Real eyes
both sides.

There used to be a way to tell. A cover letter that knew the company. A resume tuned to the role. A reply that came back the same week. None of it was a guarantee, but it was signal — it told you someone had paid attention.

AI killed the signal. Candidates now fire off a hundred applications in an afternoon without reading any of the job descriptions. Hiring managers auto-reject a thousand resumes before lunch without reading any of them either. The motions still look right. The signal is gone.

Now both sides are guessing. Real interest looks the same as fake interest. A serious applicant looks the same as a bot. The only way out is for both sides to put something real on the line — something that can’t be faked, because it costs money.

Candidates pay a small refundable deposit to apply. Around $20 on a $100k role. You get it back if you’re interviewed. You get it back if the employer ghosts you past 21 days. You get half back if you’re rejected with a real reason instead of “we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.” You only lose your deposit if a company takes you seriously enough to thoughtfully reject you.

Employers pay fees that grow the longer a posting is open and the more applicants they ignore. A focused role closed in 10 days costs almost nothing. A rogue posting collecting 500 applicants over two months gets expensive fast. Companies that hire someone or close their posting on time get most of their fees refunded.

Forfeited deposits pool together and get paid back to the people who were mistreated on that specific posting. Bad actors literally subsidize the people they wasted time on.