How to apply for a job on SmartRecruiters

SmartRecruiters is a recruiting system used by employers of every size, many of them in Europe. Its postings live at jobs.smartrecruiters.com or careers.smartrecruiters.com, and short links to them at smartr.me. The application is one long page rather than a wizard, so once it is open you can see everything it asks.

Two things catch people out:

• A check before the page. SmartRecruiters is protected by a bot-check service, and it sometimes shows a slider or puzzle before the posting or the form loads, especially if you open many postings quickly.
• Entries built from your resume. When you upload a resume, SmartRecruiters reads it and turns it into experience and education entries. What it reads is not always right, and those entries are what the recruiter sees first.

A SmartRecruiters form takes ten minutes or so when you have everything to hand, and much longer when you stop to look things up. Before you press I'm interested, have:

• The resume for this job as a PDF. If you change your resume for different kinds of roles, pick the one that fits this posting; our guide to resume keywords helps you see what the posting is looking for.
• Your history with months. Each experience and education entry wants a start and end month, and a parser's guess is often off by a year.
• Your links: LinkedIn, and a portfolio or GitHub if your field uses one.
• Answers to the usual questions: whether you have the right to work in the country, whether you need sponsorship, your notice period and your salary expectation.
• A cover letter, if the posting asks for one. Our guide to writing a cover letter for a job covers what to put in it.

1. Open the posting and pass the check. If a slider or puzzle shows, solve it. If it keeps coming back, wait a while before opening more postings.
2. Press I'm interested. The button sits at the top and bottom of the posting. It opens the application form for that job.
3. Personal information. First and last name, email, a confirmation of the email on some forms, your location, and your phone number with its country code picked from a list.
4. Experience. One entry per job: title, company, location, a description, and from and to dates, with a box for the job you still hold. SmartRecruiters fills these from your resume if you upload it first.
5. Education. One entry per school: institution, major, degree and dates.
6. Resume and other files. The resume upload, and on some forms a cover letter or a place for other documents.
7. Links and a message. LinkedIn, a website or portfolio, and sometimes a short message to the hiring team.
8. Screening questions. Whatever the employer added: right to work, sponsorship, notice period, salary, languages, or questions about the role. Some are required.
9. Consent and Submit. A box for the employer's privacy policy, sometimes a second one for keeping you on file for future jobs, and the Submit button.

Some employers offer to sign you in or let you apply with a profile from another site. You can usually skip that and fill the form as it is.

Jobapplier's browser extension fills SmartRecruiters in your own Chrome, on the page you opened. Here is what it does:

1. When the site's check is on the page, the panel asks you to solve it, and starts Autofill once the form shows.
2. It fills your personal information, picks your phone's country from the list, and uploads your resume.
3. It fills each Experience and Education entry from your Jobapplier profile, the first entry from your first job in the profile, the second from the second, and so on. If SmartRecruiters already made entries from your resume, they are filled from your profile so they say what you wrote there, not what the parser guessed.
4. It answers the screening questions from your profile and your Application answers card. Every answer the AI wrote is marked so you can check it.
5. It stops before Submit. Press Submit Application in the panel, or the form's own Submit button. The panel's button stays disabled, and says why, while a required field is empty.

For a resume made for this one posting, press Apply with tailored resume instead of Autofill; the posting's own resume, named Resume.pdf, is what gets uploaded. See how to tailor a resume to a job description.

• the site's check, the slider or puzzle that shows before the page
• any sign-in or password, if you choose to use one
• a photo or video, if an employer asks for one
• the final Submit

Anything you type yourself counts as yours, and the extension leaves it as you wrote it. If you turn a kind of field off in the extension's settings, that field stays empty with the reason in the panel, and Submit waits for you when it is required.

Jobapplier's cloud Agent does not apply on SmartRecruiters. The site's check is meant for a person, and Jobapplier never applies there from its own servers; the application is filled in your browser, with you at the check and at Submit.

SmartRecruiters usually shows a confirmation on the page and sends one to the email you gave. If the employer replies, it comes to that address too, sometimes from a SmartRecruiters address rather than the company's, so check your spam folder in the first days.

Jobapplier records the application once, when the employer's confirmation shows on the page or when you tell the panel it went, and it then shows on your Tracker with the resume that was sent. If you want to know how well that resume fit the posting, the resume match score guide explains the number you see beside it.

• Check the entries, not only the file. The recruiter often reads the experience and education entries before opening your resume. Make sure titles, companies and dates match your resume exactly. Our guide to how an ATS parses a resume explains where parsers slip.
• Pick the phone country first. The number field expects the country code chosen from the list. Typing the code into the number as well can make the form refuse it.
• Read the consent boxes. One is usually required to apply. The other, keeping your details for future jobs, is your choice.
• Answer equal employment and diversity questions once. Keep your answers on your Application answers card and the extension uses them on every form. A question the card leaves open is decided by “Let AI give its best answer”: on, the default, the AI picks; off, the form's decline option or the most neutral one.
• Use the same email each time. The employer writes to it, and it ties your applications together at that company.

The extension is for Chrome and is not in the Chrome Web Store yet. You connect it to your account under Settings, Login & Security, Your Browsers. To find postings, browse the job board.