. It takes a huge amount of time, and all the generic/automatic applications certainly don't speed up the process.
Everyone has difficulty hiring people. The most popular companies, like Google, may have a glut of applicants, but it's still incredibly difficult to know whom to choose.
For almost everyone else, there are two problems: not enough applicants and no infallible way to screen them.
Hiring is (and should be) the most difficult thing a company does. It's the most important thing a company does for sure.
I'm not interested in the generic "everybody." I'm intersted in accatyyc's experience specifically. Not every company bins generic applications. It would be interesting to see if accatyyc's company can afford to do so because they have a glut of qualified applicants or if they're artificially limiting their candidate pool for some other reason.
To expand on my other answer in regards to this - I wouldn't say we have a glut of qualified applicants. It's pretty hard to find the great developers, and the reason we bin the generic ones is that we have never found a fit through one of those. Also it simply takes too much time to move further with those applications. I'd rather be programming :)
Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it! That's definitely on the roadmap, right now users can still select which companies they would like to apply to before sending out their applications.
Hi guys, I built this after spending over 2 months applying to 100+ jobs on all the job boards and managing everything through a spreadsheet as a senior in college. I want to make the job seeking process easier for everyone so I built JobGen, a way to auto-apply to hundreds of jobs in 2 minutes. It's built with Rails on Heroku, and on the backend uses image recognition and DOM parsing to identify fields to submit your applications (name, email, resume, etc). All feedback is welcome, you can also email me here: admin@jobgen.io
Well done on building this, it's an interesting idea. Where did the numbers come from on the homepage?
I only ask because your personal account of 100+ jobs, at 5 mins per application, doesn't seem like the best approach to me. When I was jobseeking, I'd research every job description & company thoroughly first, and if it seemed like somewhere I'd want to work then I'd spend probably 20 minutes or so writing a cover letter that came across as personal.
I'm sure our experiences aren't apples-to-apples, but I definitely got a very high response rate from taking this approach.
Thanks! The numbers are from a beta test I did with around 200 users. I came up with this idea as a college student, when my classmates and I would apply to dozens and even hundreds of jobs to get any opportunity available.
Ok, I was going through your website. i found few issues.
1. the progress bar and the percentage do not match up.
2. I think you are storing the search results in sessions. Try to clear out the sessions every time. when i did a search on a term it shows me the result when I did a new research or refresh the page, the results are not being updated with new search
3. Upper case on the nav bar tabs labels which looked weird to me.
4. Applications remaining and upgrade plan gives me the same page. I would expect application remaning 10 should be a label not anchor tag
5. when I click on my profile and try to open current resume. I would expect resume to get downloaded. But it takes me to a blank page
Congrats on taking the time and effort to build something both functional (fills a need) and can work as an example of your work (demonstration) at the same time!
As a fellow job seeker frustrated by the "Look at all these great tools for Employers to make Candidates jump through hoops" slant in SaaS, your contribution is quite welcome. I'll admit I have a Candidate Assist SaaS type program in mind as well, definitely different from yours in approach and execution, so feel very good about encouraging your success. Maybe even the scales a little!
You may want a FAQ section or something that describes the onboarding process a little more in depth. My gut reaction when looking at the instructions is "Will it just send my information out the second I click submit?" then I realized I didn't read the word "Create profile" on the button and that step 2 is where the magic happens.
Having something like an animated gif or screencast that walks through the process would be invaluable. It would also likely be good to have a privacy policy. I've been evaluating things like this and if I can figure out it isn't the right fit without jumping through the hoops or sharing personal information it would definitely be preferred.
First of all, make the website look more professional. I.e. Do Not Capitalise Every Single Word. Secondly, fix spelling mistakes ("Its a numbers game").
Hmmm, and we built a Job Search tool that we initially intended as our internal tool to hunt for contract works. However, we end up aggregating all sorts of jobs.
Are the keywords the only way to filter the aggregated results? I immediately ran into wanting to filter by region but I don't think full text keyword search would be so reliable
You can hide that ugly 'Choose File' button by putting it inside a hidden div, and then have a nice bootstrappy button in its place that relays the onclick event to it via javascript.
I only mention it, as I discovered how to do it (and auto upload) only a few days ago...
