TheApply.ai is a new job search tool that focuses on helping job seekers tell their story in order to stand out in today’s tough job market. I caught up with their founders to see how this new tool works and how it got started. Watch…
What’s up, job boarders. So I got a new startup for you today. The Apply AI is a career growth company helping job seekers stand out in a competitive job market. It’s raised more than 1.25 million in funding in the last year. And joining me now to discuss the new startup is Vrijen Attawar, founder and CEO and Logan Currie, founder and COO, and they join me now from Zoom. Hey guys, how are you?
Well. Awesome. Excited unison there. Excellent. I guess Vrijen, let’s start with you. What’s the origin of this website here?
The applied ai, I mean the origin of the website and the company. I think it all happened pretty much within a 24 hour, 24 hour span. Quite literally the day that Chat GPT launched, I was a little bored at work and Logan and my background is in a lot of admissions coaching, a lot of career coaching, and I was just tinkering with the tool and most of the concept as it stands sort of came to me. What we really care about is people getting a great coaching experience and back when we worked together in Singapore, it was something that we tried to do. We wanted to figure out how do we get what’s in our brain as far as knowledge of what it takes to get into college, what it takes to get a good job, how do we get that to people on mass?
And it turned out that that’s really hard with the technology. Back in 2018, the best you could do was an online course, but when Chad GPT launched and we realized it was available commercially, I sort of had this idea about how we could use that technology to deliver that coaching experience. And the essence of that in our opinion is just listening to people asking really good questions, really digging into their stories and understanding where they’re coming from and what they’re thinking, and then transforming that into content that they can use to move their careers or their lives forward. And so that very same day I messaged Logan, I sent her three 4,000 word sort of essay on how we can start this company and what we can do. And I’m eternally grateful that the very same day she said yes. And that’s sort of when we kicked off the company and the concept.
Okay, very cool. And Logan, tell me a success story so far. I know you guys are pretty new, but give me a quick example of how successful you guys help a person.
Sure. I think one of my favorite examples that I often refer to is a job seeker who had been coming back from maternity leave and was kind of reevaluating some of her work experience, trying to figure out what types of roles to go for. And essentially by talking to the AI coach, it’s not trying to tell you necessarily what to do, it’s essentially just reflecting back what it has learned about you. And that’s almost like a smart mirror almost, right? So it’s a moment of self-reflection and kind of metacognition in the sense that you’re thinking about what you’ve done in a new way. And so she messaged us and she was like, I actually in telling, I think she had talked to this AI, maybe told three or four stories and she said, I didn’t realize that I had been doing director level work in my previous roles, but I had been taking on a lot more leadership or I’d been doing management that I didn’t even really reflect on or didn’t really acknowledge to myself.
So it’s a different type of recognition that users are getting from essentially that reflection process and the AI is like, Hey, I learned this about you, would you say it’s accurate? And then they say, actually, yeah, so it’s really confidence inducing. So then she’s now been applying for more director level roles and feels that kind of sense of self-worth and confidence to be able to do so. So it’s essentially this is a brutal job market. It’s very, very difficult to feel confidence in any way, shape or form. So because you get rejection, you’re ghosted all day long. And then those are the types of stories that really make us excited even though we’re early stages that we’re giving people a sense of confidence in their own abilities.
Very cool. How do you guys see AI impacting this job search here? Obviously there are things like helps you create a resume now coaching with it. Where else do you see this going? Give me some foresight there.
I think to be totally candid with you, the feeling that we have is that the impact of ai, especially on the candidate side, which I think is where we sort of do most of our work and feel like we can comment on the most, I think the impact is actually kind of mixed. So if we use the example that you use, generating resumes, generating cover letters, what we often are finding and seeing whether that’s using Chad GPT or using some of the tools that are out there, the actual output that you get is often not that great, is often not that deep, is often just highly generic. I would argue definitely that for a small slice of people, maybe people that don’t speak English that well, maybe people that are fresh out of college and have never made a resume before, it represents a step forward.
So I’m certainly not saying that no one is benefiting from it, but I think for a equally large, if not larger group of people, it sometimes can create the illusion that they’re creating something that’s really great, that’s really fit for purpose. Maybe individuals that don’t have as much experience that the three of us on a call would have as far as looking at resumes or cover letters are concerned and it can be easy to feel that way. This is a billion dollar company, they’ve built Chat GPT, it’s pulling a cover letter out of thin air. It’s really easy to feel like that’s something that’ll get you a job, that it is totally tailoring something to your needs. But we’re often finding, and I think the research in a lot of articles that are coming out or sort of bearing this out is that recruiters are feeling like a lot of the stuff that’s being submitted is really generic.
