How Promptly works
Promptly tells students when an internship opens. This page explains exactly how — which systems we read, how a posting gets verified, and, just as importantly, what we cannot see. Every number here is generated from the live system, not typed in by hand.
Checking the live feed…
Where the listings come from
Most job sites copy listings from other job sites, which is why they go stale. Promptly reads employers' own applicant tracking systems — the software a company's recruiting team actually posts jobs into. When a role appears there, it is real, and it is current.
What happens when a role opens
An employer publishes a role
It goes live in their hiring system, usually before it is announced anywhere else.
Promptly's pipeline picks it up
An automated job runs every hour, across every employer we monitor, and compares what is live now against what was live an hour ago.
It is filtered down to student roles
Internships and early-career roles for the relevant recruiting cycle are kept. Senior, experienced, and past-cycle postings are filtered out.
Matching students get alerted
A phone notification goes out immediately. Email is batched into one daily digest, deliberately — so a busy day never turns into twenty emails.
How a posting gets verified
If the employer is not showing it, neither are we
There is no manual "verified" badge to trust. A posting appears in Promptly only while it is live in the employer's own feed. The moment a role is filled or pulled, it stops appearing in that feed, so it disappears from Promptly on the next refresh — automatically, without anyone having to notice.
That is also why every alert links to the employer's official posting and never to a copy of it.
What Promptly cannot see
Some employers publish nothing we can read
A number of well-known firms — including several large consultancies and banks — do not expose a machine-readable job board at all. We cannot monitor those automatically, and we do not pretend otherwise. In the app, those companies are labelled plainly instead of promising an alert that would never arrive.
For those, you can paste the employer's careers link and Promptly will watch it for you if the page is one we can read. If it is not, we log it as a coverage request for our team rather than quietly dropping it.
Coverage is still uneven, and here is where
Our strongest coverage is in technology and finance, because those employers overwhelmingly use the public hiring platforms above. Fields like consulting, government, and nonprofit are thinner for the same structural reason. We are actively widening this, and we would rather show you the real distribution than round it off:
Every employer we monitor
The full list, straight from the live registry. No other job product will show you this, and that is precisely why we do.
What we never do
- We never apply to a job for you. Promptly is the signal; you apply with the employer.
- We never charge students, and we never take a fee to surface a posting.
- We never sell your data. Details are on the privacy page.
- We never invent a listing, a link, or a number. If we cannot verify it, we say so.