u/nomadicsamiam

I get ads from them all the time, making bold claims to job seekers, while recruiters tell me it's easy to tell who is using them, and they can get job seekers blacklisted.

We are building to help job seekers use AI intelligently in their search, and are focused on useful tools that increase interview rates.

Job seekers, vote in the anonymous poll. I'd love to hear your experiences. Are they working? Are they hurting?

Recruiters, can you tell when someone uses one? How? Are you filtering them out?

Career coaches and resume writers, what do you tell clients? Have you tested any of these tools?

View Poll

Get a referral. Cold applications convert at ~3%. Referrals convert at ~40%. EXCEPT: referrals are hard to get, making up about 1% of all applications. (Source: Ashby's analysis of millions of applications.)

Tailor every resume. Tailored resumes hit 5.8% interview rate. Untailored hit 3.73%. That's 1 interview per 17 applications vs 1 per 33. Tailoring means changing the summary, skills, and achievements sections. (Source: Huntr 2025 job search trends report)

Match the job title. Matching your most recent title to the target title lifts response by 10.6x. Eye-tracking studies show a recruiter's second fixation lands on your current job title. If your title hides the work, add the target title in parentheses. (Source: Jobscan 2025 report)

Pick the right job board. Response rates across 598,627 applications: 72.5% of job seekers said LinkedIn Easy Apply produced zero interviews in 2025. (Source: Huntr 2025 Job Search Trends Report.)

Google Jobs: 11.3%

GovernmentJobs.com: 8.7%

Wellfound: 6.0%

Glassdoor: 5.5%

Indeed: 4.5%

LinkedIn: 3.1%

Dice: 0.35%

Apply early. Be in the first 24 hours or the first 100 in the queue. A Microsoft recruiter told me on the record: once five candidates are in the interview loop, they stop reading new applications.

Other things that help (Source: Huntr 2025 Job Search Trends Report):

• Two pages beat one. Across 128K resumes: two pages hit 3.24% interview rate, one page 3.06%. Three pages drop to 2.6%.
• Add a summary section. 92.7% of interviewed resumes had one vs 89.3% of non-interviewed.
• Include your LinkedIn link. 71.7% vs 64.3%.
• 16 applications a week is the median for successful searches. 38% of job seekers land within 30 applications.
• Use numbers. "4 years" beats "four years." Recruiters skim past spelled-out numbers.

What to ignore:

ATS scores. No universal score exists. No major ATS auto-rejects without a human looking. Recruiters at Microsoft, Amazon, and the Big Four confirmed this on the record.

Keyword stuffing. That advice is from 2010 and was about sourcing, not screening. Use keywords. Don't overdo it.

Fancy templates. Plain layout, 10pt fonts minimum, PDF or Word.

None of this guarantees a job, but hopefully it helps

I don't know who needs to hear this (maybe I'm just writing this for myself).

Humans matter, you matter, your work matters.

AI is not going to take all jobs. Jobs are collections of tasks that humans do to provide value to other humans. Some tasks may change. Tools will change. But we will NOT as a society decide that humans do not have something to offer to their fellow humans.

AI company leaders will do best to remember this. There will be many changes that many will not be comfortable with, but we will get through it, and humans will be taken care of. It has to be that way.

Am I missing something?

"You can be the best candidate, but if you apply three weeks after the role is posted, we'll never see you."

Here’s a summary of what he had to say:

1. The AI "Auto-Rejection" Myth: Our unique job-search trends data show that 60% of job seekers believe they are being auto-rejected by AI.
   1. The reality is that those instant 1:38 AM rejections are usually knockout questions (like work authorization or exact years of experience). Candidates never see these filters, and recruiters only see the qualified applicants.
2. "The ATS is Just a Filing Cabinet": It doesn’t make hiring decisions. The dreaded "keyword filters" are just a modern interface for standard, 30-year-old Boolean search logic.
3. "Treat Your Resume Like a Technical Manual":
   1. Ditch the dense text blocks; recruiters skip them. Focus entirely on problem-solving, specific tools used, and measurable success highlighted by numbers, percentages, and dollar signs.
4. Roles open for less than a week easily hit 500+ applicants. Hiring managers aim to interview 5 high-quality candidates for each role. Once they have 5 candidates in the pipeline, they stop looking. You must apply early.
5. Ghosting is a Volume Problem: He says that internal recruiters handle 30-50 open roles simultaneously, dedicating 5-6 hours a week per candidate profile just to admin and feedback. Whether you feel ghosted or ignored, treat the silence as a simple "no" and keep moving forward.

