A free guide · Ritik Yadav

Automate your job search, for free

A lot of good people got the layoff email this month. Most of them now spend hours a day on job portals, applying to roles that already have 800 applicants. There is a better way. Write straight to the people who are hiring. This guide shows how, starting with 20 minutes a day by hand and ending with a setup that runs on its own.

  1. 1FindPublic posts that say "share your CV", and good recruitment firms.
  2. 2CheckDoes the role fit you? Is the company any good? Is it a real CV inbox?
  3. 3WriteA short note with their name, to one person.
  4. 4Send20 to 40 a day from your own Gmail. One follow-up, no more.
  5. 5ReplyReplies land in your inbox. You answer them yourself.

Why this works

A job on a portal can collect hundreds of applications in a day, and software reads most of them first. A LinkedIn post that says "share your CV at hr@company.com" gets far fewer replies, and a person reads every one. Good recruitment firms work the same way. They keep a CV inbox and look at it.

So the job is simple. Find those posts and inboxes while the role is still open, and send a short, honest email. Everything below is a way to do that faster.

Level 1By hand, 20 minutes a day

  1. Search Google for fresh hiring posts. Paste one of these, change the role and city to yours, then click Tools and pick Past week. 
    site:linkedin.com/posts "share your CV" "program manager"
site:linkedin.com/posts "send your resume" "operations" "Mumbai"
site:linkedin.com/posts "share your CV" "real estate"
  2. Keep a small sheet. One row per person: name, company, email, role, post link, date you wrote. It stops you writing to the same person twice.
  3. Send a short email. Five lines is enough. Use their name and the role from their post. 
    Subject: Application for Strategy Manager

Hi Neha,

I saw your post about the Strategy Manager opening at Lodha.
I have 2 years in real estate strategy, most recently launching
a booking platform that now handles Rs 2 crore a month.

My CV: (your Google Drive link)
Could we speak for 10 minutes this week?

Your name, phone number
  4. Let LinkedIn do some of the looking. Save up to 20 job alerts. You can also switch on Open to Work for recruiters only, but LinkedIn says it can't fully hide that from your current company.

Put your CV on Google Drive, set it to "Anyone with the link can view", and send the link. Emails with attachments land in spam more often than plain ones.

Level 2Half automatic, with a Google Sheet

Same searching, but you send in one go from a sheet, with each email still addressed to one person by name. Two free add-ons do this for a normal Gmail:

YAMMYet Another Mail Merge. Free plan: 20 people a day, and it can send a follow-up.
MailmeteorFree plan: 50 emails a day (500 a month). No automatic follow-ups.

Gmail has its own mail merge too, but only on paid Workspace accounts.

  1. Make a sheet with columns like FirstName, Email, Company, Role.
  2. Write the email once in Gmail as a draft, with {{FirstName}} and {{Company}} where the details go.
  3. Open the add-on from the sheet, pick your draft, and send. Check replies once a day.

Level 3Fully automatic

I built this version to see how far it could go. It runs every day without anyone touching it. You'll want a friend who is comfortable with servers, or one free weekend.

A free serverOracle Cloud's Always Free plan gives you 2 cores and 12 GB of memory at no cost, for as long as you keep the account.
n8nA free workflow tool you install on that server. It runs each step on a timer: search at night, send in the morning, check replies every 20 minutes.
SearchOnly public search results, the same ones you saw in Level 1. It never logs into LinkedIn.
An AI checkClaude Haiku reads each post and decides yes or no: right role, decent company, a real CV inbox. This part costs a few rupees a day.
SendingYour own Gmail, through an App Password (Google Account, then Security, 2-Step Verification, App passwords).
RepliesIt watches the inbox and tells you the moment someone answers. You reply yourself.

All in, the server and tools cost nothing. The AI check is the only bill, and mine stays under Rs 30 a day. If you want help setting this up, message me on LinkedIn.

Rules that keep you out of spam

What I would not do

Don't use tools or browser extensions that scrape LinkedIn while you are logged in. LinkedIn restricts accounts for it, and you need that account. Don't buy email lists. And don't send the same message to 300 people on the first day.