ApplyAll

Before I joined I was freelancing for Tal for awhile, helping out a few hours a week on ApplyAll. After I sold off my two previous indie businesses (Indie Worldwide and Bot Eat Brain) I decided to "get a real job" and Tal let me use ApplyAll service for free for my job-search.

It was shocking how much more candidate friendly the experience was. All I had to do was upload my resume and boom interviews. So. Many. Interviews.

Instead of searching for jobs all day, I sat back while the interview requests poured in for me to choose from. I was booked with a dozen+ back-to-back interviews two weeks out.

The experience as a job-seeker is 1000x better. It worked so good that I decided to turn down all my job interviews and join the team!

You can read more about that decision in this blog post I wrote at the time: https://anthonycastrio.substack.com/p/i-got-12-job-interviews-in-two-weeks

In 2023, Tal was working at Indeed, and learned why the big job platforms maintain the status quo -- and the massive opportunities that creates for startups to empower jobseekers.

Then, like many of you, she was laid off along with 1500 others. (Yes, from a job board. The irony is not lost on us). She had a front row seat to brilliant former coworkers struggling to get even a single interview, despite doing "all the right things." Enough was enough. ApplyAll was born.

In 2017, on a rainy day in San Francisco, Tal decided to mass apply to 400+ tech product manager jobs in a single day.

Though it took like 8 hours, she got more initial phone interviews in one week than she'd ever had before (28!!!) which resulted in 3 job offers.

After trying the same experiment with friends who had different professional backgrounds, it became clear that despite popular advice, the "spray and pray" approach actually can work -- often better and faster than any other approach.