Applique

Applique is your AI career co-pilot. It instantly tailors your resume to beat any job description, writes the perfect cover letter, and preps you for the interview so you land the job.

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Inspiration The idea for Applique wasn't born in a flash of inspiration, but from a place of deep, personal frustration. For months, I was applying for dozens of jobs I knew I was qualified for, but my inbox was silent. It was a logistical nightmare— I had over 50 different versions of my CV scattered across folders, and I couldn't remember which version I sent where or what I said in each one.

Before writing a single line of code, I created a survey and sent it to as many people as possible, asking them about their job search journey. The responses were overwhelming and confirmed my own experience. I met so many brilliant individuals who simply couldn't land great jobs because they didn't know how to adequately market themselves or navigate the best practices of modern hiring.

That's when I knew this was a universal problem. Applique was born from that data; I narrowed down what most users identified as their top priorities and worked to implement those features first.

What it does Applique is an AI-powered career co-pilot designed to give every job seeker their best chance. It's not just a document editor; it's a strategic partner. It helps you:

Tailor Resumes Instantly: It analyzes any job description and intelligently rewrites your resume to highlight your most relevant skills and experience, using proven industry formulas.

Beat the Bots: An integrated ATS Scanner gives you an instant match score and actionable feedback. When you consider that a report by Capterra found that 75% of recruiters use some form of Applicant Tracking System, getting past the initial automated screening is more critical than ever.

Generate Compelling Cover Letters: It writes persuasive, tailored cover letters in various professional tones, saving you hours of work.

Ace the Interview: It generates hyper-specific interview questions based on the role and your CV. For our hackathon submission, we've integrated ElevenLabs to create a voice-powered mock interview where the AI asks you questions out loud, creating a realistic practice session.

How we built it This entire project was built with a focus on speed and modern technology, all made possible by the tools available for this hackathon.

The User Interface was generated at lightning speed using Bolt.new. I provided it with a series of detailed "hyper prompts" to build the entire responsive frontend.

The Backend and Database are powered by Firebase. We used Firestore for our real-time database, Firebase Authentication for secure Google sign-ins, and Cloud Storage for hosting users' Master CVs.

The AI "Brain" at the core of every feature is the Google Gemini API. The project's "secret sauce" is the set of detailed, multi-step prompts we engineered to get structured, high-quality output from the model.

The entire full-stack application is deployed on Netlify, which seamlessly handles our serverless API functions and hosts the Vite-built frontend.

Challenges we ran into The biggest challenge was optimizing my API calls to stay under the 10-second timeout limit for serverless functions on Netlify's free tier. My initial AI prompts were powerful but too slow. I had to go through a rigorous process of prompt engineering, refactoring the instructions to be more efficient and commanding the AI to return a JSON-only response without any "thinking" steps. It was a significant challenge, but I was able to formulate super-efficient prompts and methods that cut the API processing time in half, ensuring a fast and responsive user experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of I'm incredibly proud of building a complete, full-stack, AI-powered application that solves a problem I and so many others have faced. Moving beyond simple text generation to create a tool that performs critical analysis, reframes content, and provides a multi-faceted user experience is a major achievement. Most of all, I'm proud that this project is not based on an assumption, but on real feedback from real users.

What we learned This hackathon was a masterclass in modern, AI-driven development.

I learned the immense power of prompt-based UI generation with tools like Bolt.new. It allows for an incredible development velocity.

I learned that the most critical skill in building AI products is iterative prompt engineering. The quality and speed of the output is directly proportional to the quality and specificity of the instructions.

I gained invaluable experience in deploying full-stack serverless applications, learning the nuances of environment variables, backend configurations (netlify.toml), and handling asynchronous jobs.

What's next for Applique This hackathon is just the beginning for Applique. The foundation we've built is robust and ready to scale. For us, it's not just about getting a job; it's about empowering people to achieve financial independence sooner and build better lives for themselves and their families. Applique's core principle is making sure you are the best version of yourself on paper, thus landing the best possible job to achieve those goals.

Our immediate next steps are:

Full Interview Feedback Loop: Completing the evaluate-interview-answer functionality to give users detailed feedback on their spoken answers.

Chrome Extension Integration: Building out the browser extension I've already designed to allow users to clip and save jobs from any website with a single click.

Expanding AI Features: Adding more granular AI suggestions within the CV editor and generating "talking points" for specific interview questions.

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