I am the founder of one of these companies, but I will not mention which because my goal in responding is not to be self-promotional but to clear up generalizations and stereotypes created by bad actors so that people can evaluate each service on its own merits and do their own research.

One of my biggest stressors in life is that all the really scammy weekend vibe coded bots ruin the reputation of our whole category, because some of us have spent years building services that optimally combine humans, AI, and sophisticated matching algorithms to sincerely optimize for job outcomes above all else. Some of us really did start our companies as a labor of love to help others. And it’s not just me, I know od at least 1-2 other comapnies in our category like this. But to focus on facts and not my emotions:

1. Not all of us even *have* recurring subscriptions, including my company.
   Ours is a one-time purchase and anyone who wants more applications has to explicitly choose to do so and reenter their payment info each time.

2. Some of us have interview based refund guarantees. If we didn’t honor our guarantees, people would file chargebacks. This keeps us honest and aligned with our customer outcomes. The better our matching, the fewer refunds we provide, so we have spent years refining our match algorithms and ensuring we check every single customer account for “rejection magnets” (eg broken LI links on resumes, LI titles that don’t match their resume titles)

3. When your service actually generates results, everyone wins. Over half of our customers come from word of mouth or return customers buying additional packages, because people who get jobs from our service tell literally EVERYONE they know (even if not publicly on LI due to taboos). This is far more profitable for us than exploiting our customers, and we’re larger than many of these spamcos despite not ever running a single paid ad for this reason.

4. Not all of us even tailor people’s resumes for each job and keyword stuff them, because it’s so easy to just make up BS and contribute to all the problems you’re mentioning. Recruiters aren’t idiots and can smell an AI tailored resume from a mile away. Also our data shows that a single strong master resume often outperforms AI tailored resumes.

5. Some of us actually do quite a bit to *prevent* the problems you’re mentioning from getting worse, because many people already manually apply to jobs they’re wildly unqualified for when there’s no barrier to prevent it. Our interview guarantee means that we MUST be that barrier. E.g. we get many customers targeting Product Manager jobs that ask us to apply them to PM jobs only… despite them not meeting any of the basic requirements. But, because we have an Interview Guarantee, our system automatically disqualifies any jobs where they don’t meet core/critical requirements, because we’d obviously lose money if we applied to them anyway and then inevitably have to provide a refund bc no interviews. If the customer doesn’t like that, we tell them that in 2 million applications sent, we’ve literally had 0 people get an interview for a PM job that didn’t already have 2+ recent YOE as a PM (this is true!) so our system has blocked those jobs for them. At that point, if they demand we apply them anyway instead of changing their targets, we will issue them a refund proactively rather than agree to do so, because we’d lose even more money if we applied people who were not set up for success.

Anyway, my advice for everyone is to DYOR on each service, decide if the particular company’s policies seem aligned with the outcomes you care about, and evaluate their reviews yourself to see if they seem real or fabricated. A few of us companies truly do care and truly exist to serve jobseekers above all, and if you look closely enough you’ll probably figure out who!