From 85% rejections to interviews
I kept getting rejected — and I couldn't figure out why. Job searching is hard. Remote job searching is harder by an order of magnitude. I was sending out 30 applications in a couple of days. Getting 25 auto-rejections back. My experience was relevant, my skills were real. Then I realized: the problem wasn't my resume. It was my process. <!-- excerpt --> ## What was actually happening I'd see a position that looked like a fit. Apply. Move on to the next one. No deep analysis, no second look. Just volume. But "looks like a fit" hides a lot of traps. Buried in a wall of keywords — hybrid required. On-site in a country I'm not in. "Fluent in X" where X is a technology I'd need months to ramp up on. Easy to miss when you're skimming 20 listings a day. I wasn't getting rejected because I was unqualified. I was getting rejected because I was careless. ## The problem with job listings Let's be honest — most job descriptions are unreadable. Companies dump massive walls of keywords, mix hard requirements with nice-to-haves, bury the actual deal-breakers somewhere in paragraph four. Reading 20 of these a day is draining, and the more you read, the less you actually see. ## So I built a system I'm building a platform for myself — think of it like a shopping cart, but for job vacancies. I browse jobs as usual, and when something catches my eye, I save it through a Chrome extension. The extension grabs the page content directly from the DOM — no copy-pasting, no reformatting. The raw listing goes into my personal database. From there, an LLM parses the vacancy — extracting hard skills, soft skills, location requirements, work format, deal-breakers. All the things a human eye skips over when scanning fast. It turns a wall of text into a structured breakdown I can actually reason about. Before I apply, I sit with the parsed result. Do I actually want this? Does it match what I'm looking for? Is there a hidden requirement that disqualifies me? It's a simple shift: instead of apply-first-think-later, I think first and only apply when it makes sense. ## The result? Instead of 30 applications and 25 auto-rejections, I send 5 and get 2–3 screening interviews. Same resume. Same experience. Fewer applications. Better outcomes. ## What I learned Maybe the hiring system isn't broken. It's just more complex than it used to be. And spraying applications into the void doesn't work — not because the system is unfair, but because it rewards precision. The vacancy comes first. Study what's actually required. Then decide if it's worth applying. It turns out the bottleneck was never my resume. It was whether I was applying to the right positions in the first place.
I kept getting rejected — and I couldn’t figure out why.
Job searching is hard. Remote job searching is harder by an order of magnitude. I was sending out 30 applications in a couple of days. Getting 25 auto-rejections back. My experience was relevant, my skills were real.
Then I realized: the problem wasn’t my resume. It was my process.
What was actually happening
Section titled “What was actually happening”I’d see a position that looked like a fit. Apply. Move on to the next one. No deep analysis, no second look. Just volume.
But “looks like a fit” hides a lot of traps. Buried in a wall of keywords — hybrid required. On-site in a country I’m not in. “Fluent in X” where X is a technology I’d need months to ramp up on. Easy to miss when you’re skimming 20 listings a day.
I wasn’t getting rejected because I was unqualified. I was getting rejected because I was careless.
The problem with job listings
Section titled “The problem with job listings”Let’s be honest — most job descriptions are unreadable. Companies dump massive walls of keywords, mix hard requirements with nice-to-haves, bury the actual deal-breakers somewhere in paragraph four. Reading 20 of these a day is draining, and the more you read, the less you actually see.
So I built a system
Section titled “So I built a system”I’m building a platform for myself — think of it like a shopping cart, but for job vacancies.
I browse jobs as usual, and when something catches my eye, I save it through a Chrome extension. The extension grabs the page content directly from the DOM — no copy-pasting, no reformatting. The raw listing goes into my personal database.
From there, an LLM parses the vacancy — extracting hard skills, soft skills, location requirements, work format, deal-breakers. All the things a human eye skips over when scanning fast. It turns a wall of text into a structured breakdown I can actually reason about.
Before I apply, I sit with the parsed result. Do I actually want this? Does it match what I’m looking for? Is there a hidden requirement that disqualifies me?
It’s a simple shift: instead of apply-first-think-later, I think first and only apply when it makes sense.
The result?
Section titled “The result?”Instead of 30 applications and 25 auto-rejections, I send 5 and get 2–3 screening interviews.
Same resume. Same experience. Fewer applications. Better outcomes.
What I learned
Section titled “What I learned”Maybe the hiring system isn’t broken. It’s just more complex than it used to be. And spraying applications into the void doesn’t work — not because the system is unfair, but because it rewards precision.
The vacancy comes first. Study what’s actually required. Then decide if it’s worth applying.
It turns out the bottleneck was never my resume. It was whether I was applying to the right positions in the first place.