About once a week, someone asks us to add auto-apply. The pitch makes sense on paper: Cruto already drafts the application, why not press the button too? Most "AI job hunt" tools either ship this or are about to.
We won't, ever. Three reasons.
1. It makes the candidate look like a spammer
The thing that makes a tailored cover letter useful is that the recruiter can tell it's tailored. The thing that makes an auto-applied application useless is that the recruiter can also tell. Once a quarter of inbound applications come from auto-apply tools, recruiters filter for the signal that an application was written by a human. You don't want to be on the wrong side of that filter.
2. Job boards' Terms of Service forbid it
LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor all explicitly prohibit automated application submission. We could build it; we'd be exposing every user who used it to account-level enforcement. We don't get to break their TOS for our users.
3. It optimises the wrong outcome
The point of Cruto isn't more applications. It's more right applications. A candidate who applies to 5 great roles with a tailored cover letter and a prepared interview will outperform a candidate who applies to 50 average roles with auto-generated everything. We want to be the tool that wins for the first candidate. The second candidate already has too many tools competing for their attention.
So: we draft. You review. You copy. You apply. The friction is on purpose.
This post is one of the choices written up on our principles page — what Cruto builds, and what Cruto deliberately doesn't.