Landed a job? Share your story 🎉

[MadsLorentzen]

Nothing helps a job-seeker more than proof that the finish line exists. If this framework played a part in getting you hired, this is the place to tell the story.

Share whatever you're comfortable with:

• The role and field (as specific or vague as you like - "backend dev at a fintech" is plenty)
• Your country or market, and which portals you searched (stock skills, /add-portal creations, or a community fork)
• Which part of the workflow earned its keep - the fit evaluation, the drafter-reviewer CV pass, /interview prep, the tracker keeping you sane
• Roughly how long it took from first /scrape to signed offer
• Anything you changed or added along the way that others should steal

House rules:

• Anonymity is completely fine - no company names, no dates, no personal details required
• Please don't paste CVs, cover letters, or anything with personal data (yours or an employer's)
• Near-wins count too: first interview in months, a final round, an offer you declined - if the tool moved your search forward, that's a story worth telling

Every story posted here is read by someone mid-search who needed exactly that push today. 🎉

[rasstamann]

I wanted to share a near-miss and my general experience so far.

Some background: my former employer offered me a garden leave in february that lasted until the end of May. They haven't been doing well for months at that point and I expected it to happen. So I started looking for a new job around new year's. My expertise is in C++, Machine Vision and general near-hardware areas. At this point, I'm on active job search for 6 months.
In February, I started full-time job search. End of February I had my first interview with a company. Sadly, we only got to the first round of interview, but it set some expectations for how often I'd be getting interveiws.

I live in Munich area and most of the job offers here that I'm a good fit for are weapons manufacturing related. Unless something major happens in my life, I don't expect to ever be working in this field ever. If I can choose, I'd rather wait for a job that lets me save lives.

Being this picky about it meant I skipped a LOT of job ads. And another interview didn't happen until June. Needles to say, it's been devastating for my mental health. I'm not socially endagered (my wife works full time in IT as well), but just that I was full time job hunting was draining.

The interview in June was for a company that was recently bought out by a major weapons manufacturer. I was iffy at first, but their products are actually aligned with my personal preference: they manufacture land-based unmanned vehicles with remote control. This means that, for instance, you can have trucks driving supplies to the front being driven by a person safe in a bunker, hundreds of kilometers away. This, in turn, means less people directly in the front line and potentially less lives lost.

I got to round three, they seemed happy with me, I was very pleased with what I could see concerning company culture, hierarchy, leadership and general expertise. Unfortunatelly, I'm guessing they had much better fits with better expertise, so I didnt make the cut.

To wrap this up, I'd like to remind everyone struggling right now not to be discouraged. It's a difficult time, the best you can do is improve yourself in the meantime, keep up to date with your own field and maintain mental and physical health.

Best of luck to you all!

[MadsLorentzen]

Thank you for being the first to post here, and for setting the bar this high on honesty. A round three at a company you genuinely respected is not a small thing - that far in, it stops being about whether you're good enough and becomes a coin flip between strong candidates. It stings precisely because it was close, and it was close because you belong in those rooms.

I also want to say something about the line you're holding. Skipping most of your region's openings because you'd rather build things that keep people alive is not being picky - it's knowing what your work is for. The company you got excited about proves the line is workable: you're not refusing an industry blindly, you're waiting for the corner of it that matches your values. That corner exists, you found it once, and you'll find it again.

The mental-health point deserves to be said louder, so I'll repeat it: full-time searching is draining in a way that people who haven't done it rarely understand. I searched for roughly six months myself this year, and the near-misses were harder than the rejections. What you wrote - improve yourself, stay current, protect your health - is the whole survival kit in three clauses.

Munich, C++, machine vision, six months of sharpening: someone is going to be very glad they found you. Good luck, and post the ending here when it comes. 🍀

[MadsLorentzen]

One more thing, because it deserves saying plainly: getting rejected just sucks. There is no way around it. I was rejected over 50 times in my latest round of job seeking, and every single one of them sucked. It never became routine.

And they all suck differently. The template email an hour after you poured a day into a tailored application. The personal call a round or two in, which is somehow worse, because by then they know you, and it still wasn't enough. And then the ghosting, which hit me hardest of all: no answer, just the questions it leaves you alone with. Don't they like me? Is it me, personally? Who am I even competing against? That one can really take a toll.

But the arithmetic doesn't care how it feels: you have to apply to get a job, so the rejections are the price of the ticket. There's no version of a search where you skip them.

And there's a weird psychology on the other side of it that nobody warns you about: once you have a job, moving to a new one gets easier. The rejections bounce off differently when your mornings aren't defined by the search. It's unfair that the search is hardest exactly when you need it most, and knowing that doesn't fix it, but it helped me to know the difficulty was the situation, not me.

[rasstamann]

Thanks for taking the time to write the response. I wanted to maybe start a separate discussion to just talk about the process, how draining it can be, what's the common pitfalls and traps and maybe discuss on how to help yourself and/or one another. I'll let you decide if you want to open one, I'd comment there with my insights as well :)

I also wanted to mention "fake jobs" posted by companies, which were most likely my most common waste of time and effort. This might help people take a breath of relief.

[MadsLorentzen]

Great idea - it deserves its own room, so I opened one: #140 "The search itself: ghost postings, pitfalls, and staying sane", with your ghost-postings point as the first opener (credited). Bring your insights over - you clearly have more where the first two came from.

[HuskyDanny]

Great project, I tried, but how to actually let agent auto apply for you? Seems it is missing?

[MadsLorentzen]

Thanks for trying it! It's not missing - it's deliberately not there. The workflow drafts everything (CV, cover letter, and with /apply even the free-text application-form answers), but you always send. That's a core design principle of this repo: the agent never gets the last touch. Three reasons:

1. Accountability. Everything goes out under your name, to a real employer. You should read it first - the drafter-reviewer loop is good, but not "sign my name blind" good.
2. Quality signal. Auto-submitted applications converge on spam, and recruiters can tell. The tool's value is making each application better, not making more of them per hour.
3. Terms of service. Most portals (LinkedIn in particular) prohibit automated form submission, and I'm not shipping a default that violates that.

So the intended loop is: /scrape finds, /rank shortlists, /apply drafts, you review and submit, /outcome (or /gmail-sync) tracks. The submit step staying manual is the point.

If you do land something with it, this thread is the place to share the story 🎉