8 ms·

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

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!

PointedResponse 2y ago
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.
- mattfrommars 2y ago
  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.
  - PointedResponse 2y ago
    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.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  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.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  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.
  - tomwphillips 2y ago
    I wouldn’t. It demonstrates that they haven’t thought enough to realise it worsens a systemic problem.
mathgeek 2y ago
> 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?
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  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)
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  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.
uncomplexity_ 2y ago
missed the chance to call it "Dream Jobs"
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  I'll be awake thinking about this blunder in bed tonight.
  - uncomplexity_ 2y ago
    just rebrand already get jobs in your sleep unlimited better taglines haha
djaouen 2y ago
I can finally be productive 24 hours a day. Thanks!!
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Don’t forget to let LinkedIn know.
lolinder 2y ago
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.
- urhired 2y ago
  I too am a hiring manager and I don't even have a gag reflex, watch this:
- senordevnyc 2y ago
  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.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    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.
WD-42 2y ago
Software engineers speed running the industry into requiring that all job applications be printed out and dropped off in person. Thanks guys.
- chambored 2y ago
  New grads have to apply to 100s of postings to get responses. This is a response to a need.
  - colesantiago 2y ago
    Or this just makes the job application situation worse for both sides.
    - x_may 2y ago
      Tragedy of the commons at work once again
      - WD-42 2y ago
        More like play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  - umvi 2y ago
    What happened to university job fairs were you can talk to actual people? New grads should be leveraging those first.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      A new grad can’t stand out from other new grads regardless. Especially when they are now competing with out of work experienced developers
      - the_snooze 2y ago
        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.
deadbabe 2y ago
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.
- laconicmatt 2y ago
  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.
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Yea, that’s where we got the idea.
- BadCookie 2y ago
  This seems fair as long as someone at your company actually watches all of the videos …
  - ArlenBales 2y ago
    Until the company uses AI to transcribe the applicant's video to text and then further summarize the text into bullet points.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      This already exists for conference calls with clients. Our sales team uses it. https://www.gong.io/call-transcription-software/ https://www.gong.io/call-transcription-software/ I am not in sales. But I am sales adjacent.
- bogwog 2y ago
  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!
umvi 2y ago
The conclusion to this arms race is "captcha" like mechanisms to prevent automated job applications
- x_may 2y ago
  Captcha solvers as a service are already well developed. The end result is going full circle to in person applications only.
  - umvi 2y ago
    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.
sss111 2y ago
$45 is a bit out there
- floren 2y ago
  Note also that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559344 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.
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  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.
gcanyon 2y ago
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.
Saphyel 2y ago
Is this only for the US? Also can you apply to US remote from elsewhere?
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  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.
alun 2y ago
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
leshenka 2y ago
hey a couple thoughts: you have Typescript and TypeScript and can you make a checkbox that filters out anything crypto-related?
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  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.
pluc 2y ago
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.
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  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.
  - pluc 2y ago
    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.
scarface_74 2y ago
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.
cgreerrun 2y ago
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 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!
hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
I might some usefulness of this with some tuning if it could be deployed locally.

PointedResponse 2y ago

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.

mattfrommars 2y ago
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.
- PointedResponse 2y ago
  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.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
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.
scarface_74 2y ago
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.
- tomwphillips 2y ago
  I wouldn’t. It demonstrates that they haven’t thought enough to realise it worsens a systemic problem.

mathgeek 2y ago

> 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?

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
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)
PointedResponse 2y ago
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.

uncomplexity_ 2y ago

missed the chance to call it "Dream Jobs"

PointedResponse 2y ago
I'll be awake thinking about this blunder in bed tonight.
- uncomplexity_ 2y ago
  just rebrand already get jobs in your sleep unlimited better taglines haha

djaouen 2y ago

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

actionfromafar 2y ago
Don’t forget to let LinkedIn know.

lolinder 2y ago

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.

urhired 2y ago
I too am a hiring manager and I don't even have a gag reflex, watch this:
senordevnyc 2y ago
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.
- lolinder 2y ago
  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.

WD-42 2y ago

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

chambored 2y ago
New grads have to apply to 100s of postings to get responses. This is a response to a need.
- colesantiago 2y ago
  Or this just makes the job application situation worse for both sides.
  - x_may 2y ago
    Tragedy of the commons at work once again
    - WD-42 2y ago
      More like play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- umvi 2y ago
  What happened to university job fairs were you can talk to actual people? New grads should be leveraging those first.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    A new grad can’t stand out from other new grads regardless. Especially when they are now competing with out of work experienced developers
    - the_snooze 2y ago
      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.

deadbabe 2y ago

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.

laconicmatt 2y ago
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.
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Yea, that’s where we got the idea.
BadCookie 2y ago
This seems fair as long as someone at your company actually watches all of the videos …
- ArlenBales 2y ago
  Until the company uses AI to transcribe the applicant's video to text and then further summarize the text into bullet points.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    This already exists for conference calls with clients. Our sales team uses it. https://www.gong.io/call-transcription-software/ https://www.gong.io/call-transcription-software/ I am not in sales. But I am sales adjacent.
bogwog 2y ago
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!

umvi 2y ago

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

x_may 2y ago
Captcha solvers as a service are already well developed. The end result is going full circle to in person applications only.
- umvi 2y ago
  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.

sss111 2y ago

$45 is a bit out there

floren 2y ago
Note also that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559344 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.
PointedResponse 2y ago
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.

gcanyon 2y ago

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.

Saphyel 2y ago

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

PointedResponse 2y ago
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.

alun 2y ago

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

leshenka 2y ago

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

PointedResponse 2y ago
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.

pluc 2y ago

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.

PointedResponse 2y ago
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.
- pluc 2y ago
  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.

scarface_74 2y ago

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.

cgreerrun 2y ago

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 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!

hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago

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