About the author

Nenad Franjic

Senior marketer, and the person who builds Job Badger. I spend my working life on the other side of this problem — writing to persuade people who have very little time and a great many things competing for their attention. A job application is the same problem in miniature.

Job Badger exists because the advice available to applicants is mostly confident and untested. Guidance gets repeated because it sounds right, not because anyone checked whether it worked. The guides here try to do the opposite: say the useful thing plainly, and admit where the honest answer is “nobody knows”.

What the guidance is based on

The guidance here is tested against real applications and their outcomes — including the rejections — rather than written from a content brief.The method behind Job Badger's letters — one argument carried through a letter rather than a list of achievements — came out of that material, and the tool applies the same rules the guides describe.

Where a claim rests on something official rather than on our own experience, the guide cites it — the European Commission's Europass standard, the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, EURES — so you can check it without taking our word.

How these guides are written

Written by a person, edited by a person, and published under a name. AI is used in building the product — it is what writes your cover letter — but the guides are editorial: each one exists because a specific question kept coming up, and each is revised when the answer changes. They carry an honest last-updated date.

• Why am I not getting interviews?
• How to write a cover letter that actually gets read
• How to message a hiring manager after you apply
• The career-change cover letter
• How long should a cover letter be?
• How to explain a gap in your CV
• The ATS-proof CV checklist
• The job boards most people never search
• How many remote jobs can you actually apply to?
• Do job ads show the pay? A pay transparency report
• We tried 26 job APIs. Here is what works and what does not
• Why that remote job might not be open to you
• What rejections actually tell you (and what they don't)

Data we rely on

Job listings come from public job boards, and every result names the board it came from. To know which country a city is in, so that a search with few results can offer the whole country, we use place names from GeoNames, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Which region and district a European town belongs to comes from Eurostat (© European Union), so a search for a town can find the jobs the EU's EURES portal lists around it.