Automating the remote job search

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week, I told you about my new year resolutions for 2024, and my observation that many people's resolution for the year is to find a new remote job.

In fact, many of those joined me this week for the kick off of Cohort 4 of the Remote Jobs Braintrust, my course and private community for remote workers that has just crossed 100 members.

Today, I'll tell you about the hard work that is to find a remote job. I'll focus on the parts that are more time consuming, and how you can possibly automate them to some degree.

1/ Find job opportunities worth applying to

The job board landscape is more fragmented than ever. There are hundreds of job boards, from the popular general-purpose ones (eg: Linkedin), to the startup niche ones (eg: Wellfound), to remote specific ones (eg: RemoteOK), all the way to specific niches.

As a job seeker, you must keep track of all those job boards, and check them every day for new jobs that have been posted, so you are one of the first applicants.

It's quite a repetitive time-consuming process, but that's the only way to get your job search going. It's a numbers game: the more job opportunities you find, the more likely you are to find the one that will land you the job.

How can this be automated? Well, some people set alerts in the job boards, or use aggregators. Some more tech savvy job seekers build bots to find job openings for them.

2/ Apply to each relevant job opening

If you do the process above, it's very likely that you'll find a few opportunities every day worth applying to. Or perhaps a lot of opportunities every day, depending on your profile and selection criteria.

It's a competitive market out there. Remote jobs paying high salaries get hundreds of applicants in the first few days. That's the market you're competing against.

As a CTO, I've reviewed thousands of such applications, and the good news is that most applications are generic and confusing. I can't grasp how the candidate fits the job description. 

As such, you must create application collateral (CV, cover letter, etc) tailored for each job opportunity you apply to. This is the only way you can show how relevant you are to each specific job. Doing this for dozens, or even hundreds, of job applications is hard work. That's for sure, but it pays off as a solid pipeline of booked interviews.

How can this be automated? With the advent of ChatGPT and its API, I can tell you many applicants are using those tools to personalise applications in a fraction of the time. I'm on the receiving end of those.

3/ Prepare for each interview

This is a great problem to have, for any job seeker. You research the company, the product, the tech stack, the people who'll interview you.

If there are requirements in the job description you aren't so comfortable with, you double down in practising those and training for the technical rounds of the interview process. It can be fun, but it can also be frustrating. 

How can this be automated? Frankly, it can't. There's no shortcut when it comes to you showing up and delivering a great interview performance. You can use ChatGPT for interactive interview prep, you can use AI tools to speed up company research, but you can't avoid doing the hard work here.

Introducing the Jobs Copilot

It's the new SaaS product I'm developing on my spare time, jobscopilot.ai. Having seen so many people struggle with their job search, I've decided to built a tool to help. I'll keep you posted on progress. Join the waitlist for early access.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira, 
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover