How to speed up your job application workflow
Save yourself meaningful time while improving the quality of your job applications.
MK By Max K.The standard workflow
Every professional who’s done it more than once is familiar with the old workflow: You put a query into a job search site. You look through dozens of job postings. You click on the promising ones. Then you spend ten minutes meticulously going over their laundry-list of requirements to only to find out in the last paragraph that you need a PhD in Basket-weaving and ten years of experience in something that’s only been around for six years. “WHy didn’t they lead with that?!” you think. You’ve wasted so much time and mental effort and now you’re annoyed and you have to click down the list to find the next post. Soon you’re agitated. Frustrated. And getting burned-out. You begin skimming. You look for keywords. You’re flipping through several jobs a minute until maybe you’re even a bit surprised when one doesn’t disqualify you immediately. That’s almost worse: Now you have to read the job posting in earnest, click apply, fill out the same information you’ve filled-out countless times before. And somehow compose a cover letter and answers to questions like “What makes you excited to work here?” (It’s a terrible question: The answer is almost always “Because I need a job!”)
A better solution
Save yourself the frustration and the time: InterviewMe’s free job application tools help you conduct your search in a fraction of the time. When you find that promising job post, it’s okay to skim! Just paste the link to the job post in InterviewMe’s job tools interface and the app will be immediately analyze the job’s fit for your specific professional background, point-by-point. It pulls out a list of every requirement in the job description, whether it’s a hard requirement, a soft requirement, or a nice-to-have. And it measures them against your skills and experience. Then it tells you how strong of a fit you are: Whether you should bother applying, where the gaps you need to address in your application are, and it even lets you add more context to your work experience right then and there so it understands you better in the future. Premium users even get a breakdown of what’s most important
It doesn’t end with fit
Assessing your fit for the job is just the first step. While it was telling you where to address gaps in your background, InterviewMe simultaneously generated a cover letter for this role. Edit it in-place, copy-and-paste into the job application’s cover letter field, or download it as a PDF and attach it to your application. Don’t just copy-paste a generic cover letter: Get a cover letter tailored to your background and this specific role. If you think cover letters are optional, think again: 89% of recruiters expect a cover letter, with 87% considering them essential. In one experiment, [a tailored cover letter incresed the response rate to job applications]((https://www.resumego.net/research/cover-letters/) by up to 53%.
The game-changer: Customized Résumés
Don’t just stop with the custom cover letter: InterviewMe will simultaneously customize a version of your résumé for this specific role: It pulls context from all the documents you’ve written and questions you’ve answered to address the specific requirements found in the job description. It places these into a version of your résumé (along with the most impactful experience you have that wasn’t specifically asked-for, but will have the greatest psychological impact on the person reviewing the resume) and bolds the specific phrases that answer the job description’s requirements - drawing the reviewer’s eye to the highlights of why they should consider you for the job. There’s a very good reason for this: 72% of recruiters spend 2 minutes or less on resumes, with 39% spending no omre than a minute. That means you’ve got to make an impact and make it fast. And that’s the exact formula InterviewMe uses to tailor your resume to the role you’re applying for. Every time you add more context around gaps found in the “fit” section of your interviewing tools, InterviewMe permanently learns those facts about you and uses them to generate better résumés in the future. That means the more you use InterviewMe, the better your applications become. One experiment showed an 85% increase in responses from tailored versus untailored résumés. Multiply that by the 53% lift in responses from the tailored cover letters cited above, and you’re looking at potentially getting over 183% more responses. That’s working smarter: not harder. And if your résumés are improving over time as InterviewMe learns more about your professional history, your results may continue to grow beyond that.
Saving time
Nobody has the time to spend ten minutes reading a full job description wall-of-text, another ten minutes writing a custom cover letter, and then 30 minutes tweaking their resume to specifically fit the job they’re applying to. That’s 50 minutes of effort for a single job application. All to have a recruiter blow through that huge amount of effort in under two minutes. Yet recruiters and hiring managers respond to exactly that kind of effort when reviewing applicants: They expect custom-tailored cover letters and résumés. The solution is not to use automated AI application tools to spam hundreds of job postings with poorly-fitting applications. Nor is it to manually apply by only skimming job descriptions and sending out the same generic resume and cover letter to each role with only minor tweaks. The best approach is to apply to highly-targeted roles that you’re specifically interested in, while using AI to streamline the process on both sides: You select the roles. You write the resume and cover letter. AI analyzes the role for you to ensure you’re a good fit. And AI tweaks your written materials to highlight the experience most interesting to the recruiter reviewing the resume. This saves everyone time on all sides, and makes everyone happier without contributing to the “AI doom loop”. InterviewMe takes just 34 seconds to completely analyze a role and generate documents for you. That’s a 98.8% savings in time. Then it’s just up to you to review them and make any changes you like.
In conclusion
InterviewMe’s job search tools are free. So give them a try! If you’re not using tools that help you evaluate your fit for a role and tailor your cover letter and résumé to each specific role you’re applying for you’re leaving both time and money on the table. In today’s competetive job market you can’t afford not to take every advantage you can get, and the time savings alone is well worth the effort to make an account. Even better: InterviewMe doesn’t sign you up for an email marketing list. Does’t have ads. And doesn’t ask you for a credit card to create an account. We just want people to have jobs!