Oct 14, 2024
Introducing Plump

Job search has become increasingly complex for candidates, according to recent studies:

  • Job seekers are spending an average of 247 days (8 month) to find employment
  • Average candidates submit 294 applications before receiving a job offer
  • There's been a 31% increase in job applications, with approximately 173 million submitted in the first half of the year. Job openings have only increased by 7%, meaning more applicants are competing for relatively few positions
  • The applicant-to-interview conversion rate has dropped to 8.4%, a 34% decline from five years ago, making it even harder for candidates to secure interviews amid a crowded field

What's going on?

Problems we solve

Companies have upgraded their hiring processes with advanced ATS and AI recruiters, while the tools available to job seekers haven't evolved much since platforms like Indeed were founded. Existing solutions offer minor tweaks, but nobody innovates.

There are tons of remote-only job boards that live only because the Remote filter in LinkedIn is broken. There are dozens of fire-n-forgetAI application bots that exist only because all the job boards are flooded with expired listings and nobody responds.

The future of work market is extremely competitive; there are hundreds of "candidate-oriented" job boards out there.

– one VC told me earlier this year.

While there isn't a single job board that normalizes job locations or cares about work permits. 75% of all companies struggle to fill positions. Candidates are paying $300 to recruiters to format their CVs correctly so the ATS can eat them. And each CV that includes the word "Furthermore, " or merely mentions an attached cover letter, seems to recruiters like AI-generated bullshit.

Does it look like a candidate-oriented, extremely competitive world?

With each step forward employers hiring tools take, the candidates’ suite moves backward. This is the fight between B2B and B2C products, where the latter is drastically losing.

What we actually do

Plump is being built with the idea of consolidation in mind. Our mission is to reimagine candidates’ job search tooling and show companies that AI can be beneficial for both hiring sides, starting the search redesign with job opening content and recommendation matching.

Job content has historically been cluttered; each company uses different styles and formats, and that is why it's hard to navigate through thousands of jobs. Plump breaks down job openings into atoms using our own fine-tuned LLM, so every detail in each application matters.

The anatomy of job listings

Regular job listing:

Consists of raw job content and salary, sometimes location

Plump-made, aggregated job:

Consists of overall description, technical requirements, normalized locations, salary, equity, bonuses and benefits, qualifications, education and legal requirements. All fields are indexable and searchable by.

Aggregated job content makes it possible to introduce an unparalleled level of job matching accuracy. A candidate needs a visa to work within the US – we know it. A company is looking for Central Time Zone candidates only – we support this request out of the box.

That is also one of the reasons why spammy LinkedIn auto-appliers can't compete with Plump at this stage; the search ecosystem they're operating in is too weak.

Having that, we created an auto-application feature that operates without requiring candidates’ attention. Candidates are interested in 95% of the jobs we apply for on their behalf, making the small 5% sacrifice worthwhile for saving valuable time. Companies also benefit by receiving instant rejection notifications if a candidate rejects an application, so no time is wasted on both ends.

Plump is also experimenting with automatic initial communication now to finally bury the dummy ping-pong style chats:

26 September

What are your salary expectations?

120,000$ annually.
Is it a Worldwide position or the US only?
27 September

120,000$ gross or net?

US only, but we provide visa sponsorship and relocation assistance. Are you interested?

1 October
Sorry, I'm looking for a fully remote positions only.

Every second conversation an average candidate has

Plump agent owns a comprehensive information piece about the candidate and the job opening, it responds instantly, keep the list of communication goals to achieve, and doesn't let to be manipulated.

The following conversation is a real chat of one of our customers:

26 September
I'm Plump AI, Taylor's hiring communication agent. I'm chatting with you to close pre-interview position details, I respond instantly and can call actual Taylor to clarify things if needed.

Taylor needs more information that wasn’t clear from the job description:
– Is this position worldwide or US only?

And feel free to ask any questions you have about my client preferences; if I don’t have an answer, I’ll consult with Taylor and get back to you.

Get it. This is a US-only position, but we provide visa sponsorship and relocation assistance. Are you interested?

Taylor is not willing to relocate this year, but we would love to drop you a message back if Taylor changes his mind. How about we keep in touch?

Sure, drop me a line if anything changes.

Same sense, took a few minutes to resolve, and candidate didn't expose the salary expectations too early.

We understand that this feature requires a huge cognitive leap for recruiters to actually trust the AI on the other end. Though we're betting that one day hiring managers will get that they're the ones who benefit the most, and would want to solve initial hiring questions with AI rather than humans from that point on.

The future is free

Despite the fact Plump is literally living on subscribers' money, we believe the future of job searching should be free.

Plump's smart recommendation system, application tracker, and informational AI systems are available for every signed-in user for free. Paid user recommendations aren't different from a free user's job list. The only detail that differs is that free users take their time to submit an application, while paid users value their application time more than the subscription price.

Plump team is building the most advanced resume-writing copilot that will be available without any subscription. We strongly believe that everyone should have strong CVs, and the only thing that matters is content, not format or style. PDFs will become obsolete in the future, but for now, we'll generate best-in-class resumes for our users without any payments.

Join us

The product we have now wouldn't be possible without constant feedback from real in-field candidates. We've already conducted a dozen user interviews to understand your pains and exchange ideas, and we'd love to meet many more.

Sign up for the early version of Plump, join our Discord channel, and tell us what you think.

The future of job searching lies in instant matching and information exchange between recruiters’ and candidates’ AI — it's inevitable, and we want to make it right

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