Two Skills I Built to Automate My Job Search with Claude Code

I'm a few months into a job search after a layoff, and I kept running into the same two problems: I was spending too long deciding whether a job listing was worth my time, and my resume was drifting out of sync with what was actually landing in interviews. So I built two Claude Code skills , reusable, file-based instructions Claude Code follows every time I invoke a slash command, to close both gaps. This is a walkthrough of how they work, why they're structured the way they are, and what I learned building them. If you haven't used Claude Code skills before: a skill is just a markdown file with YAML frontmatter ( name and description ) that lives in .claude/skills/{skill-name}/SKILL.md . The description field is what Claude uses to decide when to trigger the skill automatically, and you can always invoke it explicitly with /skill-name . The problem Job searching produces a lot of repetitive judgment calls: Is this listing worth 20 minutes of my time? Every JD needs to be read against my actual background, not against wishful thinking. Once I've scored 30+ listings, what do they add up to? Patterns emerge: the same gap gets flagged five times, the same bullet gets written from scratch in every cover letter, but nobody's collecting those patterns into resume improvements. Two skills, one for each problem: /score-job and /resume-sharpener . They're designed to work as a pair, the first generates raw signal, the second mines it. Skill 1: /score-job Input: paste a JD or give a URL. Output: one markdown file, job-search/scored-listings/YYYY-MM-DD-{company}-{role}.md . Reading the right context every time The skill starts by reading a fixed set of source files in parallel: my resumes (I keep four: engineering, PM, FDE/presales pivot, and a PeopleSoft-specific one), a profile doc, a skills inventory, and a filters doc that encodes what counts as a disqualifier. Critically, it re-reads these every run rather than caching anything, because they evolve as I update my resume o