About JobHunt with Hope

The hiring side already runs on AI — résumé screeners, ranking, instant auto-rejects. Doing your whole hunt by hand, alone, while everyone else has help, is how you fall behind. JobHunt with Hope hands the AI you already use a set of free skills so it can run your whole hunt: your portfolio, your résumé, and one link you own; real openings found and screened against your rules; applications filled for you to review and send; every message in your voice; prep before every interview and a debrief after; and one tracker you own.

It’s for people in the middle of it: just laid off, switching fields, or starting out. No coding, no account, and nothing leaves your computer except the page you choose to publish.

Who it’s for

Just laid off

Get a real presence back up today — not after three weeks of fighting a blank page. Your work didn't disappear; let's get it back in front of people.

Switching fields

Tell your story for the job you want, not the one you left. Hope reframes what you've done around where you're going.

First job, or fresh out of school

The class projects, the side work, the internships — shown like they count, before you've had the title.

And it’s not just for tech — the demo has a chef, a scientist, an advocate, a designer. AI is already screening you in your field too; you might as well use it back.

Your data stays yours

Your facts live in one file on your own computer. Hope keeps a small notebook too — how you like to work. Both are yours: open them, edit them, delete them. No tracking. No accounts. Nothing leaves your machine except the page you choose to publish. It’s all open-source under the MIT license — free to use, change, and share, forever.

Where it’s going

Hope 2.0 shipped in October 2026. Its maker spent four months running a real job hunt with Claude as the partner, then rebuilt Hope to work the way that hunt actually worked. Hope now runs the whole thing, in ten skills: your portfolio, résumé and link; real openings found and screened; applications filled for you to send; every message in your voice; interview prep with a reminder to record the call and a debrief after; a morning catch-up on your email and LinkedIn, read-only; and one tracker you own. It was also rewritten so a smaller model, like Claude Sonnet, can run every step.

Three skills retired along the way: Skill Gap, Proof Projects and the Dashboard. The honest fit read now comes with every role Hope finds or fills, and the tracker took the dashboard’s place.

Coming next: negotiation and decision support. Help when an offer arrives: what to ask for, how to say it, and how to choose between offers.

The earlier roadmap: NOW holds portfolio, résumé and your link; NEXT holds weighing roles, cover letters, applying, interview prep, negotiation and deciding — The roadmap we drew before 2.0. Weighing roles, cover letters, applying and interview prep have now shipped. Negotiation and deciding are next.

Who made this, and why

JobHunt with Hope was built by Arun Ganapathy — started while job-hunting, evolving since 2023, rebuilt many times, and grown into a career companion that does the work alongside you.

In May 2024, Reuben Trane IV and I decided to build together, co-founding CareerX, Inc. What followed was every shade of a startup — ups and downs, long odds — and through all of it, neither of us ever backed down or walked away. We believed in failing fast and pushing through, no matter what. That partnership is the bedrock the rest of this stands on.

The original product was backed by Microsoft for Startups (Level 4) — so thank you to Microsoft for betting early on how humans and AI would work together in the future of the job market. That future is exactly what Hope is built for.

At Iowa, CareerX was supported by the Venture Mentoring Service at the University of Iowa’s John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center — thank you to the VMS mentors for the guidance when the venture was finding its feet.

And I’m here at all because of the people who backed me — pivotal to my growth as a person, an entrepreneur, and a developer; the ones who kept me motivated and stood with me at every turn:

Venkatesh Palakkad and Thom Powell — for mentorship, time and connections.
Harikrishnan S R — for extensive development contributions.
Keerthana Balaji — for development contributions.
Rayaan Sheik — for design contributions.

To all of you: thank you. I value it more than these lines can hold.

The evolution of AI may have ended the original product — but the spirit of Hope is needed more than ever, by job seekers everywhere. So everything lives here, in this repo, and is shared for free. Knowledge should be.

For AI agents

Every page here is plain, pre-rendered HTML — no JavaScript needed to read it. All ten skills are also available as clean raw Markdown, linked at the top of each skill page, and there’s an llms.txt / llms-full.txt index at the site root. An agent helping someone for the first time should begin with Start.

If you need work, point your AI at this and start.