Doorstep finds the cafés, shops and pubs near you who might be taking someone on — full-time, part-time or weekends — writes a proper letter for each, and hands every one to you to read before it goes.
About five minutes. Finding out how many places are near you is free — no card until you want to see them and write to them. Then it's £12.50, once. No subscription. Got the job? Nothing to cancel.
Stokes Lane Coffee Co.
What it looks like — an example place, and the letter Doorstep wrote for it.
How it works
A search a week is free, no card needed: see how many places near you might need people before you decide whether to pay.
Upload a CV, snap a photo of a paper one, or skip it — no CV needed. We can build you one you can keep and use anywhere.
The kind of work, the sectors you'd consider, the shifts you can actually do, and how far you can realistically travel on a Sunday morning.
We search the official food hygiene register and open mapping data for real employers near you, then rank them by fit and by any sign they're hiring.
We write one for each place, mentioning something specific and true about them. You read it, change anything you like, and approve it — it goes out under your name, with your CV attached and your address for replies. We never get access to your inbox.
Why bother
A café that needs someone next month doesn't write an advert. It mentions it to a regular, asks the staff if they know anyone, or waits for someone to walk in with a CV. If you only apply to what's posted online, you're competing with everyone else for the jobs that made it that far.
Walking in with a CV — a speculative application — used to be how you got these jobs. Doorstep is that, for every likely place near you at once — except you still choose each one, and nothing goes without your say-so.
The letters
Here's an example, unedited. No "passionate", no "dynamic", no "wealth of experience" — the words that get a letter binned.
The rules we work to
It would be easy to build one, and it would work for about a fortnight before every café in your town blocked it. So it's built the other way round.
No inbox access, no permissions to grant, nothing sent in the background. Every letter is approved by you, one at a time — if you don't approve it, it doesn't exist.
Every place has to genuinely fit before we'll write to it, and batches are deliberately small. If an area is thin we say so rather than padding it out.
One form, no account, no explanation needed. It applies to everyone using Doorstep, forever.
Automatically, by a job that runs whether we remember or not. No Meta pixel, no ad cookies, no third-party scripts — just our own cookie, which counts your rounds and remembers you've paid (plus a 15-minute one while you open an emailed link on a new device).
Tick boxes instead of blank pages — "opened up on my own", "handled cash and card", "worked a full service under pressure". Caring for someone counts. Volunteering counts.
Build my CV → 5Standard headings, real text, plain type — the layout recruiters and CV-scanning software both read. Pick the one that feels like you.
See the templates →Questions
It's free to find out how many places near you might need people — a real count, from your own search. Seeing them all, getting a letter written for each and sending them is the paid part: £12.50, once, with no subscription. That gets you as many rounds as you like, every letter sent from Doorstep, a follow-up written for you when a place goes quiet (you send it in one tap) and a nudge when somewhere new opens near you. Got the job? Nothing to cancel. The CV builder, and downloading your CV, are free whatever you're on.
Only the ones you approve, one at a time — there is no bulk send and no background sending. Doorstep has no connection to your inbox: an approved letter goes out under your name with your own address for replies, so anything they say comes straight back to you. Employers who don't publish an email address are never emailed: if they're on the food hygiene register, you may see them as places to walk into, with a letter you print and hand in yourself.
I don't know, and I'd rather say so than pretend. Doorstep is new. What I can tell you is what it does: it finds real employers near you who plausibly hire for the work you want, and writes you a letter that doesn't read like a machine wrote it. Whether that turns into a trial shift depends on you, on them, and on timing — which is exactly why the hub tracks what actually comes back.
It's used to work out what to say about you in the letters, and it's deleted after 30 days automatically. It isn't sold, shared or used for anything else. There's no Meta pixel and no ad cookies here. We count, anonymously, which steps people reach and which ad they came from. If you came from an Instagram or Facebook ad and say yes, we tell Meta when you see places, get letters written, or pay — never your CV or your letters. The privacy notice spells all of it out in plain English.
Batches are small and capped, every letter is specific to that employer, a person reads each one before it goes, and any business can opt out permanently in about ten seconds. Sole traders are never emailed; we may show them as places to walk into, using only their public register details.
Yes, if you're 16 or over. Finding out how many places are near you and making a CV are free. To pay you'll need a parent or guardian's OK. Some jobs, like serving alcohol, usually need you to be 18.
Five minutes, free to see how many places near you might need people — you'll see the count before you decide whether to pay. To see them all and write to them: pay once, no subscription.
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