Massive Wages War on the Job Application Process
Founder Dan Vykopen on Beating CAPTCHAs, Exposing Ghost Jobs, and Giving Power Back to the People
Dan Vykopen on Why the Job Search Is Fcked—and How AI Might Actually Fix It
"Job seekers have been fucked and getting f**ked for, you know, forever because they haven’t had any power." — Dan Vykopen, Founder & CEO of Massive
This isn’t hyperbole. And it’s not just a founder rant.
We rarely interview founders. But Dan Vykopen is a different beast. He and his team are fighting an uphill battle most wouldn't dare touch, and they’re doing it with raw conviction, hard data, and frankly, zero interest in pleasing the venture consensus.
Dan’s not wrong. Over 75% of job applications are now screened by AI, and the average corporate job gets over 250 applicants, according to Zety and SHRM. Meanwhile, job seekers are manually filling out the same forms 50 times a week, navigating ghost jobs, CAPTCHAs, and hallucinating AI tools. We agree, this is kind of not sustainable.
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Back to Dan:
What’s worse? Nearly half of job seekers ghosted by companies say they wouldn’t apply to them again.
We’ve automated rejection, but not dignity.
That’s the space that Massive is taking on.
"It’s nuts to me that people are still entering their name and education five times per job. I’ll break my computer if that’s still the norm in three years."
Massive isn’t just automating job applications. It’s rebalancing leverage.
It's an AI agent that matches you to jobs, fills out apps, prepares you for interviews, negotiates your comp, and tracks which listings are ghost jobs, all for the job seeker, not the employer.
This has some real implications:
📈 For Investors:
Massive is one of the few consumer AI products that has hit actual product-market fit. It charges job seekers directly and boasts viral traction, with 30,000 people joining the waitlist in weeks from a single LinkedIn post. It’s a thesis-breaker for investors stuck on the “AI is B2B SaaS only” narrative. It’s also past 100k users.
This is AI with business model clarity, and a wedge into a $400B+ global recruiting industry that no one wants to touch because it’s hard.
👔 For HR and People Teams:
Massive users are getting to you without going through your front door, and you don’t even know it.
They’re bypassing friction, navigating broken UX, and finding ghost jobs before your ATS does.
"Companies can’t tell right now who’s applying with AI. But when they find out, it’s often a good surprise, because they never would’ve seen these candidates otherwise."
If your TA stack isn't ready for this, you're already behind.
The signal Massive generates (interview rates, drop-offs, bad actors) is exactly the type of real-time market intelligence HR has never had access to. That’s changing.
"CAPTCHAs, 2FA, hallucinations. We had to build around all of it. We came close to dying three times."
Massive isn’t just building a job search tool.
They’re flipping the power dynamic.
And this interview makes that impossible to ignore.
Massive isn’t just another job board clone. It’s an agent that works for the job seeker. It’s matching, applying, prepping, negotiating, and even sniffing out ghost jobs before you waste your time.
“Candidates have never had access to this kind of data before, real-time interview rates, what resumes are landing interviews, which jobs are dead ends. We're making that data available to protect them.”
“We screen companies just like they screen you. If we know they're shady, we pull them. Our loyalty is to the job seeker, full stop.”
So yes, it’s AI.
But it’s AI with a spine. With a perspective. With a team willing to go through hell to flip one of the most lopsided systems still operating at scale.
Massive is building what the old job sites couldn’t:
A real market, where power, transparency, and dignity flow both ways.
And after reading this?
It’s impossible to unsee how broken things really are, and how fixable they might be.