22d • DIY Automators
“AI Apply” to 10 Jobs in 30 Minutes (Part 1)
Let’s be honest: the default job hunt turns smart people into ticket-writers. It feels like a hamster wheel, and depending your CV-to-market fit, it might be.
You sit there feeding the machine: copy-paste your resume, tweak the same cover letter for the 43rd time, fill in the same “What excites you about this role?” box until your brain is soup. Two hours disappear and you’ve applied to… maybe three roles.
And worse? You have no real system. Just tabs, vibes, and a vague hope that “something hits.”
What I want you to do is flip that.
Instead of being the cog, you treat the job hunt itself as your first live automation project. A citizen-developer project. A workforce-readiness asset. Recognize that by not doing this, you leave it to your competitors to do so.
You’re not just “looking for a job.”
You’re building a Job Search Agent that works with you (Template below)
Step 1: Build a Job Search Recipe (So You Stop Spraying and Praying)
Most people start with “Indeed… search… scroll.”
You’re going to start with a recipe:
Role keywords: e.g., “junior data analyst,” “coordinator,” “implementation specialist,” “Salesforce admin,” “learning designer.”
Locations: remote, hybrid, specific cities, visa-friendly locations if that matters for you.
Salary ranges: your realistic floor + your stretch.
Filters: visa sponsorship, early-career roles, specific tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Figma, Python, n8n, etc.).
Nothing fancy yet. This can literally live in a Google Doc or Notion page called:
Job Search Recipe – v1
The point: you’re telling your future agent exactly what “good” looks like. You’re thinking like a system designer, not a desperate applicant. If you're struggling with creating this, feed your CV into GPT and ask it to.
Step 2: Build a Simple Tracker (Your Pipeline, Not Just “Applied”)
If your job search lives in your inbox, you’ve already lost.
Make a very dumb, very powerful tracker. Sheet, Notion, Airtable – doesn’t matter. Columns like:
Job title
Company
Link
Board/source (e.g. company site, niche board, gov site)
Status (to review / applied / interview / ghosted / rejected / on hold)
Date added
Date applied
Next step (follow-up, LinkedIn message, portfolio send, etc.)
Contact person (if any)
AI-drafted cover text / outreach line
This is your personal ATS. Takes >15 minutes to setup.
At first, yes, you can fill this manually. The key is: every role in play lives here. No more “what was that interesting role I saw last week…?”
You’re building a pipeline, not just lobbing CVs into the void.
Step 3: Turn It Into a Job Search Agent
Now we add the “AI” part.
Conceptually, your Job Search Agent does a few key things for you:
- Scrapes roles from selected boards
You give it 2–3 job boards to start with (and ideally some niche ones, not just LinkedIn).
The agent searches using your recipe (keywords, locations, filters).
2. It pulls back roles that look like a match, fills your tracker
3. For each promising role, it adds a row: title, company, link, maybe even salary if visible.
4. It can add a quick “why this matches your recipe” note so you can sanity-check.
5. Drafts tailored outreach and cover text
It scans the job description.
It writes a short, skimmable outreach line for LinkedIn or email.
It drafts a cover paragraph you can paste into those awful portals and lightly edit in your voice.
Your job becomes: review, tweak, approve, send.
Not “keep re-typing the same paragraphs from scratch.”
You’re still the decision-maker. The agent does the grunt work.
Step 4: The Daily Habit – 10 Mini-Applications in 30–45 Minutes
Here’s the behavior change:
You sit down once per day.
Your agent has already queued up fresh roles into your tracker.
You work through a batch of ~10 in 30–45 minutes:
Skim the role.
Decide: Yes/No.
For “Yes”: polish the AI-drafted line / cover, send, and mark “Applied.”
Update “Next step” (e.g., “Follow up in 5 days,” “Connect with hiring manager on LinkedIn”).
Instead of “I spent 2–3 hours and maybe applied to 3 roles,”
you get “I spent 30–45 minutes and put 10 high-match applications into the world.”
That’s a completely different velocity.
And emotionally? You’re no longer measuring your worth by “Did this one company like me?”
You’re measuring: Am I running my system today, yes or no?
How This Makes You Workforce-Ready (Not Just “Job-Hungry”)
Here’s the real unlock.
When you build a Job Search Agent like this, you are quietly training three muscles employers actually pay for:
- Process thinking
You can explain, step-by-step, how “cold internet chaos → structured pipeline → consistent output” works.
2. Tool fluency
You’ve wired together a browser agent, an AI model, and a tracker. Even if it’s scrappy, you’ve shipped something that does real work.
3. Owner mindset
You didn’t wait for a “platform” to save you. You designed your own little digital co-worker.
That’s why I keep saying:
Turn professionals into problem-solvers, not ticket-writers.
Most candidates show up to interviews with a pretty CV and some talking points.
You can show up and say:
“I built an agent that scrapes roles, fills my pipeline, and drafts tailored outreach so I can keep 50–100 applications live at any given time without burning out.”
You’ve instantly reframed yourself from “another applicant” to
“the person who builds systems around their own problems.”
Recruitment Pillar Preview: This Flips for the Other Side Too
Tiny spoiler from the next pillar:
Everything you’re automating for yourself here can be flipped to help a recruiter manage 300 applicants without drowning.
Same idea: scrape → track → tag → follow-up.
Same idea: AI drafts polite replies instead of ghosting.
Same idea: a clear pipeline instead of inbox chaos.
So your Job Search Agent isn’t just a “hack.”
It’s your first citizen-dev project that can turn into a portfolio piece, a freelance offer, or even a full-time “operations + AI” role later.
This translates into any sales operation as an extra arm that you did not have previously.
The Outcome Story (Steal This If It’s You)
Picture an international student in a new country.
They’re juggling classes, part-time work, and visa stress. They don’t have the luxury of wasting 3 hours/night doom-scrolling job boards.
They set up:
A clear job search recipe.
A tracker that always shows 50–100 roles in play.
A browser + AI agent that handles the searching, logging, and first-draft writing.
Their daily job hunt window: 30–45 focused minutes.
They’re not perfect. Some days they do 6 applications instead of 10. Sometimes the agent pulls junk and they tweak the filters.
But over a month?
200+ targeted applications.
A living proof-of-work system they can demo.
A story that screams: “I don’t just follow instructions – I build the machine.”
That’s what I want for you.
If you takeaway one thing:
Stop treating your job search like a form you’re filling out.
Treat it like the first automation project in your career.
The job might be the short-term win.
The Job Search Agent you build?
That’s the asset that keeps paying you back.
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designed an incredibly useful n8n DIY template for doing this exact approach with LinkedIn and Apollo. His video and template is attached, highly recommend checking out his work on this exact topic. More on his work
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“AI Apply” to 10 Jobs in 30 Minutes (Part 1)
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