Review: ApplyTailor

For those reading to learn about job application tools, this is a quick write up of my take on the product. For those focused on building product sense through the reviews of products, try going through the product yourself and seeing what your experience and read of the product is. Ask yourself:

• Who is their target customer?

• What is the ecosystem they are playing in?

• Who are their competitors?

• What works design wise? .

• What fails?

• How patient can we all be when these products don’t meet most of our needs?

ApplyTailor is a tool to manage your resume, find and apply to jobs.

Summary

I do not like this product because, after ATS filter, the hiring manager will look at a resume, so there needs to be a solution that thinks about both the system and the human consumption of a resume.

TL;DR - I will test this for my clients to learn, but because I can't control how my experiences are listed on my resume, so I can't afford to use it for more senior roles.

For example: I need to be able to put advisory roles on my resume without them sitting at the top of my professional experience. If you believe in customizing your resume, you can't really do it with ApplyTailor.

I think in today's world, I need to find a resume/job application service that allows for more customizations.

If you believe in the ATS treating everything the same, no matter what you do, and you don’t care how the hiring manager sees your experiences, this will work for applications.

The more senior you are or the more you want to present the information in a different order or, if believe the top of your resume with a summary is important, this service will fail you.

Reverse Engineering View.

The following are my guesses based on my experience.

• This is meant to work with ATS pure and simple.

• Outside of the ATS assumption above, they seem to be thinking more from the recruiter’s POV than the candidate's since I can’t control my resume.

• This is meant for junior candidates who don't have any non-standard experience and don’t care as much about control beyond the ATS application.

  • Note: After ATS the hiring manager will look at it, so there needs to be a solution that thinks about both the system and the human.

• In today's world, where most experts advise tailored resumes, this service is inappropriately named because I can't Tailor my resume as there is only one profile.

• They appear to hope you will use this to manage all your applications, which means you need to hope you can find all jobs you need through the platform (there is no way to manually add jobs). Otherwise, your applications can’t be managed, and you will just rely on a spreadsheet.

• My Read: Unless they make some major updates to allow for control soon, they are going to fail because the addressable market that can use their service is small.

Note: ApplyTailor appears to be a re:name of a product after some major work. Don't remember the old experience as all these AI tools blend together but here is my quick walkthrough:

Profile/Resume Setup.

• Didn't pick up my LinkedIn link it simply said "LinkedIn Link"

• Couldn't handle different class of jobs

• Listed everything perfectly chronological according to what it could grab, which required editing of every job entry.

• Got confused and created 2 entries for every one of my jobs, some even with the same title

• Grabbed my bullet points but missed my short description

  • K have a fairly common resume format but it couldn't read it.

• Failed to read the start and end dates because I had no month

  • Only having years is common but not more than 50% so I get this

• Had to click into each bad one to delete it, no way to clean up quickly.

• I can see I will need to do major work, which turned me off.

• I wanted to see the value before I waste my time correcting everything, which means I never had a valid resume and couldn’t really apply. I did intend on applying if it actually could quickly create a viable resume, but it couldn’t parse my resume correctly and so it was too much work given the other weaknesses.

• In some entries it did a better job of grabbing the short descriptor and turning it into a bullet point, but not consistent, as far as I could tell.

Job Postings.

It did recommend me some jobs

• At least most have PM in the title, which is better than most of these services that like to send me to engineering roles.

• There are a mix of titles, most too junior but a healthy mix so I can live with that.

• It lets me filter job roles by level, which I like to speed up the process of searching.

• But there are some inappropriate roles.

• No way to set preferences to improve recommendations.

Application Dashboard.

• Sections for All

• Applying

• interviewing

• offered

• archived

Extra Observations

• I get 10 applications for free.

• Navigation issues: I couldn't figure out how to get back to my resume to edit it until I realized they considered Profile my Resume. I considered my Profile basic account information and was looking for the word resume to navigate back and try to edit things. Just a small note on UX.