Your First Application

This guide walks you through creating a complete job application with Jojo, from finding a job to deploying your personalized landing page.

1. Find a job

Find a job posting you’re interested in. Save the job description as a text file or copy the URL.

# Option A: Save to a file
pbpaste > job_description.txt

# Option B: Have the URL ready
# https://careers.acmecorp.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer

2. Choose a slug

Pick a short, descriptive identifier for this application. You’ll use it in every command.

# Good: company + level + role
acme-corp-senior-dev
bigco-principal-eng
startup-fullstack-2024

Use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens only. See the new command for detailed slug guidelines.

3. Create the workspace 

# From a file
./bin/jojo new -s acme-corp-senior-dev -j job_description.txt

# From a URL
./bin/jojo new -s acme-corp-senior-dev -j "https://careers.acmecorp.com/jobs/123"

This creates applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/ with the processed job description and extracted metadata.

Verify the workspace:

ls applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/
# job_description.md  job_description_raw.md  job_details.yml  website/

Review job_details.yml to confirm the company name, job title, and other metadata were extracted correctly.

4. Generate all materials

Set the slug once and generate everything:

export JOJO_APPLICATION_SLUG=acme-corp-senior-dev
./bin/jojo generate

This runs all generation steps in order: research, resume, cover letter, annotations, branding, FAQ, website, and PDFs.

The process takes a few minutes depending on your AI provider and model.

5. Review the output

Your applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/ directory now contains:

applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/
├── branding_statement.json
├── cover_letter.md
├── cover_letter.pdf
├── faq.json
├── job_description.md
├── job_description_annotations.json
├── job_details.yml
├── research.md
├── resume.md
├── resume.pdf
├── status_log.md
└── website/
    └── index.html

Review each file:

  • research.md — Does the company research look accurate?
  • resume.md — Are the right skills and experience highlighted?
  • cover_letter.md — Does it sound like you and address the role?
  • website/index.html — Open in a browser to preview

6. Customize as needed

Edit any markdown file and regenerate specific outputs:

# Edit resume, then regenerate cover letter and website
nvim applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/resume.md
./bin/jojo cover_letter
./bin/jojo website

7. Deploy the website

Copy the website directory to your hosting:

cp -r applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/website/ \
  /path/to/your-site/applications/acme-corp-senior-dev/

The landing page is a self-contained HTML file — no build step needed.

8. Apply

You now have:

  • A tailored resume (markdown and PDF)
  • A personalized cover letter (markdown and PDF)
  • A professional landing page with portfolio, recommendations, and FAQ

Include the website link in your application to give employers a comprehensive view of what you bring to the role.

Next steps

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