The current job market, particularly in the tech industry, has become very challenging and demanding. In this competitive environment, effective use of one’s time is extremely important. This led me to develop SpeedyApply, a job application autofill Chrome extension designed to streamline the job application process.
With a surplus of talent and a relative scarcity of opportunities, landing a new job has been increasingly difficult as a software engineer. This is especially true for junior roles, where recent layoffs and reduced company spending has grown competition. Most would agree that their time is better spent preparing for the daunting coding interviews rather than navigating the repetitive and time-consuming process of job applications. However, finding a balance between applying to jobs and prepping for interviews can be challenging when you need to get your resume out there to get an interview in the first place.
As a computer science student, my journey echoed these challenges. Leading up to my graduation, I’ve been in pursuit of software engineering internships, and more recently, I began searching for new graduate positions. In my experience, I would somehow spend up to an hour just applying to 10 positions even though I was just adding the same information for each application. It became hard to justify mass applying to jobs when I would rather spend time practicing for coding interviews.
Earlier this year, I was exploring project ideas to grow on my developer skills, and I wanted to build something that I would actually use. Given that finding a job was my current headache, I decided to work on a tool that not only automated the application process but also kept track of my completed applications.
While working on this project, I realized that other people might benefit from it, so I decided to create SpeedyApply and publish it on the Chrome Web Store. SpeedyApply is a Chrome extension that can fill out job application forms on the most popular career portal sites including Workday, ICIMS, Greenhouse, and Lever which encompasses over 400,000 job postings. In addition, SpeedyApply keeps a record of all completed applications which allows for tracking progress over time.
I encourage this Chrome extension to anyone looking to maximize their job application count while minimizing their time applying. To see SpeedyApply in action, click here to watch a demo. To read more about how I made SpeedyApply from a technical perspective, click here.
