70 job interviews in 17 days
blog.brandonwang.ca
blog.brandonwang.ca
That is the key number here. And that was just to get an interview. He got 6 offers from those 70 interviews, which is over a 90% rejection rate, despite some pretty good credentials in his background.
Personally, I go the other way. I send out resumes selectively, and run closer to about a 30% response rate. And In my entire career, I've only ever NOT gotten an offer twice. Not because I am some extremely special coder --- I'm not. But because I take some care in selecting who I talk to in the first place to make sure we're a match before even getting that far.
First route is through personal contacts/network/referral/nepotism/cronyism. In this case, your strategy of customizing resume and application is an effective strategy as you know your application will be reviewed a relavant human.
The second route is through applying to job listings when you don't have any contact. With this route the chances of your application being reviewed by relevant human is extremely low. In this case, you are better of reaching out to as many opportunities as possible. Pre-application suitability filtering and application customization is waste of job applicant's time. Instead have an standard application and just apply to all positions in your area of interest. Any filtering by job hunter happens once an interested company has made contact.
I thought there is a shortage on devs these days.
The last 2 years I only worked with companies I found online on some recruiting platforms.
http://www.workbridgeassociates.com/posts/images/1835/3054/C...
No. It's difficult to evaluate and hire, and the process generally takes much longer than companies would like, for a whole bunch of reasons (some good, some bad).
Which people confuse with "a shortage of qualified devs".
Seattle is estimated to have over 15,000 dev openings. My last company wanted to hire several hundred on its own. All the people we wanted had multiple offers. There seemed to be more jobs than people, but to be fair, it could be because we were all missing a bunch of good people. But it was hard to even get people to apply, they were tired of companies bugging them to interview. It sure felt like there was a shortage devs, because they didn't even want to interview with us.
Look for personal contacts that can help you get through the endless blitz of resumes. Look for a company recruiter on linked in or the web that hires people with your background, connect up with them, tell them you might be a good candidate. Respond quickly to their email. Look for user groups in your area, go to them. Ask your profs. Doesn't your college have a job counseling office, usually you can keep using it even after you graduate.
Sometimes I painstakingly craft out a cover letter and tailor my CV, but that seems to actually have a negative impact. My success rate is best when I don't write a cover letter at all; just attach your SO's CV to a blank email.
My guess is that it shows you don't really need their job, which makes you a more attractive candidate.
For people who don't see the key takeaway, my read is that it's something like the following: (a) consistency and hard work pays off: it is, or can be, a numbers game (b) thinking like a business can be a useful approach when looking for a job
> * 1300 applications > * ~70 interviews (~5.4% conversion) > * About 6 offers
Which result in:
> [T]he bar here isn't all that high because you only need to make one sale to land a job. ... I had too many interviews to really optimize any more than I did.
We have to ask ourselves if the most effective use of the author's (and employer's) time is doing 64 failed interviews, or whether some portion of those 64 prospects could have been "funneled out" with a lower-cost pre-qualification step in the funnel.
(edit: Another criticism is whether the author is filling his funnel with the "best" jobs by using job postings Angel.co. Do a web search for "the hidden job market" for more on this.)
From the post:
"It's of note that these conversion rates, are likely lower than their eventual steady state rates because I ended up accepting an offer which essentially stopped the process."
This is the fallacy of percentages rather than absolutes.
He got 6 offers.
How is that bad?
You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Sending 1300 applications and attending 70 interviews feels like a huge waste of time.
EDIT: Also, is sending an application still a thing? Being LinkedIn user for a while I really stopped watching job boards and just rely on offers sent directly to me.
As Drucker used to say.. "focus first on being effective, then on being efficient"
How tightly that correlates to "good" is pretty debatable.
Admittedly, in the context of recruiters, it could be different, but doesn’t have to be. Personal relationships are a strong signal for many people.
I've never heard of a job without an interview.
Regarding the offer that required no interview - turned out hiring manager and me had some mutual friends, so he just reached out to one of them to get an opinion about me.
For the other offer I had an interview, but it was very short - I think my resume speaks for itself, so it was more like loose talk about my previous projects than real evaluation of my technical knowledge.
How does that work? Did they already know about you and/or have direct evidence of your work?
> It's of note that these conversion rates, are likely lower than their eventual steady state rates because I ended up accepting an offer which essentially stopped the process.
