legolas.dev

My job hunt runs itself twice a day now

3 min read automation, claude, job-search, macos

Most mornings I find out how my job hunt is going before I'm properly awake. I shuffle to the kitchen, start the coffee, open the laptop, and there's a ranked shortlist in my inbox, each role with a one-page fit report. I didn't lift a finger for it. My Mac did the work at 6am while I was face-down in a pillow.

Last time I walked through the pipeline. This is the bit I promised at the end: how it runs itself twice a day without me hovering over it.

Two runs, weekdays only

I schedule the whole thing as local Claude Desktop tasks. One run early, before I'm functional, and one around 4pm, before I shut the laptop. The morning run scans and scores the overnight postings, so I wake up to coffee and a shortlist instead of 40 open tabs. The afternoon run sweeps up whatever went live during the day and tidies the tracker. Weekdays only. Senior roles don't really get posted on a Sunday, and I'm not reading ghost jobs on my weekend.

I'm hunting senior engineering roles across mobile, AI, backend, and product, so the net is wide: Reddit, Supabase, Qonto, NOWATCH, Lely. The scheduler doesn't care that those are five different archetypes. It reads, scores, and files.

Why it stays on my Mac

The good listings live behind LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed, and all three want a real, logged-in session. My scanner drives my own Chrome over the remote debugging port, 9222, with the cookies I already have. A cloud runner has none of that. It'd trip every bot check on the first request and get my account rate-limited or worse. So the machine that does the scanning is the one on my desk. The scheduler just wakes it up on a timer.

The guardrails

Running a job hunt unattended is a great way to embarrass yourself, so there are rules. It never applies: the agent gets me to an evaluated shortlist and stops, and a human sends every application. It respects rate limits instead of hammering a careers page, because a flagged LinkedIn would undo the whole point. And I audit what it writes: I skim the generated CVs and cover letters before anything goes out. A tailored letter with one wrong company name is worse than no automation at all.

The shortlist it hands me is real, though. Ditto Care and Zalando both turned into actual interviews. My favorite result is still a rejection: I built Voluble on Deepgram and ElevenLabs, name-dropped both as a warm angle in the cover letters, and both said no. Fair enough.

So that's the split. The computer does the grunt work, and I do the judging. Twice a day it hands me the 10 roles worth my attention and quietly bins the 300 that aren't.

Tools