Product updates
The 23 updates to Applystead that went live for every member on .
Assistant now has its own place in the menu, next to Interviews and Calendar. It shows your next meetings from your calendar for the week ahead, and you can ask it about any of them. Calendar shows the Assistant beside your next event and marks the upcoming interviews it has a briefing for: open one to read its briefing. Today's upcoming interviews link straight to theirs.
Some employers' forms ask for a phone number, the school you attended or the weekly hours you want. When we don't have one of these, Applications › Questions now asks you once, and your answer is used on the applications that need it.
When an employer asks for a resume, the reply Otto drafts comes with the resume you applied with already attached: yours to change or remove before you send. Drafts can now draw on the answers you gave on that application too, so more of an employer's questions come back already answered.
When your resume is tailored to a job, its skills now lead with what that posting asks for and keep the rest of your own list short and readable, so the skills you added to your profile no longer all appear on every application you send.
Applying through one job board's quick-apply window is now more reliable. When you update your profile or your answers, those updates are put to use more precisely across your applications. More employer questions (work eligibility, clearance, past agreements, earlier work, preferred title, how you heard of the job) are now answered from the details you've already given us.
When an employer's reply or an interview invitation is waiting for you and you have never turned Full auto on, Otto now offers it: one tap opens the Full auto dialog, where you turn it on yourself. The dialog has a new box for recruiters and agencies. Choose Not now and Otto stops asking.
The "Did you book a time?" prompt and every Interviews row now offer Have Otto schedule it whenever an interview still needs a time, so Otto can find and book a slot for you. When Otto needs your interview hours first, it asks, with one tap to use Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm. Your phone assistant offers callers times inside those hours.
Invitations to a live interview, and messages from a real person about a job you applied to, used to sit in Updates with nothing waiting for you. They now get a reply you can send, a to-do, or a booking card in your Mailbox. Receipts, codes and bulk updates still stay out of the way.
Calls and texts on your recruiter line now carry unread markers, so a missed call or a recruiter's message stands out until you open it. Carrier opt-out notices and promotions no longer count as unread: they wait under Other, apart from real messages. When a caller asks when you are free, the assistant notes the time they asked for on the call.
On November 11 many job pages on Applystead showed "This job is closed" although the employers' postings were still open. Those pages are coming back at the same links, and a job page now closes only when the posting itself is gone or has expired.
Interview hours is a new setting: the days and times you can interview, Monday to Friday 9 am to 5 pm to start, in your own time zone. It sits in Settings under Calendar and time budget, and the last step of setup shows it prefilled so you can confirm it there. Otto offers and accepts interview times inside your hours, and in your Mailbox it now asks you to set them instead of guessing times.
When someone asks for a time, a document or an answer, Otto now writes the reply. When a message only asks you to fill in a form, book a time or sign, you get a to-do instead of an acknowledgement. Drafts draw on the job description, your answers and resume, offer times with their time zone, and leave fewer blanks to fill. A draft that would turn down a job you applied to waits for your tap.
When an email offers you an interview time — a calendar invitation, a booking link, or a message asking when you're free — Have Otto schedule it now appears in your notifications, on the Interviews list and on the job's page, not only inside the message itself. It also recognises booking links that pass through a redirect, and it stays available while the offer stands.
When an interview's time has passed, your Interviews ask whether it happened: one tap for It happened, It didn't or It was moved, and the next step or thank-you is ready. An invitation you haven't booked yet asks you to pick a time, with one tap to open the employer's email. When an employer goes quiet, Otto prepares a nudge at five and ten business days for you to review and send.
The Mailbox now opens with a Waiting on you list: interview requests with no time booked, replies and to-dos ready for you, and interviews whose time has passed with no outcome, oldest first. Today shows the count and the three oldest, and five or more interview requests to book lead your Queue when you open it.
If your assistant reads Applystead through the agent connection, a long answer that used to be cut short now keeps its paging details, so the next page can be read instead of the first page repeating. Saving an answer that already matches your profile is accepted, and filtering your Mailbox by the kind of update works there too.
With Auto apply on, the info button beside your queue's counts now says each ready application is sent for you, and any job left for you to decide reads Waiting for you. If you send each one yourself, nothing goes out until you tap Apply. The filter row also says that Posted or found and Search only narrow the list in front of you: your saved search and your queue's total stay the same.
Otto can now read the cover letter an application shows and rewrite it from your own experience, even when the employer's form had no cover letter of its own. Ask him to make it shorter, more formal or closer to the job's wording, and Undo puts the previous version back.
Company and role pages now keep up with employers' current openings. 88 employers that were listed under a short code or an oddly split name now appear under the name they use themselves, for example Beth Israel Lahey Health and AutoZone, and four employers that had two pages each now have one. On phones, the company links in the monthly hiring pulse are easier to tap.
Open a search in the criteria dialog and it shows how many applications it brought, how many got a reply from a person and how many led to an interview invitation. Once a search has brought a lot of applications over a couple of weeks and nothing has come back, Otto offers to look over its job titles and opens that search for you. Not now hides it for that search for good.
On windows between a tablet and a laptop the prepared application cut its title mid-word and showed only a sliver of the Resume and Cover letter tabs. The title now keeps a readable column, and when the window is narrow the screen's controls move to their own row so every tab is reachable.
Pick "I'm not getting interviews" while cancelling and the dialog shows what came of your plan: the jobs you applied to, the replies people wrote and any interview invitations, with one button to where they wait. Pick "The jobs aren't a good fit" and it offers the list's own answers, and the one you pick opens the setting that changes it. Cancelling is unchanged, and you can ignore both.
When an employer writes about an interview for a role you applied to more than once, the email now attaches to the role it names, by the posting's link or the job title, level words and all. If it is not clear which role, the interview shows under the employer without naming one. If we still get it wrong, your thumbs-down fixes it at once and moves the email out.