The service, called Massive, costs $39 a month and fills out up to 50 automated applications per week, all of which are reviewed by humans for accuracy. Some companies offer additional services such as AI-generated cover letters and messages to recruiters. LazyApply helps users resign by automating the resignation process.
Many of these services are based on the idea that job hunting is a numbers game. Dawson admits there is some truth to this idea for early career candidates. “But if you're an established professional, quality is more important than quantity,” she says. “The best way to find work is through referrals,” Nicklos says. Nicklos' company calculates that about one-third of its hires are made through referrals. “That hasn't changed for a long time.”
Sonara founder Victor Schwartz heard similar advice when he was job hunting in 2019 as a senior studying computer science and machine learning at Duke University. “Network, network, network.” He found it puzzling. “What do you mean?” he would reply. “I'm 22 years old and just graduated from school.” Without a professional network to draw on, Schwartz spent hours applying through his LinkedIn and Indeed, sometimes multiple times. I was ghosted after an interview. “I felt like the world was conspiring against me,” he says.
Schwartz started working on Sonara in 2019, reasoning that even if networking was effective, most people wouldn't do it “because it's scary.” Initially, he hired a team in Brazil to manually complete his application. Sonara launched his AI-powered service in March and currently has 5,000 users, Schwartz said. He's working on a feature that automatically tailors his resume to individual job descriptions before submission.
Automated application services tend not to reveal that a bot has performed a job on behalf of a person, but recruiters can spot telltale signs. Applicants receive a bonus if they receive an application within seconds of the job posting being published. Candidates do not know which jobs they have applied for. “One of the worst things I've heard from someone who sent me a resume is that I didn't know I'd done that,” said Ronaldi Recruiting owner, accountant and chemistry specialist. says Marcus Ronaldi, who specializes in mechanical engineering jobs. After you recommend a candidate to a company, you may receive a reply that the candidate has already applied and therefore cannot represent the company. But it turns out the candidates themselves didn't know that because they outsourced the process to a bot.
Dawson recalls speculating that one candidate might be using AI. The reason for this was that applicants had no idea how many jobs they had applied to, and had a hard time responding when clients contacted them to say they were interested. “Candidates were feeling overwhelmed with so many things happening at once. It's OK to apply to a lot of jobs, but it's also very difficult to pay close attention to what's in front of you. “It’s important,” she says.
spray and pray
Distributing applications indiscriminately across the Internet can have other consequences, especially when the emergence of services like LazyApply forces companies that develop applicant management software to take action. “Some of these tools are very sophisticated. They can identify you as a spammer,” says Josh Bersin, CEO of the eponymous human resources advisory firm. Masu. Nicklos believes that AI could better assist both job seekers and recruiters if it could identify a small pool of roles that would be best for people to apply for or for recruiters to offer. This may work best if the AI tool focuses on his one area of expertise. “We need to be more nearsighted,” she says.
Dan Vykhopen's company Massive is tackling this matching problem. “Filling out the application is easy” for AI, he says. “Matching is difficult.” He aggregates a large amount of information about companies, including culture and leaders, from sources such as his Crunchbase for startups, his Harmonic database, and his Glassdoor site for job reviews. Masu. Job seekers can use that data to hone their job search using criteria such as benefit quality, founder experience, and investor success. Vikpen said Massive currently focuses on technology jobs because it's easier to map the industry, but hopes to expand in the future.
