The Job Market is a Dumpster Fire

Dumpster Fire mascot, a smiling flaming dumpster giving two thumbs up

Product · Brand · Engineering

Dumpster Fire

A job-search operating system for people who are done feeding the machine.

What I did: Everything. Product, design, brand, and engineering. A solo build.

The job market is a dumpster fire. You fire your résumé into an ATS, it vanishes, and the one AI everyone is using writes the same cover letter for the same job. So I built the opposite: a tool that finds the few roles worth your time, digs up the actual human behind each one, and helps you write to them in a voice that sounds like you and nobody else.

On the surface it is three simple steps: scan, find, reach out. Underneath, each one is doing a lot of quiet work. That gap, between how simple it feels and how much is actually happening, is the whole project.

It reads the whole market so you don’t have to

Running a scan pulls live roles from across job boards and company career pages, then scores every one against your profile. You do not get a wall of five hundred listings. You get the short list actually worth a look, with the noise already thrown out.

Scan complete screen showing 52 roles read and 11 worth a look, with a View matches button
A scan finishing: fifty-two roles read, eleven worth a look.

A fit score that shows its work

Every match explains itself: what lines up, what is a stretch, where the salary and location land. Even the odd, off-angle roles surface with a reason attached, because a spectrum beats a hard filter. You make the call, with the evidence right in front of you.

Best matches list with a role scored 84 out of 100, responsibilities and required experience annotated, and Save, Skip, Pursue actions
Each role is scored and annotated, the strong matches and the weird ones alike.

The hard part nobody sees: finding a real human

This is where most of the engineering went. For every role, the tool rebuilds the likely reporting chain: the hiring manager who owns the function, the recruiter running the search, the leader above them. It searches and verifies each one as its own separate lane, scores how confident it is, and says plainly who is confirmed and who is still just a lead. Making that work for any person, any industry, and any company, without ever turning one lucky example into a hard-coded rule, was the entire challenge.

Human Path contacts step showing a verified hiring manager at 82 percent confidence and a recruiter still to confirm at 64 percent
The reporting chain, rebuilt and verified per role: a confirmed hiring manager, a recruiter still to check.

Written from your résumé, your answers, and your voice

The outreach draft is built from three things at once: what is on your résumé, the answers you gave during onboarding, and the tone you asked for. It points at the specific work that overlaps with the role, keeps it short, and never once opens with “I hope this email finds you well.” It reads like a note you would actually send.

Message generation screen with an outreach draft written for a named hiring manager, referencing the applicant's design-systems work, with Copy and Regenerate
One draft, grounded in the role and your own history.

Why voice is the whole point now

When everyone is holding the same model, the only edge left is sounding like a specific person. So the tool asks how you want to come across, punchy, blunt, no fluff, and what to steer clear of, corporate jargon and biz-formal filler, then it holds that line in every message it writes. Personality stopped being a nice-to-have. In this market it is the differentiator.

How should you sound screen with selectable tone chips like punchy, no-fluff and specific, and steer-clear chips like corporate jargon
You set the voice once. Every message keeps it.

Making it feel simple was the hard part

Each of those screens is one tap for the person job-hunting and a stack of moving parts underneath: live scans, contact verification with confidence scoring, generation grounded in three separate sources, and guardrails that keep a message from ever sounding like a press release. The work was hiding all of it, so that someone in the worst stretch of a job search just sees the calm version. Here is a good role. Here is the human to talk to. Here is a message that sounds like you.


Stop applying.
Start pursuing.

Dumpster Fire is designed and built end to end by me.

AIRandall Fransen