After my own offers came in, my friends naturally wanted to know what had changed. For two years I had been the cautionary tale, and suddenly I was choosing between firms. The honest answer was not a secret technique. I had stopped applying through portals and started emailing small firms directly, and I had written some code to do the slow parts.
So a few months back I set the rough version up for a handful of friends. Different courses, different cities, different targets: one wanted boutique law, one wanted asset management, one wanted marketing agencies. The scripts found the firms, read their websites, and drafted a personal first email from each friend's CV. They edited and sent from their own Gmail accounts.
Every single one of them landed an internship.
Not all from the first batch of emails, and not always at the firm they expected. One got a reply saying no, but the partner forwarded the email to a friend at another firm who said yes. That forward is the whole thesis in one sentence: at small firms your email reaches humans who know other humans, not a screening pipeline.
I want to be careful with this story. A handful of friends is not a study, and I will not promise you an offer. What I can tell you is that the mechanics are the same for everyone: firms that genuinely fit, found live and researched properly, reached at the address the founder actually reads, with a note that sounds like you and is true about you.
Watching people I know go from ignored to interviewing is what convinced me this was worth building properly. Until then it was a pile of scripts on my laptop that only I could drive. The months since have been about turning it into something any student can use alone, with the safety rails a product owes you: fact-checking against your CV, refunds for dead addresses, and the reason each firm was picked shown next to it.
Max, founder of GEN-MAX