Joshua Curry and Vishal Patil have seen a lot of customer service chatbots. The chat windows that pop up on your screen while visiting sites from online retailers to cell phone companies, asking what you need help with, have proliferated in recent years.
Curry and Patil have built similar chatbots. But theirs don’t live on business websites or solve customer service issues. Theirs are on their portfolio websites — and are meant to help them find work.
Curry and Patil’s personalized AI chatbots draw on their application materials and professional experience to interact with recruiters visiting their websites. They hope the chatbots will help land them jobs in today’s tough, “low-hire” job market; U.S. employers added just 116,000 jobs last year, compared to 1.46 million in 2024. Their approach is just one creative solution among many — like sending snail mail or turning to reverse recruiters — that applicants are trying in the hopes of getting noticed.
Curry, a web developer in San Francisco, has gotten interviews for two positions of roughly 140 he’s applied to since November. “It’s insane out there,” he says. “I have to stand out.”
For Patil, an F-1 student visa holder, the job market feels especially daunting, he says. He estimates he’s gotten a screening call or interview for 30 applications of the more than 700 he submitted from mid-August 2025 through March.
