How the Apply Agent works

Setting it up: two things

Setup is deliberately short, because most of what an application form wants is already in your CV. Go to the Apply Agent page and the checklist shows what is still outstanding.

First, upload your CV. That is the whole of the profile step — your name, email, phone and LinkedIn are read straight off the document, and nothing legal or personal (work authorisation, sponsorship, salary, notice period) is ever inferred from it. Those get asked only at the moment a real form needs them.

Second, tell it what you are looking for. Job titles, location, and how many picks you want each morning. When your CV is uploaded, the form offers the roles it found in the document as chips you can accept or ignore — each one shows the line it came from, so you can see where it got the idea.

Naming employers to skip is optional but worth the minute. Your current employer above all: it is the one thing that cannot be undone after the fact.

• ✓ Job titles are comma-separated — "Product Manager, Programme Manager" searches both
• ✓ So are locations — "London, Manchester, Remote"
• ✓ You can run several saved searches with different criteria and different salary floors
• ✓ Picks per morning defaults to 5; start lower until you have seen its work

What happens overnight

The nightly run looks only at postings that are genuinely new to the board, so the same job does not reappear in your queue every morning. Each candidate is scored against your CV, and anything below the fit floor is dropped rather than padded in to fill the day's quota.

Two pieces of the platform's own data then do the triage. Employers whose takedowns are mostly re-listings of the same role are skipped entirely — that is the churn pattern behind most ghost-job complaints. Employers with a track record of roles that stayed posted and then genuinely closed get a small boost, and the queue tells you which.

Every pick arrives with its reasons attached: the match percentage and the terms that matched, whether the employer has filled roles in our tracking, how fresh the posting is, whether it clears your salary floor, and whether the agent can submit that one for you.

Review mode and auto mode

The agent starts in review mode, and that is the default for everyone. It prepares the application — drafted answers, tailored CV, cover note — and nothing leaves until you press send. If you never change the setting, the agent never submits anything on its own.

Auto mode is the opt-in. In auto, the agent submits the applications it can complete end to end without you, and hands back everything else. The first few releases are held for your approval regardless of the setting, so you can see exactly what it intends to send before it sends anything unattended. That is the feature working, not a fault — a run that only holds on day one is the expected shape.

You can pause the whole thing with a date it comes back on, so a pause you meant to last a week does not quietly become permanent.

Where it can submit for you, and where it cannot

This is the part most worth understanding before you subscribe, because the honest answer is that unattended submission covers a minority of the board and always will.

Applications are submitted by driving the employer's real application form in a real browser. Some applicant-tracking systems put bot protection on that form — a CAPTCHA, an invisible score, or a required candidate account with that specific employer. Where that protection exists, the agent stops. It does not solve CAPTCHAs, spoof a browser fingerprint, or route around detection, and it will not, because those are the exact behaviours that get applications binned and accounts banned.

So the board splits in two. On the vendors with no such wall, the agent can fill and submit. On the rest — which includes the single largest ATS by volume — it prepares everything and you press submit. The Apply Agent page shows the current split as a live count taken from the board itself, not an estimate, and the job board marks individual postings the agent can finish with an "Agent can apply" chip so you can see it before you save a job.

What it will never do

The refusals are the product, not the missing half of it. An agent that guesses on your behalf is worse than no agent, because you find out at the interview.

• ✓ It never invents an answer. If an employer asks something your CV and standing answers do not support, that application is handed back with the question named
• ✓ It never answers identity, nationality, demographic or document-number questions — those are yours to give, per application
• ✓ It never solves or evades a CAPTCHA, and never pretends to be a different browser
• ✓ It never applies to an employer on your skip list, and it spaces out applications to the same employer
• ✓ It never sends twice — the tracker is checked, and an ambiguous submit is escalated to you rather than retried

When it looks like it is doing nothing

"No applications" and "no matching jobs" look identical from the outside, so this is the list worth checking first. Almost every quiet morning has one of these behind it.

The mandate is paused or was never activated. The Apply Agent page states the status directly; an inactive mandate produces nothing and says so.

The CV used for matching is too short or was never saved. The agent scores every posting against it, so it will not activate without one.

A category is set. Choosing a field excludes postings whose role could not be classified from the title, which is a substantial slice of the board — there is a checkbox to include them, and with job titles set it costs you almost nothing.

A salary floor is set. Only postings that state their pay can clear a floor, and most postings do not state it, so a floor is a much narrower filter than it looks.

A posting-age limit is set. It applies to the date the employer states, and postings published without a date fall outside it, because we do not guess an age.

Everything it found needs an answer you have not given. Filling in notice period, work authorisation, salary expectation and postcode once turns a large share of refusals into sent applications — a measured dry run went from five blockers to one on the same form purely by completing the profile.

What you get each morning

A shortlist on the Apply Agent page, and an email if you want one — sent only when there is something new, never an empty list. Each pick shows its reasons and which of your saved searches found it.

Keep a pick and it enters your application tracker, where the rest of the account already works from: the tailored CV, the drafted answers, the cover note, and afterwards the interview date. Dismiss it and it goes away. Unactioned picks expire on their own rather than piling up.

Once an application is in the tracker you get something no other job site can tell you: what actually happened to that exact posting. We record the day it came down from the employer's own careers feed, so after an interview the tracker can say whether the ad was withdrawn and has stayed down, or whether the same role has gone back up. That is a fact about the posting, not a verdict on you — but it is the only observable signal in the silence after an interview.

Common questions