One study showed that for every job opening, there are over a hundred applicants and only 20% will ever receive an interview. The average hiring process has increased from 12.6 days to 22.9 days.

Applying for a job has become a tedious process where it’s not uncommon for applicants to create multiple accounts for their respective employers, take personality analysis tests, and force them to retype their entire résumé in separate boxes. Then, when it’s all finished, they press the submit button and hope for the best. For many, submitting a résumé feels like throwing it into a black hole. With so little applicants getting interviews, many are left in the dust. They are placed in a sort of limbo swinging between whether or not they were unqualified or that employer is just slow to respond. It’s also not unheard of to have applicants get a phone call months after applying, asking if they want to come in for a interview. What’s frustrating is within that large span of time there were no frequent follow-ups. There was no scheduled email detailing the status of their application. There was nothing. Within this void time was lost, especially for those who are desperately searching for work to pay their bills and feed their families. Anyone who has gone job hunting knows one thing for sure: time is precious.

Arthur Malmis, the founder of RelyApply, LLC, was one of many individuals who experienced the woes of job hunting. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when an employer that literally was 5 minutes from his house took over a month to get back to him after he had spent over an hour and a half filling out their application. Frustrated he went online and saw that he shared this experience with many others too. It was always the same pattern: Apply and hope something happens. Energized by his frustrations and how common this problem was, he had an idea. That idea was to create a website where job hunters can share their experiences about the job application process. Arthur knew he had to make this platform, but didn’t really have the skillset to make it. So for almost year, he taught himself to code, plugging away relentlessly until finally he created and launched relyapply.com on March 2019.

RelyAppy (relyapply.com) is a free platform where users can anonymously share how long it took to hear back from employers they applied or interviewed at. They can even share their level of experience relative to the job requirements too. By allowing a platform to share their experiences in the job hunting process, many can now make informed decisions as to what should be a reasonable time frame to hear back after applying or interviewing for that specific employer. They can mark it down on their calendars that if don’t hear back within that time frame, they can do one of two things. The first, is to do their own follow-up. The second, is to assume they did not get the job and move on. Either way, it helps them have some closure. If job hunters see that a company isn’t too responsive, they might even save their time and not bother applying at all. Instead, they’ll apply to a more responsive employer.

In the end, RelyApply was a platform created to help job hunters save time, be efficient, and soothe their anxieties in a process that is often mind-numbing and filled with uncertainty.