I built a free Chrome extension to stop retyping the same job application 50 times

Vimal Kumar Jain — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 10:28:04 +0000

A few months ago I was job hunting and doing the math on how much time I was burning: same work history, same dates, same bullet points, typed into a slightly different form on every ATS. LinkedIn Easy Apply, Greenhouse, Lever, Workday — all asking for the same 20 fields with different labels.

So I built ApplyCandid, a free Chrome extension that:

Scores how well your resume actually matches a job posting before you spend time applying
Tailors your resume with AI for a specific listing
Autofills the application form itself — text fields, dropdowns, even the screening questions — across LinkedIn, Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, and most major ATS platforms

It's free, no signup wall to try it on your first few applications.

Some things I learned building the autofill part that might be useful if you're working on anything similar:

ATS forms are not standardized at all. Two "Years of experience" fields on two different Greenhouse-powered career pages can have completely different DOM structures depending on how the company customized their careers page.
Combobox/searchable dropdowns are the hardest part. A lot of ATS platforms use type-to-search comboboxes for things like "Location" or "University" — you can't just set .value, you have to actually simulate typing and wait for the option list to render.
Detecting "no AI allowed" and CAPTCHA-protected forms matters — some companies explicitly ban AI-assisted applications in their terms, so the extension needs to back off rather than silently fill those out.

Would love feedback from anyone who's dealt with browser automation across a wide variety of third-party sites — happy to answer questions about the approach.

DEV Community: Vimal Kumar Jain

I built a free Chrome extension to stop retyping the same job application 50 times