It’s not really speaking to the candidates in depth in quite the way that it needs to. And that’s something that we’ve been really cognizant of when designing the platform. There’s the reason why the core functionality that we’ve built out isn’t just something that’s trying to spit out a resume bullet. It is trying to understand you first and foremost because at the end of the day this is kind of an informational issue. If you just ask us to give you a resume bullet based off of let’s say the title of the job that you’ve had previously, whatever we come up with is necessarily going to be generic. We kind of need to understand your background in order to come up with something a little bit more detailed. The last thing I’ll say that against something that I would caution your audience against and is I think really important to get out there is this phenomenon of using auto apply tools, which I’m personally really not a big advocate of, right?
It’s something that one does a disservice to everyone because it kind of floods the market, but I think more importantly for that individual candidate using these tools oftentimes paying a lot of money for the privilege of using one of these auto apply tools, they’re not very discerning in terms of the jobs that they put you forward for. Knowing what I know about a lot of how these ais work, they’re often not as accurate as you would think filling out the different workday forms on your behalf or filling out the different portals on your behalf. But most importantly, studies have shown about two thirds of recruiters actually do want a degree of customization or they want to feel like the materials you’re submitting are fit for purpose when it comes to an application. And so sure, you may have submitted 80 applications over the course of a day or two through an auto apply tool, but how many of those are really landing?
How many of those swings are really going to connect because the right materials are being submitted to the right job and in the long run may lead you to actually be more demoralized because now you’re thinking, well, I use this tool to submit a thousand applications and I’m not hearing back the long-term sort of negative effect can actually be a little bit worse. So without being sort of too discouraging, this just some of the things that I wanted to bring up to an audience to be a little bit more wary of the promise of some of ai.
I just saw a story about lazy apply and it just made up stuff on behalf of the seeker, which is not good for anybody and you got to be careful with that. That’s another big, I think that recruiters are going to be with AI and recruiters are going to be just inundated with the resume applications are going to go up with AI because of all these stuff.
I’ll just add two risks as well to it, which is as you very rightly pointed out, the risk of hallucination in the sense that it’s like it is just going to make something up, right? It’s not good at saying no. And so if it doesn’t have that to kind of reference and it’ll be like, cool, yeah, you improved productivity by 40% or whatever. I think we’ve all seen examples of that and that’s a big risk that people are just kind of sending this out with Willy-nilly. And then the other one is primarily around, I think with this increased inundation of recruiters with all these resumes, referrals and warm intros are now going to be, they’re kind of back. They were always there, but it’s now even more important.
There was that good Wall Street Journal article about it’s who again, and it’s essentially that if a recruiter can get a referral or more introduction to a candidate, they’ll probably maybe bypass a lot of, let’s say the hundreds of applicants who all maybe look the same because they’ve used chat GBT to generate the resume. So I think that it’s putting more emphasis on, ironically this new technology is putting more emphasis on the oldest kind of trick in the book, which is networking and it’s who and it’s the social capital that you can and some people have and some people don’t have. So I think that ultimately it’s still people hiring people and so being able to speak about yourself authentically, confidently and cogently is still going to be the best way that you can get ahead.
Okay, so your website here says stand out with a strong story. So I think you’re going after that genericized responses that chat TBT gives you. So what does that actually mean? What do you deliver for the candidate here when you use your tool here? Give me some sense of that.
Sure. So as I alluded to earlier, sort of the core functionality with the apply AI is the ability to have a story. So it is a conversation with our AI career coach. Our AI career coach wants to dig into specific anecdotes from your professional past. So we sort generally phrase it as a time, you solved the problem time, you achieved an objective. We’re working on some ways to give you some more definite prompts, but essentially just the kind of thing that ends up as a resume bullet on your resume. Those are the kind of experiences that you want to talk about. You have a conversation about that experience. What we’re finding is much like the example Logan alluded to earlier in the process of having that conversation, you learn a hell of a lot about yourself, you actually help flesh out that experience, which tends to be quite valuable in the long run because oftentimes those experiences are the ones that you use in an interview conversation.
