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Credit Christoph Hitz

We have come to expect our smartphone apps to accomplish any simple task we ask of them: order food, get from here to there, read the news and maybe buy tickets to a movie or a concert. But when they offer to do complex tasks, it’s best to remain skeptical.

I’ve looked at apps that promised to help their users find gainful employment before, but a new app called Planted is distinguished by the type and quality of the jobs that it connects applicants with.

The app, formerly known as Lynxsy, claims to specialize in helping recent grads find nontechnical roles at start-ups. Planted makes money by charging companies a fee based on salary when they hire its users.

A candidate is asked upon registering with Planted to complete a questionnaire and upload a résumé. The questions are quirky (“Does your family hate playing you in Monopoly because you refuse to lose?”) but are meant to give the app a baseline for the roles a candidate is best suited for. Users are then assigned “career totems” (mine was a cat), after which the app begins to suggest suitable jobs.

The questionnaire is so short that it is hard to believe Planted is gaining a thorough understanding of its users. The initial options I was shown were for sales positions, roles in which I have no interest whatsoever, and jobs I would have been sure to avoid if the questionnaire had been more direct.

Depending on the desperation level of the unemployed person, though, it might be a relief to see that there are available jobs in the world, period. And once the résumé is attached, the user can start the application process with a single tap.

Of course, there remains the question of actually getting the job: Planted cannot guarantee anything other than that these companies are generally looking to hire.

Planted claims that seven in 10 candidates who apply to a given company will receive an interview. The app has more than 20,000 users on the platform, and is partnered with more than 500 start-ups. Its founders say that “over 200” candidates have been hired since the service was launched.

But while Planted isn’t likely to hook users up with their dream jobs, it does excel at identifying real start-ups that are actually hiring. The job search is demanding and exhausting, and one of the hardest parts is simply finding new places to apply. Planted helps to solve that problem.

Susan Zheng, one of the app’s founders, suggested that Planted’s goal was simply to “surface these interesting opportunities at companies that our users normally wouldn’t find otherwise.”

That’s a refreshingly modest pitch, and something that can absolutely help applicants, whether or not they end up getting the job through Planted.