Auto apply vs autofill: what actually gets sent

Search for a way to automate job applications and you get three different products under one name. The words on their pricing pages are nearly identical. What arrives at an employer is not.

Three things people mean by “auto apply”

• Autofill. An extension pastes your name, email and links into the boxes. You still read the posting and press submit. It removes typing, which was never the slow part.
• Bulk sending. Hundreds of listings a day, nothing read, one résumé everywhere. The number on the dashboard goes up every day. The replies do not.
• A real submit. It reads the posting, checks it against your rules, fills the employer's own form in a real browser, submits, and keeps proof of what the server received.

What autofill leaves on your plate

We took a real form apart field by field, the one 147 employers used last month. The five fields an extension is good at are the five that were never slow: first name, last name, email, phone, country. The hour goes into what is under them: school is a search against a remote catalogue that returned nothing after 6.5 seconds.

What a real submit looks like on the wire

The browser sends a request to the employer's server and the server answers with a number. Two hundred means it took the application, and that is the only part of the process where a machine tells the truth, because it comes from the other side. Almost every tool skips it and reads the page instead: the button went away, a green box appeared, therefore submitted. That is a guess about a picture. On one common form a block titled “Security code” appears after the click, with eight one-character boxes: over ten submissions on 21 August the code went out on the first submit from an address and was then reused, and one arrived four minutes before the submit that needed it. Here an application is only called sent with the request and the status, or a confirmation written on the page. The mechanism is on the auto-apply page.

Why 10 a day beats 1,000

In four days of a real search we read 360 postings across eleven job sites: 47 matched and nine became applications. On the accounts we run today the number of roles a day genuinely worth someone's name lands between one and eight. The ceiling here is one a day on the free start and ten a day with credits, and the first 5 applications are free, with no card.

Five minutes to test any tool, including this one

• Ask for one submit on the wire. The request that left and the answer the employer's server gave. A tool that cannot show it does not know either.
• Send one and watch your mailbox. A week of “submitted” with no employer confirmation at all was never applications.
• Ask how often it refuses. A tool that never says no to a posting is not reading them, and one that wants your LinkedIn login is betting your profile on not being noticed.

Run that list on us: the method, status and address of the request in the timeline; the conservative answer flagged for you to correct; from US$0.33 per application sent; and 87% of what we read in that run never became an application. The rest is on the FAQ. Create an account and paste one job link.