His numbers aren't accurate.
My strategy and success rates are similar to yours, but I don't think that identifying good matches really explains all of the high response rate. The other piece of the puzzle is that when you go through this process you necessarily do a lot of work learning about the company/position and tailoring your application, and that work shows itself in your application package and your interview. You will stand out from the crowd of people who shotgunned a generic resume and cover letter.
That number is alarmingly accurate from the other side of the table too. I can't speak for any other companies, but from what I have personally observed, from 100 interviewed candidates we hire about 9. (Which translates to >90% rejection/non-hire rate.) The anecdotes from around the London tech scene imply that our numbers are not that different.
Basically, every company struggles with the same problem.
I even wrote about the experience as an interviewer some time ago: https://smarketshq.com/notes-on-interviewing-engineers-a4fa4... ; interviews are not easy. Regardless of the side of the table you're on.
My most recent job search had an 85% response/interview rate, and 42% of the total applications resulted in an offer... of course I only applied to 7 jobs :)
When businesses spam people they are getting customers, so if they are converting 5.4% out of hundreds of thousands they can get some nice change, but when a job seeker is spamming potential employers he only needs one acceptable offer.
Of course, spamming and getting multiple offers can give you leverage or comfort, but unlike companies which are not advised to put all their eggs in one basket by getting a very large customer, job seekers usually can only be in business with one company.
So I think it would be better to consider Customer Acquisition Cost instead of conversion here, even if the CAC is hard to measure because when talking about job applications it's more about time investment.
The reasoning is that when you spam thousands of job openings you heavily reduce your cost or effort to apply for a job, sending resumes selectively means a higher cost of acquisition but if it lands you the 'big one' it means a higher return on investment.
That has been my experience as well; smaller, "boring" companies (that I still genuinely want to work for), project list attached to CV priorized according to the company -> response rate of > 70 percent
Domain experience helps tremendously, if only because it builds some rapport with the interviewer.
Deep customization of CV / project list is lost for larger companies because it never reaches a person who understands it, leading to the abysmally low response rate.
I'm not the same as everyone else, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.
I'm a hiring manager, with many openings. To those who are considering this approach, keep this in mind:
- This industry is smaller than you think. I have colleagues all over town and across the country. It's not uncommon for me to be maybe 2-3 degrees of separation from any person or place on your resume. If I think you automated your way into a conversation with us, I don't discount you right away but I highly doubt your sincerity.
- Generic templated messages vs. thoughtful direct messages are _easy_ to detect. Even if I'm wrong, if it doesn't pass the smell test, I will pass.
Do NOT kid yourself about the importance of managing quality vs. quantity in discussion with us. This process likely works in landing you an interview, but it can ignore the human element. To me, how you get in the door matters. Picking out the interested-after-the-fact vs. those who have done their homework on us is easy, and that matters greatly to me.
I hire for the long-term and career-growth minded, and I recognize anyone on my staff can up and leave at any moment. I commit time, resources and energy to ensuring my staff is healthy and happy with us. This saturate-the-airwaves approach to introductions, even if refined, makes me think you're going to treat us as a temporary stop, simply looking to jump to the next "better" opportunity, and therefore leaves me less interested in devoting time to you.
If all this just sounds like better execution with this approach, you're right. Just remember you don't get a second chance with us to make a first impression.
If you're not big enough to have an initial screen happening, then obviously my point doesn't apply and you're entirely correct. But for many, getting anywhere near the hiring manager is the most difficult step.
Plus, from my memories as an applicant - to startups and larger firms alike - I can't tell you how many times in my past I've taken the step of writing a nice, personalized cover letter and a tailored resume for something which was a reasonably good fit, only to either never hear a word or to receive an automated form rejection in return. Courtesy is a two way street - if your ATS blasts rejections to people, you can't get upset with candidates blasting applications to play the numbers.
If everybody starts doing automated résumé spamming, then nobody will get past the HR filter, even if for no other reason than the volume of spammed résumés will become overwhelming. HR recruiters will respond by putting up other roadblocks to return things back to a manageable volume, most likely by requiring one of the much-hated automated coding tests as a screening step before a résumé will be considered, and then everybody loses out.
What this person is doing should be considered highly anti-social and inconsiderate.
