ApplyOnce — What's Been Built & Why It Matters

What It Is

A Chrome extension that fills job and college application forms from one encrypted profile. You type your info once. Every form after that is one click.

What's Already Built (Ready to Ship)

Core Engine

• 4-pass field matching pipeline — doesn't just match "first name" to "first name." Handles Workday's legalNameSection_firstName, Greenhouse's job_application[answers_attributes][0][text_value], Taleo's ctl00$MainContent$txtFirstName, and 230+ other field naming patterns across 6 major ATS platforms
• 7 label detection methods — finds the right field even when the HTML is ugly: explicit labels, wrapping labels, aria-labelledby, table layouts (iCIMS), previous sibling text, section headings, and Workday's data-automation-id
• Confidence scoring with review overlay — every fill shows a confidence score. Low-confidence fields are flagged. User approves before anything gets filled. Never auto-submits.

ATS Platform Coverage

Field Types Supported

Text, email, phone, date, number, URL, textarea, dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes. Handles state abbreviation ↔ full name conversion. Gender/race/veteran/disability EEO fields. Parent/guardian section for college apps.

Security (The Differentiator)

• AES-256-GCM encryption with PBKDF2 key derivation (600,000 iterations)
• Unique salt per install, random IV per encryption
• Zero data transmission — nothing ever leaves the browser. No servers. No accounts. No analytics.
• Permissions: 3 only — storage, activeTab, scripting. That's it.
• Manifest V3 compliant — no eval(), no remote code execution

Validation

• 93 tests, all passing across 7 test suites
• 100% match rate on a real Greenhouse form — tested against actual HTML extracted from a live Dropbox job posting (not a simulation)
• Realistic ATS test suites modeled on inspected production HTML from Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Taleo

What the Boardroom Said (3 Independent Reviews)

Three clean-slate adversarial evaluations. Different agents each time. Zero memory between rounds.

Technical Verdict: PASSED ✅ (All 3 Rounds)

Not a single round killed it on the code. The engineering is solid.

Business Verdict: CONDITIONAL GO ✅ (2 of 3 Rounds)

• Round 1: Conditional GO at $15K
• Round 2: NO-GO (overloaded claims, Common App ToS issue)
• Round 3: Conditional GO at $5K

What the Boardroom Liked

1. Zero operating costs — no servers, no APIs, no infrastructure. $0/month to run.
2. Privacy angle vs Simplify — Simplify ($4.35M raised, 200K users) requires account creation and sends data to servers. ApplyOnce: zero data leaves the browser. Only real differentiator in the space.
3. Technical depth — not a generic autofiller. 230+ ATS-specific synonyms. Shadow DOM traversal. Iframe injection. The kind of engineering a competitor would need months to replicate.

What the Boardroom Killed On (And How We Fixed It)

The Selling Points (Why Someone Installs This)

For Job Seekers

1. "I applied to 200 jobs last month. I typed my address 200 times." — ApplyOnce: type it once, fill it everywhere.
2. "Workday makes me create a new account for every company." — Your profile carries across all of them.
3. "I don't trust these tools with my data." — Your data is encrypted on your device. We literally can't see it. No account, no servers, no cloud.
4. "Simplify is free but they have my data." — We don't. That's the trade.
5. "I spend 15 minutes per application." — Cut it to 2 minutes. That's 13 minutes × 200 applications = 43 hours of your life back.

For College Applicants

1. Parent/guardian fields — no competitor handles these. Common App, Coalition App, scholarship forms all have them.
2. EEO/self-identification — gender, race, veteran status, disability status. Pre-filled from your profile.
3. Scholarship applications — 1.7M filed annually. Same fields every time.

The Numbers

What's Left to Do (The Launch Program)

Full Documentation