How to get the most out of Reach
Reach works out of the box: upload a resume, and within the hour it is scoring thousands of postings against you. But the difference between a account that produces two interviews a month and one that produces none is almost never the algorithm. It is six or seven setup decisions, most of which take under a minute. This is the ordered list, from the settings that change everything to the ones that only matter once the rest is right.
1. Set your gates before anything else
Your persona has a handful of hard constraints: salary floor, locations you can legally work in, remote or hybrid or onsite, schedule, seniority, and companies you refuse to work for. These are gates, not preferences. A posting that fails one is never scored, never tailored and never applied to.
Getting them right is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and both failure modes are expensive:
- Gates too loose and your daily application budget goes to roles in countries you cannot work in. Over half of postings advertised as remote actually restrict hiring to one country or region, and a tool without a location gate spends your quota discovering that.
- Gates too tight and nothing clears the bar. If your matches are empty, the dashboard tells you which specific gate is doing the filtering rather than vaguely blaming your keywords. Read that message before changing anything else.
Set a salary floor you would genuinely accept, not the number you want. Under half of employer-written postings state pay at all, and a floor set aspirationally quietly removes every posting that stayed silent.
2. Give it a real resume, or let it interview you
Scoring compares each posting to your actual history, so a thin resume produces thin matching. Upload a PDF, Word file or plain text on the Personas page. Coming from LinkedIn: open your profile, choose More, then Save to PDF, and upload that.
If you do not have a resume worth uploading, take the short interview on the Personas page instead. It asks about your work in plain questions and writes a resume from your own words, which is a much better starting point than a document you hated writing.
One thing that does not work: a resume that is mostly a link to a portfolio. There is nothing to match against, and the system will tell you so rather than silently underperforming.
3. Run more than one persona
This is the most underused feature in the product. A persona is one career track, with its own resume emphasis, its own gates and its own scoring. You can run several at once.
The people who get the most out of Reach are usually running two or three: the role they have been doing, the adjacent role they are moving toward, and sometimes a wider net at a lower salary floor as a safety line. Each persona scores the shared job inventory independently, so a posting that is a weak fit for one can be a strong fit for another. You will never apply to the same posting twice; that is enforced per account, not per persona.
4. Decide how hands-off you want to be, per persona
Auto-apply is off by default on every persona, and that default exists so nothing goes out before you have seen what goes out.
- Review mode (auto-apply off): matches queue up under Matches, and each one is prepared and waiting for your approval. Good for the first week, and permanently good for a persona you care most about.
- Auto-apply on: applications go out on their own within your daily cap. The Matches tab disappears for that persona because there is no queue to review. Good for the wide funnel underneath your top targets.
A common and effective setup is a primary persona in review mode and a broader persona on auto-apply. There is also a daily cap per account, and lowering it is a legitimate way to slow things down without turning anything off.
5. Vote on matches, which is the only training signal that exists
Every match has a thumbs up and thumbs down. This is not a satisfaction survey; the votes are fed back into scoring as examples.
Thumbs down asks why, and the reason matters more than the vote. "Wrong seniority" and "pay too low" teach the model different things, and a down-vote also removes the job from your queue permanently. Twenty honest votes in the first week measurably changes what you see in the second. Skipping this is the most common reason someone concludes the matching "does not understand" their field.
6. Point your job board alerts at your Reach address
Every account gets its own Reach email address, shown in Settings. Two things use it.
First, applications go out from it, so employer replies come back to it and are forwarded straight to your normal inbox. Nothing gets lost in a spam folder you never check, and the Inbox tab keeps the full thread.
Second, and this is the part people miss: set up job alerts on the boards you already trust, LinkedIn, Indeed, niche boards in your field, and send them to your Reach address. Those alert emails are parsed into your job inventory. It is the cheapest way to widen coverage in a specialty the general scrapers do not cover well.
7. Use the extension for the applications automation cannot finish
Some forms cannot be completed by a server: captchas, login walls, and applicant tracking systems that filter automated traffic. Those applications park instead of failing silently. The Reach Autofill extension finishes them in your own browser, where you are indistinguishable from any other applicant, because you are one.
Install it in the browser you actually job hunt in, press "Start queue" once a day, and clear the parked pile. Ten minutes of clicking replaces about two hours of typing. The full walkthrough is in the extension guide.
8. Answer employer questions once
Applications stall on questions no system should guess at: work authorization, notice period, salary expectation, why this company. When one comes up, Reach parks the application and asks you rather than inventing an answer.
Answer it in the Personas tab and the answer is stored and reused everywhere. The first week has the most of these. By week three, most applications go out without stopping. The count of unanswered questions rides on the Personas tab, so it is never hidden.
9. Read the skills gap tab before your next course
The Skill Up tab compares the skills demanded by postings you are actually being matched against with the skills evidenced in your resume, and ranks the gaps by how often they cost you. It is a much better guide to what to learn next than a generic "hot skills of 2026" list, because it is computed from your field, your seniority and your region.
Often the finding is not a missing skill but a missing word. If you have done Kubernetes work and never wrote the word down, that is a five-minute fix with an outsized effect on keyword screens.
10. Use Resume Studio for the applications that matter
On paid tiers, every application gets a resume and cover letter tailored to that posting, checked against a grounding validator so it can only emphasize things you actually did. Resume Studio is the manual version: open a specific job, see the tailored document, and edit it yourself before it goes out.
Worth doing for the roles you would genuinely be disappointed to lose. Not worth doing forty times a day, which is exactly why the automatic version exists.
Habits that separate the accounts that work
- Check in daily for ten minutes, not weekly for an hour. Fresh postings convert best. An application sent on day two beats the same application on day twelve.
- Fix the reason, not the symptom. Empty matches means a gate is doing its job. The dashboard names which one. Widen that one thing rather than loosening everything.
- Keep the daily cap modest and the quality high. Volume is not the goal; coverage of the right postings is.
- Treat the top ten companies separately. Hand-written application, referral hunt, no automation. Reach is for the wide funnel underneath.
- Turn on notifications you will actually read. A daily digest you open beats a real-time stream you mute.
Troubleshooting the three most common complaints
"I have no matches." Nearly always a gate: a salary floor above what postings state, a location policy narrower than the market, or seniority set higher than your titles read. Look at the dashboard message; it names the specific cause.
"The matches are irrelevant." Vote them down with a reason, and check that your resume reflects the work you want next rather than the work you did five years ago. Scoring matches against what is written, not what you intend.
"Applications are stuck." Open the Applications tab. Rows waiting on you are separated from rows in progress. Most stalls are an unanswered employer question or a form that needs the extension, and both are shown as such rather than left to guess about.