Auto Apply 5000: Automated Job Application Bot for Effortless Job Hunting

[Zap]

I created a bot that can automatically apply to jobs for me while I sleep. I let her rip for about 30 seconds, and she had applied to 10 jobs already. I'm going to just let her go while I sleep tonight and see what happens.

She simply finds jobs with the "Apply with your Indeed Resume" option, and then she just clicks continue until the job is done. If she runs into a surprise question that must be answered before moving on, she takes a screen shot of that, cancels the application process and moves on to the next. I will try to have her answer some common questions once I have a fair amount of screen shots piled up.

She will continue applying for as long as there are results showing up. She moves from the first page to the last until there's nothing left. If need be, I can have her make extra queries or page refreshes to keep her going. Anyway, if anyone is finding the job hunt exhausting, you can automate the process .

(Don't tell Indeed)

Update: It doesn't apply to as many jobs as one might expect. The majority of job posts don't have a quick or easy apply feature, and of those that do, most require responses to additional questions that the bot isn't programmed to answer. However, she was still able to apply to over 100 jobs in about an hour or two.

 

[Zap]

She submitted about 250 job applications before running into a captcha. I don't think there is a good automatic solution for solving the captcha. I can do the captcha manually and then just start the program again. So, I managed to submit 250 job applications in one night while sleeping.

So, with this bot, I can apply to 1,000 jobs per week with zero effort, if I choose.

To make things a little clearer, these are not completely random jobs. She does an Indeed job search with a user specified query, of all jobs posted in the last 14 days. My query was simply "data." This brings up about half a million job posts related to data. The bot then goes and tries to apply to as many as she can. She also keeps a cache of job ids to avoid attempting to apply to the same job twice. I've not even made the slightest dent in this pool of half a million jobs. I could apply to 1,000 jobs per week and never ever reach even a quarter of all the jobs in this pool.

Update: For the skeptics, I already got a phone interview

I'm going to set up a Fiverr and maybe charge people to use my bot.

 

[Office_Shredder]

This bot sounds hilarious, and represents everything wrong with the current way we fill job roles. To be clear, I think you have done nothing wrong (well, maybe violating the TOS of the website) , and applaud your effort. I hope you succeed at monetizing this.

I think there are companies you can pay to solve captchas for you.

 

[Zap]

You can outsource the captcha solving to India, or something like that, but that sounds like kind of an extra pain, an extra expense, and not necessary. I can just solve the captchas myself, when needed, and then resume the program. I could have Python send me an alert or something when the bot crashes. Solving a captcha takes like one minute. Not a big deal.

I checked Fiverr and I don't see this service being offered. There are lots of people offering to apply for jobs for you, but not with a bot. So, they are asking like 120 dollars to apply to 100 jobs, and the wait time is like 6 days.

I got some pretty good feedback today after rocket firing 250 apps last night. Not as much positive feedback as I was expecting, but still I got at least three phone interviews. I haven't read all my emails yet, but I recall three so far.

Not bad.

 

[Locrian]

Nice! If you ever open source the code, I hope you'll message me the link on LinkedIn.

Two thoughts:

1) I don't think there's anything wrong with it the way you're using it (with a small caveat) and I don't think it represents a problem with the job search or hiring process. If it manages to get someone (including you) a phone interview that leads to a job, then everyone won.

2) The caveat is that I think you should NOT bypass the captcha - it represents a clear intent to not allow bots through, and I think you should honor that. Additionally, I'm assuming you're following all rules related to web scraping and/or api usage, or whatever applies to the techniques you're using.

 

[Zap]

I think using the bot for my own personal job hunting is okay but selling the capabilities of the bot to other people and profiting off of it is definitely against Indeed's policy. Although, I'm not really selling Indeed's data, am I? I'll have to read their policy carefully, but I'm pretty sure I'm borderline using the bought privately and most likely breaking their policy by selling use of the bot.

I have to ask people for their email and password to even get the bot started, which is definitely breaking their policies. But, there are a bunch of people on Fiverr already asking for passwords to fill out applications manually. I had spent a few hours trying to come up with a way to not have to ask for people's passwords, but then I thought to myself, if the people already on Fiverr don't have to follow the rules, why should I?

