Recently, my partner was laid off from work, and has been feeding manual job searches to cause burnout and lack of motivation very quickly. Thus I decided it was time to investigate a small side project that could tailor the experience and make it less draining.
My first idea was AI based auto applications, but most companies have a way to auto reject those now, and it would also cost me a mint.
My next idea was what if instead of cramming pages of jobs into one session, we made them feel approachable on a manageable feed, and reminded the user to check it every so often, thus creating the following benefits:
- You're consistently applying for jobs - resulting in more callbacks.
- You're always looking for new opportunity - given it's right where you already go and not tucked away on another site
- It's intuitive, and comforting. There's as little overwhelm as possible by using condensed information and only serving key points, we can hide the details on another link and make the content easily digestible.
Introducing the product of these concepts: The Seekret.
The Seekret started as a simple CLI script with a simple purpose - hook into an internal SEEK endpoint that I had sniffed from their site, and fetch jobs from it, save them to a database, and post new ones to a webhook.
As you can see, it started relatively simple but accomplished it's goal extremely well - it condenses the jobs into easily digestible info, catches new jobs early on, giving you a chance to snipe them, and keeps you updated with an easy to follow feed.
How could we expand this idea?
Well, we already have the data - what if we made it interactive?
It was time to create a second aspect to The Seekret - a modern Discord bot that could utilize Discord's Interaction endpoints to create an easily actionable system that removed even more friction.
I built the base of my CLI into a bot, and began to add button based interactions to jump straight to applying, dismissing a job to clean your feed, and a Save button that stores that job in a database, and reminds you in a dedicated channel once a day, up to three times - giving you proactive nudges to review opportunities and act on them.
As you can see the UI has been vastly improved - the bot is FAR easier to interact with than the CLI webhook.
This is an example of the reminders - we pull an encouraging message from an array, and gently remind the user about the opportunities that interested them, without being overbearing.
Users are also reminded of the next steps when they save a job - a gentle nudge towards what they should be planning to do if they are low on motivation.
If you would like to look at or deploy this bot yourself, it's fully open source and available here.
Sneethan