And at the end of that conversation that tends to last about five to eight minutes, you get a couple of things, you get a bunch of resume bullets that you can use right away if you so choose, you get a sample interview answer. So in that sort of star format, situation, task, action results. And so that’s something that you can leverage in the future and you also get a breakdown of the skills that you exhibited both the hard skills and the soft skills and that tends to be quite valuable as well if you’d like to include in your resume. The key thing is as you build up more and more stories, there’s another dimension of our product which are these action workflows and these can range from anything from write a cover letter to send a networking outreach message, send a thank you message. There’s about two dozen of ’em and all of these workflows are fueled by the stories you’ve written. And so that’s how we sort of ensure that there’s a really high degree of personalization to everything that we generate for you. If you compare that to what the average person does with a chat GPT, they’ll paste in their resume. Maybe they’ll paste in a previous cover letter, but that’s actually a really small slice of information even compared to just one conversation with our ai. And so that’s how we’re able to generate much better outcomes for people and much better content.
Gotcha. So here’s a look at the discovery chat I guess here. Just describe what I’m looking at here maybe.
Yeah, absolutely. So that discovery chat over there, you’ll see the AI sort of asking very specific questions. The AI is given sort of general principles for what to dig into and the kind of information that it wants to get out of you. Everything that we’ve developed is based on sort a proprietary layer of prompting based on the expertise that Logan and I bring as career coaches. And so there’s no specific ask this, ask that involved, and while at the same time being able to take advantage of the best of chat GPT-4 and it’s sort of based off of that, that we’re able to give you all these sort of high quality results.
So if you go a little bit lower, another thing that you’re able to do is as you sort of go through the onboarding, it gives you a pretty sort of simple career game plan, which kind of gives you guidance on how to spend your time, how to break down the time that you’re going to be spending on app in terms of how much time you should be spending, networking, how much time you should be spending applying. And we have actions, those workflows I was mentioning earlier in all of these different categories. And so here are those workflows that I was mentioning. You can generate LinkedIn posts, you can tailor your resume bullets to a particular job description. You can get practice talking about your impact in a particular job. And so there’s just a variety of things that you can do all leveraging the stuff that you’ve shared through those stories.
Very cool. Now there’s no jobs in here, it’s just a way to do career advice here, is that correct?
That’s right, yeah. We are hoping in the farther down the road to have jobs on platform as well as another way of taking advantage of those stories. Face it, that would be a pretty cool way to sort of match you up against a job is to be able to compare you to the actual stories that you’ve shared, be a much deeper way of making connection than a resume. But that’s something that’s going to come a little bit later.
Gotcha. And let’s talk about pricing here. Now, what’s interesting, one of the trends I’ve seen lately guys, is that in the past, in the early two thousands, tens job seekers didn’t really like to pay for much, but that’s changing now with tools like this. Talk about that aspect of it. I think Gen Z is much more willing to pay for a tool like this versus an older job seeker out there. And to me that’s a great trend because I think it’s their revenue model for job boards out there in marketplaces, things like that. But talk about the pricing here and what it offers,
Right, absolutely. I mean I think from a pricing standpoint, the reality is that we have a pricing up on the platform, but the platform itself is still functionally free right now. So we haven’t actually activated the pricing yet and it’s something that we invite people to take full advantage of. This represents what the pricing will most likely be. There’s two tiers. There’s the actual individual tier that will let you use the app in an unlimited way. So as many stories as you’d like to share, as many actions as you would like to undertake, the ability to share a story will always be free, something that benefits us, the fact that you’re kind of filling up the reservoir of the platform. And it’s also something that we just as career coaches care very deeply about that people always have someone to listen to their stories and give them that basic amount of insight and feedback.
And then that functionality for career coaches, which again is sort in the process of being built out is more so to give career coaches the opportunity to automate certain aspects of what they do. So a lot of what we’ve built a tool on are those discovery conversations that a career coach would do with their clientele. So essentially this would be charging them to have a backend where they could take on more clients and have those clients do some of those more sort of simple, straightforward discovery calls through our product and then work with their clients on some of the more complex and high level tasks and it benefits the client as well because now all of a sudden you aren’t spending as many hours with your very expensive career coach and you can dig into the really intensive high value stuff right away. Anything to add to that?