We are a larger organization, and getting past the HR filter is understandable. We have taken significant measures to improve that step with us, and it has yielded much better throughput on worthy candidates. At sounds as though we do something similar internally -- incorporate shared reviews from our team with inbound resumes.
And to your point about a two-way street -- I couldn't agree more. We respond to everyone, and do so manually. We don't automate that way, as I want a human contact behind the message. (We don't get thousands of resumes, but we do get in the low hundreds.) I've found executing those directly is meaningful and translates to better communication over time. I think of it as a function of customer service, not recruiting.
To really tie it all together: we want to speak with those who have genuine interest, and are willing to put effort into it from the beginning of any conversation with us. We hope our candidates do the same.
I should add that this is probably easy for me to say since I'm outside of a tech hub and also receive a lower volume. If I were getting thousands per vacancy, I'd have to find a different approach, but handing the keys to the ATS is not how I'd want to have it go.
Yep, this. I actually see this as a future competitive advantage for us. I want us to be known for having a really positive experience for anyone who wishes to work with us, no matter the choice/decision that ultimately happens. It will take time to get there, but consistency builds reputation.
I am not saying to do this. I am saying, given the technological filter barriers that have been erected between applicant looking at a post and the real hiring manager, yeah, it is a reasonable response.
In terms of a search, I went through this recently. I activated my network (with a few well placed emails) as well as carefully submitting applications to various companies. My response rate to the latter was about 40%, including 2 solid offers. My response rate to the former was 100%, including 1 solid offer that route, 2 likely offers (had I continued). I ended the process by selecting the offer that I thought would be best for me. I had additional people I knew calling to recruit me for up to a month past this.
Not bad for an older-than-40-ish person.
My advice is quite simply, build your network. Make sure people know you, and know what you are capable of. Make sure your history is documented. Update your linkedin. Keep your skills current (ex-Fortran programmer here, so really ... current), show public code contributions. Play with relevant things so you can talk intelligently about them.
What bothered me were the "technical" interviews I ran through with some of the prospects, some of whom spent inordinate amounts of time on things unrelated to the tasks at hand. This is just like sales, you are looking for a fit. And if someone is looking at you for a particular role and asking you deep (meaningless in context) questions about things outside of this role ... this should be a huge signal or red flag to you. Just like with a sales call or meeting, you need to be able to understand when something goes sideways.
Don't get emotionally invested in this. You are selling yourself (your time anyway), and you have to hustle to make it happen.
Also this industry is actually much larger than you suggest, and I think your "2-3 degrees" claim is a bit extraordinary. There is far more software development going on outside the tech hubs than I think people in these hubs appreciate, and in many ways under the radar of the like who frequent HN.
Very true. As always, your mileage my vary.
> Companies foster career development less and less, and employees recognize this more and more.
Yes -- which is why we care about career development; it's something we view strategically. And yes, while some job functions are being commoditized, people are not. This is true across the industry, whether other companies choose to believe it or not. We take that seriously and make a commitment to those who work with us.
> this industry is actually much larger than you suggest, and I think your "2-3 degrees" claim is a bit extraordinary. There is far more software development going on outside the tech hubs than I think people in these hubs appreciate, and in many ways under the radar of the like who frequent HN.
When we recruit, we do so on a broad level and will look where others don't as a way to get a leg up on our competition. As a result, our staff works out of multiple locations nationally, as well as Canada and the EU.
I have colleagues in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, St. Louis, Nashville, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Charlotte, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Kansas City -- that's off the top of my head. My network is sizable.
The point of my comment is this: don't assume that if you reach out to me, I won't have any connection to your background through mutual relationships. I can't speak for others, but I doubt I'm so unique in this respect.
On the one hand I get that you need to require them to do something and I don't have an immediately better idea, but on the other hand they keep talking about increasing the number of jobs you have to apply for etc despite their literally not being enough jobs for everyone on benefits.
Fun times
I had to document a certain number of applications per week to get unemployment in the U.S., but those policies vary by state.
After a while you can tell that a good number of those positions are just recruiting firm honeypots; which makes the search both aggravating and depressing (since you feel like there aren't any /real/ jobs out there).
Wanting to work at any company that is willing to hire you, is that an unacceptable answer?
A few notes:
I'm not proposing high touch methods are incorrect. I'm proposing there exists an alternative.
