Paying someone to apply to jobs for you

The four ways to hand it off

Auto-apply software is the cheapest, at roughly $99 to $999 a year. It fills in forms in bulk and nobody reads the postings.

A freelancer or virtual assistant will apply wherever you point them, usually by the hour. That saves the typing, but you still choose the jobs and you still tailor the resume, which are the two parts that take the time.

Volume services promise hundreds of applications a month. Software usually finds the jobs; a person may check them or click submit.

A reverse recruiter is a person who chooses the roles, rewrites your resume for each one and files the application. It is the only option that takes all of the work off you, and it sends far fewer applications because of it.

The math per application

Here it is $199 a month for 5 applications a week, roughly 22 a month, so about $9 each. A full-service firm at $3,000 a month, aiming at five to ten roles a week, works out around $75 to $150 an application. Software costs pennies an application, because nobody's hours are involved.

Price per application is the wrong number to minimize, though. The number that matters is interviews per application, and that is mostly decided by two things software is bad at: whether the role is a real fit, and whether the resume reads like it was written for that posting.

What the $9 pays for

A person reading the posting and deciding it is worth your name, with the reason written down. A note on where you fall short of what it asks for, so nothing in the application overstates you. Your resume rewritten for that posting. The form filled in and filed in your name. A receipt with the portal and the confirmation number.

And 24 hours to stop any of it. Every role is emailed to you first, and if you say nothing it goes out, so the search keeps moving in the weeks you are too busy to look.

When to keep doing it yourself

If you only want a handful of specific companies, apply yourself. Nobody will care about those applications as much as you do. If you are sending applications and getting no interviews, paying for more of them will not fix it; fix the resume or the target first.

Paying someone makes sense when you know what you want, the applications are the bottleneck, and the bottleneck is your evenings. If you would rather keep applying yourself, just faster, the Resume Tailor builder rewrites your resume for a specific posting in a few minutes.