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 a job application autopsy?
A job application autopsy is an application diagnostic that looks at your rejections as a set, not one at a time. You give it 3 to 15 recent applications and it grades the pattern A–F across five dimensions: who you targeted, how well your CV matched the advert, whether the salary expectation was realistic, which channel you applied through, and the red flags you walked straight past. Here’s the thing — fifty rejections almost never have fifty causes. They usually have one, and it just keeps repeating.
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.