Blog
We write when we find something specific: what a board’s form actually does, what a number in a job index actually counts, where a tool should stop and hand the work back. There are no listicles here and there is no publishing schedule.
5 min read
One test beats every warning-sign list — check whether the role is still on the employer's own ATS board. We ran the warning-sign lists against 6,507 live postings to see how well they work, and mostly they do not.
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Around ten, done properly. We cap our own product at ten a day free and thirty paid — here is the reasoning behind those numbers, which parts of it are measurement and which are judgement, and what the volume actually buys you.
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We index seven aggregators and six ATS vendors, and we probed each one to see where its apply button actually goes. Four of the seven never hand you the employer's own page — here is the measurement, and why that is not a scandal.
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The race, gender, veteran and disability block at the end of a US application is optional and it is not nothing. What the forms actually say, what leaving it blank does differently from declining, and how to decide once instead of forty times.
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We read the published application payloads of six ATS vendors. Here is what is decided before you submit, what each board reveals about the recruiter's configuration, and the part nobody outside the company can honestly tell you.
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Upload a résumé, watch three fields fill in, then type your phone number for the fortieth time this week. The reason is that application forms have no shared vocabulary — the field ids are minted per employer and carry across nothing.
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Work authorisation, sponsorship, "how did you hear about us", salary, notice, the consent box. The wordings repeat verbatim across hundreds of boards — so most of these are answerable once, and three of them are not.
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Every mainstream applicant tracking system gates submission behind a captcha bound to its own origin, and every server-side submit endpoint we could find is issued against the employer's key. Here is what we found when we went looking for a way around it.
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Tailoring is reordering and rewording what already happened. Four tests tell you when an edit has crossed into invention — they are the same four our own rewriter enforces in code, and you can run them by hand.
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Before anything scores you, your file is flattened into one stream of plain text. Here is what survives that, what a parser deletes on purpose, and the two file problems that make a résumé arrive empty.
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