Do you have any other questions for hiring managers/recruiters? I met with at least one every week.

LinkedIn is a terrible job board that rarely converts to interviews. Sometimes it is unavoidable for companies and jobs you really want but know that even if you go to the company site and apply the job is still highly competitive

LinkedIn is a social network meaning the job seekers are the product. There are other job boards that are much better for getting interviews and simply googling for jobs is a good way to aggregate all the job boards.

Remember to filter by jobs that are posted in the last 24 hours as that’s what recruiter have told me has a big impact on interview chances

That 4.3% doesn't match what job seekers tell me. It doesn't match the wider economy either. Here's the fuller picture, pulled from BLS March 2026 data and Gallup's latest workplace report.

Unemployed: 7.2 million. People without a job who want one.

Underemployed: 4.5 million. People working part-time who want full-time hours but can't get them. (BLS counts another 6 million who want a job but aren't actively searching, so they fall off the headline rate.)

Misemployed: 110 million. Gallup's 2024 data shows 69% of US workers are either psychologically checked out (52%) or actively resentful of their jobs (17%). They show up, but they don't want to be there.

That's about 122 million people. Out of a labor force of 170 million, that's 72%
.
If we want to talk about the labor market honestly, 4.3% won't cut it.

The real story is much bigger and I intend to dedicate my life to help solve it.

Here are the job boards that get better interview rates than LinkedIn.

The Human Genome is an 800MB file that builds a conscious machine.

It wires 100 trillion nerve links across 37 trillion nodes, live-patches its code, runs a 20-watt exaFLOP supercomputer on the caloric intake of a sandwich, and packs 215 petabytes of data into a single gram.

The efficiency of biological evolution is remarkable.

Quote from a South African mom we surveyed about job search.

This is real. This matters. This is motivation to make the world of job search better. Because hardworking people deserve better than to be cast aside.

WE HAVE PEOPLE THAT WANT TO WORK AND A SOCIETY THAT DOESN'T WANT TO HELP THEM.

Here me out because I know there's a lot of doom and gloom, and believe me, I understand and feel it around job loss.

Return to supply and demand with me.

Today in the world, there is a certain amount of human processing power and a certain amount of AI processing power. One of these is increasing exponentially, and the other's growth rate is in decline...

AI processing will then compete with AI processing for value creation (ultimately judged by humans). Human processing power will be more scarce and thus more valuable.

This assumes that you are not one of those crazies who believe that the human brain is perfectly reproducible in bits and bytes, and thus there is no difference between human and AI processing power.

To whom I remind that Humans are the result of an 800MB file (human genome) that builds a conscious machine. It wires 100 trillion nerve links across 37 trillion nodes, live-patches its code, runs a 20-watt exaFLOP supercomputer on the caloric intake of a sandwich, and packs 215 petabytes of data into a single gram.

Human labor FTW

So much attention to AI job loss, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Does anyone understand the position Anthropic and Dario are taking?

If AI is capable of causing mass unemployment, then it will be powerful enough to help solve the problem of unemployment.

Especially if the technology is properly diffused, it will be able to help someone make sense of how they can improve their own income (if they want to).

Yes, this is optimistic, but also I don't think it is wrong and it is certainly more reasonable than AI is going to cause this massive problem because it is so good, but it won't be good enough to help fix it...

There are many who are quick to say that AI will wipe out our jobs. But if AI is a tool to help humans get what they want, and more and more humans want jobs, then isn't that an opportunity to use AI to help get people jobs that are the jobs they want?

Especially the AI company leaders who are claiming this is what AI will do.

1. We do not have any examples in the past of technology wiping out job growth.
2. Even if it is different this time because AI is potentially capable of both manual and intellectual labor, then it will certainly be capable of helping someone to determine the highest and best use of their time for creating value and generating income.

I understand the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the future, but I can't understand the idea that the technology can only be used to hurt people and their livelihoods and not improve them.

What am I missing here?