Why we publish these
We started writing these updates so the platform you apply through this month would visibly be better than the one you applied through last month. The last one landed almost a month ago, which is too long a gap to keep that promise. We are catching up. Here is what shipped between then and now.
A homepage that leads with the work, not the pitch
The version of gethiringfunnel.com you saw before this week opened with a generic value-prop line and a soft "Get Started" button. The new one opens differently. The headline now leads with 1-on-1 coaching as the actual product, not as a footnote under the AI auto-applier. The primary call to action is "Apply Now."
Below the fold there is a new section called Free Playbooks. It is a row of short YouTube clips from our coaches: salary negotiation, the cover-letter rewrite that lands replies, what to actually put in your portfolio at the senior level. The scroller has oversized hover arrows so it works on a trackpad with no horizontal-swipe instinct, and the native scrollbar is hidden so the row reads as one deliberate strip instead of an "is this a control" mystery. Mobile keeps the native swipe behavior. The section heading itself shipped, got shortened, then got recolored to land in our orange brand color. Small visual choices, but the page now feels like one design instead of three.
The other change worth naming directly: the homepage testimonials. Earlier versions of the site had quotes attached to names that did not correspond to a verifiable client. That is the kind of thing that, in 2026, will get a startup correctly mocked. Those quotes are gone. The remaining testimonials come from clients whose stories we can point to, and a new callout went to Mitchell Carter, a software engineer who was laid off by the USDA and landed a $125K offer four weeks later. The fake JSON-LD aggregate rating that lived in the homepage structured data is also gone. If a search result ever shows stars next to our name, it will be because real clients put them there.
Your auto-applier now respects your filters
The biggest shipped change for current members. Until last week, the AI auto-applier filtered jobs at scan time, meaning the filter only looked at the title of a posting, and only at the moment that posting was first ingested into the shared pool. That had three compounding problems. First, "Software Engineer" titles that hide a Python-only requirement in the description would sail through a .NET developer's blacklist. Second, the substring match treated "java" as a match for "JavaScript," forcing you to write awkward keywords to avoid false positives. Third, jobs that pre-dated your filter never got re-checked.
A .NET Core developer on the platform hit the consequence directly: getting applied to Python, TypeScript, and Kubernetes roles he had explicitly blacklisted on his profile.
The fix moves the filter to match time, runs the check across title plus description plus requirements together, uses Postgres word-boundary anchors so "java" no longer matches "javascript," and retroactively purges any pending queue rows the new filter would now reject. The moment you save a filter change in your profile, every job in your queue gets re-evaluated against the new rules and the violators get marked skipped. We also added a starvation metric: if your filters become so restrictive that the matcher would return zero candidates, we know about it on the server side, not three days later when nothing happened.
This is work that should have been there from day one. It is there now.
Also shipped
A bundle of smaller things that landed in the same window:
Resilient closed-deal webhook.: A real client's deal-close event errored two weeks ago and broke their onboarding flow ("no matching booking"). The handler now has a two-tier gate: trusted GHL contacts auto-insert a legacy booking row and the onboarding completes; email-only orphan closes (the forged-webhook injection path) still get rejected. The same fix landed on the webinar handler as a latent-landmine close.
Bylines and authorship on every post.: Every blog post and every comparison page now shows "By Jared Dean," carries a datePublished and dateModified, and emits Person schema so search engines understand who is making the recommendation. The /about page got a real scaffold and the same schema treatment.
The HF monogram.: We finally have a proper square logo. Open graph cards, browser tabs, dashboard chrome — same mark everywhere.
Terms of service and a privacy policy.: Linked from the homepage footer. Governing law is Tennessee.
The app subdomain stops showing up in Google.: `app.gethiringfunnel.com` is the member dashboard. It has no business being indexed. A host-aware `noindex,follow` now ships at the middleware layer regardless of which route renders, with a coverage test pinned so it cannot silently regress on a future refactor.
Shared Gmail password input removed from the member profile.: Members used to paste a credential into a form field, which is a security-shaped foot-shotgun. The field is gone. The integration is OAuth now, full stop.
LLM cost observability.: Every Claude call we make now writes to a cost table tied to the revenue funnel it serves. We can see, per day, what we are spending on inference versus what that inference is generating in MRR. Cheaper models replaced premium ones on location normalization with no quality drop, and the same dashboards now expose the funnel end to end.
What is next
A few things in the queue:
• The webinar funnel. The CTAs on the landing page already point to a live webinar, the embed is wired to our active recurring slot, and pricing for the self-serve path changed from a free trial to $19 per week immediate billing. The next round of work is the pre-webinar scorecard and the conversion of registrants into discovery calls.
• The coach scorecard and the recurring NPS pulse. Plumbing is in. The dashboards that show a coach their own scorecard, and the recurring pulse that asks each member how things are going, ship next.
• The multi-step apply flow we have been writing about since April. The schema is in. The seven step pages are wired. The Stripe checkout for the self-serve path is the last piece.
If you are an engineer thinking about a move, the application form is open. If you want to know exactly how the AI auto-applier decides what to send out on your behalf, our automated job applications guide walks through the matching pipeline end to end.