HR professionals, the receiving end, spend their day spamming people on LinkedIn, email, etc. The same is true about sales people, marketers, and anybody trying to get the word out, except they do it at scale. I'm a little surprised by how many folks take issue with messaging people who might be interested and also do exactly what you're doing.
If everybody does this, then job hunting becomes more like marketing since your message/resume has to stand out more. Consumers are bombarded with messages every day, they're good at ignoring things they don't want. The folks doing the hiring would become better "consumers".
Engineering roles are, in general, way easier to land than a non-engineering roles because there aren't enough decent engineers.
That's the same logic used by advertisers to plaster every square inch of the world with ads. Yet how many people here on HN use spam filters on their mail, ad-blockers in their browsers and commercial-skipping functions on their DVRs? Are we, as job seekers going to want to run the gauntlet of whatever HR devises that's the equivalent of those things if your technique becomes common?
Perhaps your method works, perhaps it's not against any rules, but I have to say that find it to be morally dubious at best. I sincerely hope that it does not see wide adoption.
Why is it morally dubious?
You have to become better at demonstrating value, yes.
Stay for one year, then start looking around- you will be surprised by your range of options.
In the meantime, keep looking.
Absurd as it may be, it is the reality of the market and the majority of graduates go through it.
Hang in there, it is worth it in the end.
I'm an EE, less relevant than CE to CS (if you're going after software positions). There are plenty of EEs, physicists, etc. who are in top posts at most tech companies for software. Your degree isn't limiting you.
Job hunting is about demonstrating value to people who matter. If you can demonstrate value to the hiring person (hiring manager, HR, etc.), then you'll get hired.
So while the resume and education are one thing, they're really the tip of the iceberg. You can contribute on open source, you can showcase papers you've authored, you can build relationships with hiring managers to show that you know your stuff.
If you're going for hardware, hardware positions are lower paying, harder to get, and require more experience than software positions. You might want to apply for internships. Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia, all have great internship programs. They might get you to do fun things you'd never do as a full timer as well (Apple gets lots of interns to go to Shenzhen, Nvidia gets it's interns to drop boxes on the floor to test packaging).
Almost all tech companies I've ever interacted with have different staff that deal with new grads/university students than the rest of HR. A typical HR person probably doesn't like new candidates, but new grads are what university recruiters are supposed to do. I'd seek out university recruiters specifically (you can search "university recruiting" on LinkedIn).
I know lots of people who start companies because the jobs they're qualified for, suck. Honestly, I started my first company because I engineering stopped being challenging/fun and no business wanted to take me on. Now I can say I've scaled businesses, sold my B2B SaaS product to $B companies, etc.
Finally, on the motivation/keeping the hope alive. I've had my fair share of dark times. Tony Robbins, Art Williams, and Zig Ziglar are all great to listen to.
Best of luck!
Unilaterally spamming potential employers in this way may result in improving your outcomes, but at whose cost?
while(true) {
1. faced with a large number of resumes, employer become aggressive about filtering.
2. faced with a large number of rejections or not hearing back, employee sends even more resumes.
}
homeless dude looks up hopefully, fishes out his tattered, vacant resume
"In my case, my message was: I've built 2 companies, got a strong technical background, worked at places like Microsoft/Amazon/Nvidia, and I'm looking to work with great people."
Oh.
If you are unemployed for more than about 6 months, people start to look at you suspiciously, but after that you can't really fall any further. Being unemployed for 1 year or 2 years can be an advantage if you use that time productively. It won't appeal to everyone, but battling back from nothing is also a compelling story.
Like I said, there will be many people who can not do it, for one reason or another, but I think the message that brand is important is not wrong.
Most people probably wouldn't be that lucky.
Still, it does also show that even the best candidates will struggle with the job finding process in this day and age. I mean, someone with that sort of technical background and experience should be getting offers all over the place.
If you're an ex Microsoft/Amazon/Nvidia employee who set up two companies and has a strong technical background, and you're still only getting a 5.4% conversion rate...
Yeah, the system is really messed up.
1. I highly second using angel list. Modern founders know, and we (graphistry) list there!
2. ... We are overwhelmed by candidates from there, both by junior or bigco candidates who are hard to distinguish just on paper, and senior candidates who we are not sure are serious. Probably ~100% of the people we talk to didn't do the author's generic approach, but shared a carefully crafted 1-3 paragraphs. The more you go out of your way, the more we notice.
