// FIELD NOTES
Practical writing on job-search automation, ATS scoring, and the workflows that actually land interviews.
· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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· 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.
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