Past the Post
Behind the posting: meet the people at the companies you applied to.
Turn applications into conversations. You tell Past the Post where you've applied. It finds people at each company you share something with (school, hometown, clubs, past jobs), plus the team and recruiters, links their LinkedIn profiles, drafts a short first message, and helps you turn replies into coffee chats and referrals. It isn't a job board: Simplify and others already find jobs. Past the Post starts after you apply.
Live app: https://past-the-post.vercel.app/
Why
Referrals are only 6 to 7% of job applications but 30 to 50% of hires (Chanty, citing Zippia, SHRM and Forbes Agency Council). Most students know they should network, but not who to message or what to say. Past the Post does the research and leaves the conversations to you.
What it does
| Step | What happens |
|---|
| 1. Set your target | Claude asks about ten short questions: cities, role, term, companies, school and year. |
| 2. Find open internships | Every posting is checked on the company's own careers site, with the best match flagged. |
| 3. Find people to message | People you share something with first (school, hometown, clubs, past jobs), then former interns, the team and recruiters, each confirmed from a source. |
| 4. Draft first messages | A connection note under LinkedIn's 200-character limit: who you are, the role, one detail from their profile, and a 15-minute chat ask. No referral asks. |
| 5. Tailor your resume | Rewritten to match the posting using only what's true, as a one-page PDF. |
| Tracker | Every message and application with its status, plus totals for a LinkedIn post. |
| Chat prep | When someone replies: their background, your 20-second intro and questions to ask. |
You send every message and every application yourself. The tool never sends, applies or connects for you.
How to use it
Fastest: open the live app, add your school and the jobs you applied to (or fill them from your tracker), and press Run free in Claude or Run free in ChatGPT. A new chat opens with everything filled in; your own free account does the search and ends with a results block. Paste it back and you get, for each application, the posting link plus people with LinkedIn links and a drafted note. When someone replies, "prep me" opens a coffee chat prep in the same assistant, ending with a referral ask.
Deeper search in Claude: on Use in Claude, do the one-time setup (a free Claude account, optionally a free Clay account), copy the skill into a new chat and say "Help me find an internship."
No install and no sign-up on this site. The tracker is stored in your own browser; use Back up to save a copy.
How it was built
Past the Post is two parts:
- The skill (
skill/SKILL.md): the instructions Claude follows. It uses Clay to find people and web search to check postings.
- The web app (
index.html, assets/): a plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript site with no build step. It runs the one-page search, hands the skill to Claude for deeper runs, and keeps the tracker.
- Free runs: Try it builds a prompt from the form, opens it in the visitor's own Claude or ChatGPT, and parses the JSON block they paste back into cards and tracker entries. Nobody pays for these searches.
- The backend (
api/run.js), for access-code demos: one Vercel serverless function. It calls the Claude API with web search and a strict output schema, streams progress to the page as it searches, and returns postings, people and notes as JSON. The API key stays on the server, each visitor is limited to a few searches an hour, and an optional ACCESS_CODE limits live search to people who have the code (a link with ?code= fills it in).
Decisions that came from testing
I built this during my own Summer 2027 internship search, and most rules came from something that went wrong:
- Postings are checked on the company's own site. Job boards keep closed and last-year listings up.
- Companies are identified by LinkedIn URL, not web domain. Searching by domain matched the wrong companies (pga.org returned a small fund in Florida).
- Every alumnus is confirmed one by one. The search tool's school filter matched loosely, and similar names (Texas A&M-Commerce) don't count. About 1 in 9 current staff at a target company turned out to be alumni.
- First messages ask a question, not for a call or referral. People reply to something they can answer in a line.
- Apply first, then message the same day. Programs review applications as they arrive.
- Tools are described honestly. Apollo was tested as a second people source; its people search needs a paid plan, so the setup says so.
See the changelog for the full history.
Results so far
On my own search: 10 open Dallas-Fort Worth internships found and verified, 3 applications, 6 LinkedIn messages and 1 reply.
Run it locally
npm install
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... npx vercel dev
# or, for the front end only:
python3 -m http.server 8000
Credits
Adapted from Use AI to Meet People at Companies You Want to Work For by Angus the Nontechnical.
Built by Bruce Hinson, Texas A&M. MIT License.