Take it from the perspective of a neat small team (like ours!) who is excited about what we do & are growing. Whoever we hire now has a huge impact on what we're building, and as we're planning out the next 3-4 doublings of our team, your personal DNA & culture will determine the success of the 10 people who descend from you. You want to apply to teams who are spending time on doing this well.. and in turn, do it well yourself.
Also.. build@graphistry.com if you agree ;-)
> Having lots of offers takes a lot of psychological pressure off of the process.
This intrigues me the most, I'd love to hear more about it. I personally would have expected the opposite before reading this. Often having multiple job offers makes me freeze up and worry a lot about which one I should choose. But maybe that's because I'm worrying about 2-3 jobs I want, as opposed to 70. I'm often optimizing relationships and my own happiness potential rather than compensation. That one sentence does make me want to try an approach like this.
It'd be equally easy to spam without a script, right? This one looks like it hit "Apply" 1300 times in 1.5 hours - I'm looking at the 4 second delay. The script might be a 10-20 minute job, but I'd be paranoid enough about running something like this with my name attached that testing it and making absolutely certain it didn't go haywire would very likely take me a few hours. I probably would have done something that didn't scale, and clicked 1,300 times manually.
I did chuckle a little when creativity was mentioned multiple times, for a process that is automated and "spam". It is a bit creative, so I don't mean to judge - I'm seeing the word spam in many comments here - but I feel like there are some much more creative ways to get exactly the job you want, and the idea here might be more about DIY than "creative" per se.
By the time I step into the employer's office, I am 90% sure I would like to work for them. Anything else would be inefficient use of time, both mine and the employer's.
Does anyone know how to find these companies when you're already at the high end of the spectrum? There are thousands of start ups and even shooting an email or checking LinkedIn for previous work history of current engineers can be a time drain to figure this out.
Ideally, the compensation would be something like > 80% total comp of big tech company in liquid money + a lot of private RSU's ( > 50% of big tech total comp)
When I took my current position, I had only one offer. I was moving cities and my response rate was lower than I'd like (some jobs explicitly requested locals), plus I had a shorter window in which to jump ships.
Needless to say, I wasn't negotiating from a position of strength. A nice bump, for sure, but I could have done much better. I regret having to move so quickly.
But now that I have a strong name on my resume, companies are lining up to interview me and this time around I can pit their offers against one another.
Sure, having to pick companies might be slightly stressful, but knowing you got the best deal is an amazing feeling.
Not a Devo fan, are you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass
> With multiple offers you are guaranteed to be able to get higher pay, more time off, and/or better working conditions.
Actually, you aren't. You are, however, free to pick one of many offers, and one of them may suit you better than the others. Perhaps you can negotiate better offers, but this doesn't mean that a potential employer may be willing to present a better counter-offer.
You're somehow assuming that salary is the only relevant parameter in choosing a job, or even that all jobs are equivalent in career growth and creating more job opportunities. Some jobs are dead-ends and career killers, even if they pay more. This sort of stuff needs to be considered.
I benefit from a lot of privilege and circumstance, but any company making me an offer probably knows that not having another offer right now doesn't weaken my hand, at any moment i'm only a few days away from another offer if I really want it.
So yeah, I suffer from anxiety-related issues, I'm going to choose the route of less stress.
Basically, all 4 options had variables that appealed to me, and there was no clear winner.
The fundamental issue was that my dream job doesn't appear to exist in London right now, the kinds of things I want to work on all seem to require moving to either SF or NY. So I was essentially having to work out which job would most progress my skillset and experience for 2-3 years from now.
But... I bet the author is right about this mass application technique lowering his stress. He's gaming the system and not applying through his network, there's no great reason to care deeply about any of the offers, and he has so many offers that it's not risky to mess some of them up. You get to be detached and learn more about the application process by doing dozens of them at once.
It reminds me of this Moth podcast story about the guy who data mined for dates on OK cupid. https://themoth.org/stories/data-mining-for-dates Worth the listen, but he reported being a lot less invested in individual dates, and seeing interesting patterns in the process. It did add some stress, but a different kind of stress than he had with one-date-at-a-time.
So you're right that maybe the mass approach is better for avoiding this feeling, although it's hard to imagine taking it unless I was already out of work and could invest the time in such a high number of potential interviews.