Job Search

Bringing the application kit to the real form

The app keeps a person’s CV, contact details, portfolio links and reusable answers close to where they’re needed. Apply opens the employer’s own page inside the app, and an Assist panel reads the fields it can identify and offers to fill matching answers. Individual answers can be inserted or copied when a form needs more care, and people can create their own custom fields for form questions the starting set doesn’t already cover.

Every employer form is different, so I designed a partial-match workflow with review and manual control, rather than pretending one button can complete every application. The person checks the form and submits it to the employer themselves.

Left Assist on the employer’s own form, drawing on saved answers. Right From a vacancy to the kit: job detail and saved CVs.

Finding roles without building another jobs platform

The first concept relied on search queries and a service to gather results. During development I found that many company job boards publish structured vacancies through public endpoints, so I moved discovery to those direct sources. The app reads supported company boards into a local index and lets people search, filter, save jobs and follow searches. People can add a company by name or board link when it isn’t already included.

Localised: the feed in English, German and Japanese, with Japanese listings, not just a translated interface.

A bundled starting index makes the feed useful on first launch while its sources refresh in the background. I extended the work to boards and job data in other regions, including European employers using Personio and Japanese employers using HRMOS, which went well beyond translating the interface. The index is curated from supported boards, and people can add the companies they care about most.

Left A feed read straight from company boards, and adding a board. Right Search, and saved searches that alert.

Tracking what actually happened

Opening a vacancy or starting its form isn’t the same as applying. When someone leaves an unfinished application, the app asks whether they sent it, plan to return or chose not to apply. That small question keeps the application record useful without guessing at an outcome the app can’t observe.

Opening a form isn’t applying: where the app can’t see what happened, it asks.

A quiet calendar grid shows when applications were sent across the last six months. It offers perspective on a search without turning daily applications into a streak or a competition. Saved roles, application states and search alerts help people return to the opportunities that matter.

What actually happened: an application record and the quiet six-month grid.

Giving the work a visual language

I adapted the warm paper, expressive colour and card language I developed for Soleil to make a demanding task feel more approachable. The bright cards give the app character, while a consistent facts panel keeps location, pay and employment type easy to scan. I gave salary and perks a deliberate hierarchy and carried the colour identity through light and dark appearances. Job Search came together while I was completing a full redesign of Soleil. Because that design language was already mature, the new product went from idea to a working app very quickly, and I refined the two side by side so improvements in one fed into the other. Reuse still had its limits: the job card had to answer this product’s own scanning needs.

Using the app across discovery and tracking, I found a simple fix: a job’s card should keep its colour as it moves into Saved or Applications. People remember a role partly by how its card looks, so a card that changed would leave them wondering whether it was the one they applied to. Keeping it consistent preserves that recognition wherever the job appears.

A job keeps its colour as it moves from Saved into Applications.

Testing assistance against real forms

Many employer systems parse an uploaded CV and pre-fill parts of the application form. In my own applications, that meant some fields were already filled before Assist ran, and Assist didn’t account for it. I changed it to fill only the fields that are still empty, leaving what the employer’s system had entered for the person to check. The design has to respond to the form that’s actually there, including fields it cannot fill.

Privacy and reach

Searches and board data are handled on the device, and personal application records and saved answers sync through the person’s private iCloud account, with stored CVs in iCloud Documents. The app requires no separate account and has no backend of its own. I prepared the interface and App Store presentation for the UK and US, and in German, Spanish, French and Japanese, ready for launch.