50 applications. 2 replies.
Here's why.
This is an anonymised Application Autopsy for a UK mid-level software engineer. Five A–F grades on the pattern, not the jobs. UK-specific signals AIApply can't tell you. No auto-apply. No spam. Free.
You're spraying — not targeting. 32 of your 50 applications were LinkedIn Easy Apply submissions to roles at least one seniority band above your current experience, and your salary expectations are £15–20k above what those JDs actually advertise. The 2 replies you got were the only roles where your CV's keywords lined up with the JD requirements. Stop applying, fix the pattern first.
- Stop applying for the next 7 days. Your time-on-applications is high; conversion is near zero. Pattern fix first.
- Apply directly to company careers pages — not LinkedIn Easy Apply. Cut your application volume in half but reply rate will 6–8x.
- Rebuild your CV around technical scope, not org-chart language. Match the actual keywords from JDs in fintech, AI, or quant — the 3 verticals where your salary ask is realistic.
- Take-home: At £85k you'd take home £4,720/month after tax, NI, 5% pension. The £62k you'd realistically get takes home £3,650. The £15k gross gap is only £1,070/month after deductions — worth knowing before you reject offers.
- Employer signals: 4 companies you applied to filed redundancy notices on Companies House in Q1 2026 (FastCloud, NorthBridge AI, Lyric Health, OrbitOps). 3 had Glassdoor-UK ratings below 2.8. None of these were going to respond.
- Commute vs salary: 5 London roles you applied to advertise '£62k London hybrid'. Your stated locationPref is Manchester. A 4-hour commute 2 days/week costs ~£480/month — net pay drops to £3,170/month. That's worse than a remote £56k role.
Your CV needs to address 3 specific issues.
Generate a tailored UK CV that fixes the targeting, keyword match, and channel-quality findings above. Free during beta — no card.
Sign up free & rebuild my CV →How does your application pattern grade?
Free during beta. Use your last 5 rejections. Diagnosis in 20 seconds. No auto-apply, no spam, no card needed.
Sign up free to run your own autopsy →Just used AIApply or LazyApply? Your auto-applied rejections are perfect for an autopsy.
Honest diagnosis. UK-only. No auto-apply. Built for the candidate, not the recruiter.
Common questions about the autopsy
What is an Application Autopsy?
An Application Autopsy is a diagnostic that grades your job-seeking pattern A–F across five dimensions: targeting, CV-JD keyword match, salary realism, channel quality, and red flags you missed. You paste 3–15 recent rejected applications and the autopsy tells you the pattern preventing interviews — not the individual jobs.
How is this different from an AI CV builder or auto-apply tool?
AI CV builders polish a single CV against no job in particular. Auto-apply tools spray your name to hundreds of employers, which gets you ATS-banned and binned on sight by recruiters. The autopsy diagnoses the cause first — so when you do rebuild the CV or change channels, you fix the actual problem.
What UK-specific signals does it check?
IR35 / inside-out contractor traps disguised as employment. Real take-home pay (NI + pension + student-loan adjusted). Right-to-work and visa sponsorship gaps. Companies House status — flags employers that filed redundancies in the last quarter. Glassdoor-UK and Trustpilot patterns. Commute cost against advertised salary (London-vs-regional adjusted). NHS / civil service grade decoding.
Is it really free?
Yes — during public beta. No card required. After beta, there will be a £9/month Pro tier for unlimited autopsies, plus a permanent free tier with 3 actions per month.
Why no auto-apply?
Auto-apply tools get you fingerprinted and banned by ATS vendors (Greenhouse, Workday, iCIMS, Lever). LinkedIn rate-limits and shadow-bans auto-apply traffic. UK recruiters bin AI-spray CVs on sight. Beyond the bans, it actively undermines the candidate — once your name is associated with spam, you can't un-poison the well at that employer. We never auto-apply, and we never will.
What the autopsy is — and isn't
It is a pattern diagnostic. It looks at how you're applying across the last few jobs and finds the structural issue causing rejections — most often a channel quality problem (LinkedIn Easy Apply has a ~1.8% reply rate vs ~14% for direct), a seniority-band mismatch, or a salary-expectations gap. It will tell you the single highest-impact change to make, not a list of twenty.
It is not a CV grader (each application gets the same pattern grade, not a per-CV score), an interview predictor (we cannot see whether the employer is hiring in good faith), or a guarantee of interviews (no tool can promise that). It also will not flatter you: the demo on this page is mostly Ds and Fs because that is what the actual pattern of 50 spray-and-pray applications looks like.
If the diagnosis surfaces fixes, the next step is rebuilding the CV with the findings baked in. That happens inside the free AI CV builder — which is part of the same product, not a separate tool. The autopsy and the CV builder are the same spine: diagnose, then rebuild.