Philippines Trip

Site visit to the remote team (with pics)

I just got back from a visit to our remote office in the Philippines where we've trained a team to fill out job applications for American tech workers.

We started the week off by taking the team to a beach resort.

For the past year Tal Flanchraych and I have been systemizing our "done for you" job search service. You’ve probably heard about ApplyAll by now because I won’t shut up about it.

Instead of doing it all with AI, we decided to build our service using a lot of human labor, to make sure every job application is relevant and accurate.

It's a ton of extra work vs a fully AI solution but it means we meet a quality bar that is untouchable by competitors or even doing your job search by yourself.

The island of Bohol is famous for the “Chocolate Hills” a natural formation caused by symmetrical wind-patterns eroding the ancient limestone landscape.

We are better at finding you a job than you are (in many cases).

(This is why we can make a money-back guarantee: if you don't get at least one relevant job interview from our service, you get your money back.)

We built the team remotely.

The first hire helped us recruit the next ten hires. Once we had four people working in the same town, they suggested we get an office space.

Before we knew it we had an office in the Philippines.

Between the tropical environment and a dozen heat-generating humans and computers, it takes two A/C’s to keep the office at a nice cool working temperature.

New team members go through an apprenticeship period to learn the ropes of the tech job search.

Then each member gets assigned a particular set of clients to work on and learns their specific job search preferences.

Every job search is human-reviewed.

Since we started doing this, it's been on our bucket list to visit the team in person in the Philippines.

We finally got the timing right and it was more fun than I expected.

Karaoke party circle at the beach resort.

We almost accidentally created one of the best jobs on the island and attracted a really fun and talented group of people to work with us.

Hours are flexible, it's hybrid-remote, the pay is as much as double the national median.

Now that I'm back home in NYC, I'm kind of jealous. It was more fun working in an office together with a team on a mission. It was really satisfying getting to see the team use our internal software and instantly make improvements for them.

What’s on the roadmap for ApplyAll right now:

• Getting off of Bubble (the no-code tool that we started our MVP on) because it’s begun to severely restrict what we can build.

• Making tools that automate the simplest job applications so we can apply to more jobs, faster.

• Adding better, more automated, analytics. The dream here is a dashboard that automatically tracks the status of all of your job applications (applied, interview stage, offer, etc).

Maybe it won’t be another six months until the next post. I’ll probably write about my rooftop garden project next.