// FIELD NOTES
Practical writing on job-search automation, ATS scoring, and the workflows that actually land interviews.
· 6 min
The two job searches look the same on paper and feel completely different in practice. The differences in pace, framing, and follow-through are the kind of thing nobody tells you until you're in the chair.
Read note →
· 5 min
The negotiation step that decides 80% of the outcome happens before any haggling: getting the offer in writing. After that, four moves and one don't-ever.
Read note →
· 6 min
Career advice defaults to 'always negotiate, always take the higher offer.' Sometimes the math says otherwise. Five real situations where the lower-paying offer is the right call, and the framework to tell.
Read note →
· 6 min
A compressed daily session that ships 20 quality applications without burning the rest of your day. Time-boxed, ritualised, and built to survive a search that runs longer than you wanted.
Read note →
· 5 min
Easy Apply makes you feel productive. The numbers say it lands less than half the response rate of any other channel. Here's why, and when to use it anyway.
Read note →
· 5 min
LLMs will happily turn your résumé into something that's almost-true. Five rules for staying on the right side of the line, and the recruiter signals that catch the people who don't.
Read note →
· 6 min
Two months into a search, no offers, maybe a few first-rounds. The instinct is to apply harder. The right move is to stop and audit. A short triage guide for the week-eight slump.
Read note →
· 6 min
The ATS gives the recruiter a match score per candidate. The recruiter overrides it about 40% of the time. What changes their mind, what doesn't, and why a 92% score isn't always better than an 80% with a good cover line.
Read note →
· 6 min
Half the time the ATS is a black hole. Cold outreach is the side door — but most people do it wrong. A short guide to the message that gets opened, the timing that works, and the targets worth your time.
Read note →
· 7 min
Three ATSes that look similar from the outside, three different engineering shapes underneath. Notes from writing autofillers against all three on what makes them easy, hard, and intermittently broken.
Read note →
· 5 min
Rejection emails contain more signal than people give them credit for. The phrasing tells you where in the funnel you fell out, which tells you what to fix. Five templates and what each one actually means.
Read note →
· 4 min
Open Applier (openapplier.com) is a Chrome extension that auto-fills job applications. OpenApply (openapply.com) is a school admissions CRM. Same-sounding names, completely unrelated products. Here is the disambiguation.
Read note →
· 8 min
Auto-submit tools promise to fire 500 applications a week while you sleep. The receipts say they're firing them into the trash. Here's what we found when we audited a week of submissions from a popular auto-apply tool.
Read note →
· 14 min
A review-first workflow that beats volume-only auto-apply. Concrete signals that actually matter to ATS matching, the 5 rules of resume tailoring that isn't lying, and a 90-minute daily session that ships 20 quality applications.
Read note →
· 6 min
The salary-expectations field is the most consequential single input on a job application. The default advice — "leave it blank" — is wrong because most modern ATSes won't let you. Here's the box-by-box decision tree.
Read note →
· 5 min
If your cover letter is three paragraphs of generic enthusiasm, it's worse than no cover letter. The data is unforgiving and the fix is simple: two sentences, one specific reason, no salutation gymnastics.
Read note →
· 7 min
Recruiters spend six seconds on each résumé that survives the ATS. We instrumented twenty of them with a heatmap and watched. Here's what they actually look at, and what your résumé needs in those six seconds.
Read note →
· 9 min
Workday looks like a form. It is not a form. It's a state machine that loads field definitions per tenant, with eight quirky widget types that break naive autofillers. Notes from a year of writing the resolver.
Read note →
· 6 min
Most job-search tools meter you. We picked a flat $5/month with no caps because the alternative — telling a job seeker they're out of credits in week three — is the worst time to charge twice.
Read note →