No, I just say another reason that we really are committed to having stories, sharing stories is because human recall is quite imperfect. So people don’t remember what they’ve done right now. A big problem with many people, we talked to job seekers and even recruiters, they’re like, oh, you did this thing and you didn’t even bring it up in a first conversation or whatever. People don’t remember, you’re just doing your job, right? You’re getting your paycheck. Cool, cool, cool. I did a project and then it’s in the rear view mirror. People are essentially realistically updating their resume on a Word doc, maybe 18 months maybe you tweak your LinkedIn, but it’s not saving any of that information for you. There’s no track changes or version history on any of this stuff. So people are really in some ways, leaving a lot on the floor in terms of trying to make sure that you’re putting this information somewhere safe, somewhere dynamic somewhere that’s kind of helping you have that as a dynamic database.
So our ideal vision in the future is essentially to be that kind of career companion for people that maybe every payday you kind of tell a story about what you’ve been up to recently and then that’s a much better and more helpful way of protecting your professional ip, which is what it is. That’s what makes you marketable is your skills and your stories and what you’ve accomplished in your job. That’s something that often gets left behind. I think that’s another big part of what our vision is in the long run, is to kind of be that professional repository for you and your stories that make up what you’re good at in your career.
Yeah, it looks like you’re going to offer it to career services too, from university standpoint. Yeah,
We’ve got one or two pilot programs coming up. I think that it’s a natural, just as was saying, that kind of discovery conversation. A lot of times what happens in a career services situation is you come in and you’re like, here’s my resume. And then you have to kind of do this whole backtrack, okay, okay, cool, tell me a little bit more about this. You kind of extrapolate a lot of that information and then you go back and you say, alright, you need to work on this, you need to work on that. And you’re trying to contextualize what that academic experience is and link it to job market opportunities. But realistically, a lot of career services counselors haven’t really necessarily worked in those industries either. So it is trying to help bring in a little bit of that job market tips or strategies to career services in a scalable way, but also keep the human in the loop. They’re still going to be people involved in this process, but you can kind of use AI and use this new technology to ensure that you’re getting the best and most robust set of information that you can about each person before you go into those in-person conversations.
Very cool. What’s the plan to market this thing? Obviously attracting seekers today is something that job boards do a lot, but it’s going to take some funds as well. You’re prepared to start more of a consumer type of advertising for this product.
Yeah, I mean we’re ramping up. I think we’ve been in kind of beta beta testing version mode for a while now in a positive way. We’ve been talking to job seekers all day long, so if nothing else, we’ve got a really good sense of the problem space and the reality on the ground and it’s really frustrating for everybody. I think that that’s the moral of the story. We talked to recruiters as well and they’re like, listen, I’m swamped. I don’t know how to run through all these people. It’s really frustrating on both sides. So I think that that’s something that we can all probably agree on and that AI is essentially just thrown this giant rock into a pool that was already a little bit imperfect. So as far as how we’re going about it, we’re working with different cohorts. As we said, we’ve got some kind of campus ambassadors to go towards more early career professionals.
We definitely see this product as being quite useful for career changers because storytelling is such a huge part of that in terms of, okay, I want to do a pivot. How do I frame that? How do I tell that story? Or if you’re trying to go for different types of roles, for better or for worse with knowledge work, it’s really changing with AI too. It’s not just the job game. The actual skills that you need for a particular type of role are also shifting quite dramatically and quite quickly. So we see this as a play for something, not a play, but it’s going to be really necessary for every individual to contextualize how you’ve grown in the job, how you are essentially upskilling and upskilling yourself. And you’re probably going to be going for different types of roles in the future too. This is a pretty volatile time period in terms of layoffs, in terms of some jobs getting automated away.
And I think that people are going to be increasingly under pressure to make sure that they’re telling that story in a way that is beneficial to them. And also, I’ll just note as well with younger people, gen Z changes jobs. I think it’s like every 2.2 years. So this is going to become, if you look at those forces kind of intersecting, it’s going to become increasingly necessary for people to do this. So I think we’re still in experimentations phase for sure, in terms of which types of people will be most well-served by the product, but it’s exciting because we know that we’ll be able to help a lot of people,
And I’ve been predicting tools like this, so glad to see you guys have something around it. And the job search still sucks even after 25 years of doing this, but I’m hopeful that tools like this will help to put a dent in that fear and help the job seeker out there. So I wish you guys well stay in touch. Keep us up to updated, keep us updated, and we’ll have you on the show again.
Awesome. Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time, Chris.
Excellent. Check ’em out @ theapply.ai folks.
