From job board to sent application.

1. Discovery

Four sources feed one list. Keyword searches built from your search titles run against a job-board aggregator covering UK vacancies. Job-alert emails that arrive in your connected mailbox are read for the roles inside them. Job URLs you paste in are fetched and read. And employers you follow on the company watchlist have their own careers boards checked — Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, Workday and BambooHR.

All of that repeats on a schedule in the background, so new postings arrive without you going to look for them. There is no search-now button on any page: the only search you start by hand is the one at the end of the setup wizard.

2. Deduplication

The same role posted to four boards is still one role. Before anything else is decided, each new posting is checked against what you already have. Employer, title and location are normalised — case, the various dash characters, runs of spaces, a town name folded into the job title, a postcode standing as its own part of the address — and an exact match on that triple collapses into the record you already have, whichever source it came from. Two copies arriving in the same run collide with each other too.

Postings that share an employer and a job title but differ in locality or source are not merged behind your back, and there is no separate duplicates screen for them. The job card itself carries a notice saying a possible duplicate exists. Open it and the other copies are listed, each with its own control to dismiss that one; a single control at the bottom tells Rolehound the group is not duplicates at all, which keeps every copy and stops the notice appearing again.

3. Gates

What survives is measured against your own criteria, in order: is the role in the UK, does its salary clear the floor you set, and is the commute from your home postcode inside the maximum you set. A role that clearly fails one of those is dropped there and then. It is not stored as a job, and it never reaches your list. One path does leave a trace: a role that came out of a job-alert email is recorded against that email, so the Inbox page shows it under Rejected by gates along with the check it failed. Remote and hybrid roles skip the commute check entirely.

A role that cannot be judged is treated differently from one that fails. An unrecognised town, a listing with no salary stated, an address that will not resolve to a map point — those are kept and flagged for review, with a short note naming the check that could not be completed. Losing a real job to an unfamiliar place name is worse than glancing at one you end up dismissing. A job you pasted in yourself is never dropped either: if it fails a check it is flagged, so you can see why and decide for yourself.

4. Fit scoring

Each role that gets through is read against your profile — the titles, skills, sectors, must-haves and dealbreakers taken from your CV — and comes back with a score, a one-line summary, the strengths it found and the concerns it has. Sort by score and the shortlist writes itself.

Scoring runs on a fast, inexpensive model, because it runs on everything. It also re-runs when your profile changes, so editing your CV re-sorts the list instead of leaving yesterday's judgements sitting on top of it.

5. Drafting

Nothing is written until you ask for it. Pick a role and Rolehound researches the employer, rewrites your CV around that particular job, writes a cover letter to match, and renders both as PDFs attached to the application. That work runs the strongest model available and takes longer than a web request reasonably should, so it happens in the background: you carry on, and the documents appear when they are ready. A draft that fails is retried, and if it still fails you are told, so you can ask again rather than wonder.

Rolehound does not submit applications. It drafts, and it hands you two PDFs. Deciding to apply, and the act of applying, stay with you — there is no code in Rolehound that sends an application to an employer.

6. Your pipeline

Every application sits as a card on a board that runs Draft, Applied, Acknowledged, Responded, Interview and Offer, with closed lanes for Rejected, Withdrawn and Removed. Drag a card to move it, and only the moves that make sense from its current stage are offered.

7. Mailbox tracking

Connect a mailbox and the loop closes. Rolehound reads incoming mail, works out which of your open applications a message belongs to, and decides what it means — an acknowledgement, a substantive reply, an interview invitation, an offer — then advances that card to the matching stage. Every message it has classified is then filed out of your inbox into a folder under Rolehound/ named for what it decided that message was — including mail it judged irrelevant, which goes to Rolehound/Irrelevant. Nothing is deleted, and reading a message never marks it read. Because the sweep is unconditional, a mailbox you use only for your job search is a better one to connect than your main personal one.

Two rules bound this. Cards only move forward: an email can never drag an application back a stage, and it can never touch one you have already closed. And a rejection is never applied on Rolehound's say-so — it is flagged for you to confirm, and until you confirm it the application stays exactly where it is.

The connection is read-and-file only. Rolehound never sends mail from your account, and never deletes or trashes a message.

And a record of all of it

Every one of those stages writes to an audit log on your account: what was ingested, what was scored, what was drafted, which cards moved and on what evidence. Nothing happens to your data that you cannot go back and check.