 

[Locrian]

Yea I definitely meant the way you were either using it for you, or letting others use it for them. I wouldn't accept anyone else's personal password, just a recipe for disaster.

 

[Zap]

I have to read through Indeed's terms of service for job seekers and all users to really understand whether I'm breaking them or not. If I can get around not asking people for passwords, I may not be breaking any terms of service, if I am not scraping any data from their site. I am using a bot to simply respond to published job ads. It's not a "web scraper," because I'm not using it to extract data. So, It may be permissible, but I'm not totally sure.

Of course, I'd rather abide by the rules and be a good guy crawler, to avoid any possible issues that may arise, like potentially being sued.

But there's already a bunch of people on Fiverr asking for people's Indeed passwords so they can manually apply for jobs for them. I would be offering the exact same service, except the bot will be doing the applications for me. So, I don't understand what is the difference between me manually clicking Apply Now and a bot clicking Apply Now. Seems like the two are almost indistinguishable.

My idea to get around asking for passwords is to simply ask for the client's email and a copy of their resume. Then, I will set up a new account with the email and fill out the Indeed Resume with the information provided in their resume. This way, passwords do not need to be shared. In the future, if this is successful in any way, I'd like to make a Web UI in which users can simply log into their accounts themselves and have access to the bot, but at this stage I don't want to invest that amount of effort.

 

[Zap]

So, in the terms of service it says

Unless you have been specifically permitted to do so in a separate, written agreement with Indeed, you agree that you will not crawl, scrape, reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Site for any purpose.

This text file is supposed to tell me what the restrictions are for robots, but I've no idea what any of it means.
https://www.indeed.com/robots.txt
And then there are websites like this.
https://towardsdatascience.com/web-scraping-job-postings-from-indeed-com-using-selenium-5ae58d155daf
So, I'm kind of confused. Can anyone guess what the potential ramifications of crawling indeed are and trying to profit off of doing so? Scraping indeed seems to be a fairly common thing to do. There are multiple "data science" tutorials online explaining how. I don't see anyone selling this service, though.
So, after viewing about 20 YouTube videos of people web scraping Indeed, I'm back to thinking if they don't have to follow the rules, why do I?

 

[Locrian]

That robot.txt file is telling you all the directories you can't crawl. You need to feed that to your crawler and ensure it doesn't go there.

People have been sued by companies for crawling their sites without permission.

 

[CrysPhys]

So, after viewing about 20 YouTube videos of people web scraping Indeed, I'm back to thinking if they don't have to follow the rules, why do I?

A truly, truly, truly lame argument. Besides, Indeed can simply single you out to make an example out of you. That's what happened when the RIAA got fed up with copyright infringement and targetted a 12 yr old girl, among others. Made big headlines at the time and sent a strong message to other would-be violators. See, e.g.: https://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/09/music.swap.settlement/

 

[Zap]

Buzz kill.

It's such a great tool that could be used to help people.

I know that it's against Google's terms to web scrape it's search engine. However, you can web scrape their search engine, and there aren't really any repercussions. They will simply attempt to flag you as a bot and then ban you from accessing their engine. But you can just disguise the bot as a human being and get away with it. If you just make sure the bot is not making an insane amount of queries per second, which is not humanly possible, it won't be flagged as a bot, and it can continue scraping and no one would ever know it is a bot.

 

[Office_Shredder]

Zap, I don't think what you're doing is crawling. The tos you quoted are intended to stop someone from cataloging the contents of the website and using it to make money by pretending the job listings originated at their website instead, not to stop you from applying to stuff on their site.

Maybe you should never let a bot access any of the pages in the disallow section, but I don't think they are intentionally banning your activity, at least in the part you posted.

To be clear though, I am not a lawyer and do not actually know the legal ramifications of anything.

 

[Zap]

In any case, it would be a good idea not to mention what job site I'm using to anyone.

 

[berkeman]

Whelp, this thread has gone on long enough, IMO. It's closed now. For anyone who is interested, you can follow this link:

https://support.indeed.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040122551-How-to-Report-A-Conversation-to-Indeed