![]() Every few days, I would spend 20 minutes sifting through the options and vetoing the jobs that weren't relevant. For $39 a month, it would send out up to 50 applications a week. I chose a couple that felt most relevant to what I do: content marketing and PR. But it had a limited, preset list of corporate occupations I could apply to. True to its name, it showed me way more openings than Sonara and Wonsulting. I had more hope for Massive, another bot I tried. About one in three applications never went through. But like Sonara, it didn't show me many job openings, and it was pretty glitchy. It had a cool feature that allowed me to use a different résumé for each job title I applied to, meaning I could highlight different skills and achievements for various positions. ![]() It was a little more manual than Sonara: Every time I wanted it to pull in more job openings, I had to input my experience level and specify the title and location of the position I was looking for. Undeterred, I signed up for WonsultingAI, which seemed like a bargain at only $19.99 a month. Then, after a week, a statement popped up on Sonara's website. It was hardly the job-applying firehose I was looking for. But the ones I approved continued to sit in the queue, unsent. Each morning when I logged back on, it would send me a trickle of new options to consider. I greenlighted a few of them, and the bot promised it would send them out. After I spent a half hour uploading my résumé and completing my profile, Sonara showed me maybe a dozen job options. For $79.99 a month, I signed up for the most expensive "amplitude" plan, which would allow me to apply for 420 openings. Some 120 applications later, I stood corrected. How could an AI-generated version of me possibly compete in such a crowded and chaotic job market? ![]() I didn't think any employers would actually bite. Which roles would it apply to? How accurately would it reflect my skills and interests to employers? A friend joked, "Does your editor know this story might end in you taking a new role?" The thought hadn't even crossed my mind. But late one night I cracked open a beer, updated my résumé, pulled out my credit card, and entrusted my fate to a job-application bot. The question is: Do the bots work? I decided to find out. It's the promise of AI, applied to the job market: an intelligent, personalized, HR-slaying machine, designed to land you a gig through a combination of tech-savvy and brute force. You pay a fee, feed your résumé into the bot, tell it what you're looking for, and blam! - it starts sending out hundreds of applications on your behalf, often in real time. The bots - with names like LazyApply and Massive - have turned job hunting into a technological arms race. So when I heard that you can now use a bot to mass-apply to job openings, I was intrigued. Things have gotten so grim that LinkedIn no longer trumpets the number of people who have applied to openings on its job portal. The whole process has become an odds game: Job seekers submit their cover letters to hundreds of companies, struggling to stand out among the tsunami of applicants. Employers are so overwhelmed by the flood of résumés that they're barely able to glance at most of them, let alone read them. In the current market, it's not uncommon for totally unremarkable jobs to attract thousands of applications. And these days, applying for a job has turned into even more of a nightmare. Luckily, I landed a job after a few months. How does anyone do this? I might as well have been sending my applications out into the ether. I was floored that I didn't advance to a single interview. Yet all I got back was a raft of canned rejection emails - or worse, silence. I wrote heartfelt paragraphs about why each role was perfect for me. I tailored my CV to match each job description. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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