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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

"5.4% conversion"

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.

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I would like to believe this, too. However, after spending 6+ months helping my SO applying for more than 100 positions, handcrafting every CV and cover letter for each position, highlighting the skills that each position required, and all that we got back was maybe 5 negative answers, I think it's time to try the mass spamming approach. It's true the positions were not hardskills programming ones (more BA/data analyst oriented), but I still find it quite baffling.

There are two routes to finding jobs.

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.

First route is essentially the only way of doing it, especially after you've been in the field for a bit. Either you're doing amazing work, and companies are after you, or you're a kid out of school. In between is ALL about who you know.

Really?

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.

A shortage at the price companies are willing to pay, typically growing slower than inflation.

Software development salaries are definitely beating inflation, by at least 2x recently.

http://www.workbridgeassociates.com/posts/images/1835/3054/C...

I thought there is a shortage on devs these days.

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".

That is an interesting perspective, but quite different than mine. But it could be there is both a shortage of devs and it is difficult to hire and eval etc.

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.

I hire very good people without personal connections using postings here, recruiters, etc.

Any chance you're hiring at the moment?

We're always kind of hiring. Depends if you've got a PhD in stats or some machine learning heavy field, can code a bit and want to work in London.

I have a mentor who convinced me to go the computer engineering route. How do I convince him to grease the wheels so to speak and go the nepotism route to help me land a job out of college? It seems he does not want to do this, and I cannot seems to land a job.

A first job can be hard to land. Are you looking for jobs that you are qualified for? Play up any internships you had. Are you looking in areas that have jobs that are introductory? It's not nepotism unless he's your uncle or something, but it is normal and fine for your mentor to help you find a job.

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.

May I ask what's SO?

Significant other?

Significant other, it means wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend.

Ah, an old /. refugee I see!

Stack Overflow. It's a website.

The strategy which worked best for me was to first find a job that I was interested in, and then to reach out to someone in recruiting via linkedin, twitter, whatever you find. The point is to have an actual conversation/email exchange so you're not just a pdf in someone's inbox. The recruiters won't think it's weird that you dug up their contact info because this is exactly what they do for a living, and you come in the door as a warm lead, so in the end it's a win for them. I had around an 80% success rate in getting phone screens and on-site interviews using this method.

+1 for the spamming approach. I've been in the software and system engineering field for over 15 years and the best jobs I've got involved the least effort.

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.

> He got 6 offers from those 70 interviews, which is over a 90% rejection rate

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.

This is because conversion rate is not the right metric to analyze, spamming as a job hunting approach might work, but it is not the best method given the desired outcome.

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's definitely not the key takeaway from the article. What's your point exactly? His approach worked. Your approach works as well. I doubt OP would claim your approach to be inferior, but for some reason you seem to want your process to be superior over theirs. Who cares?

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

The OP defined his funnel:

> * 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.)

Those numbers aren't precise because the experiment was not allowed to run to conclusion.

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."

> 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.

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.

> Personally, I go the other way. I send out resumes selectively, and run closer to about a 30% response rate.

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.

From TFA:

> 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.

Yeah that. Quality over quantity all day errday.

I agree that the ratios are most important. I tend to do highly targeted job searching (i.e. carefully screen for roles that would want me, that I would want).

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 :)

I wonder what's the conversation rate for a woman or person of color?

Person of color here. Everyone else have to struggle a bit more. I am not automatically privileged like the whites are born into. I changed my name in the resume to a white name just for a test and surprisingly got more interview requests.

Someone tested this a while ago by sending online applications with equal Ivy League graduate resumés by just switching the name to stereotypical ones(it was something like John on one, DeShawn on the other), and the 'white-sounding' name had an overwhelmingly higher number of responses.

I got a 100% response rate which makes me think I was aiming too low.

> .. which is over a 90% rejection rate

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.

I've just recently was approached by 3 recruiters, did one interview (15 minutes over the phone), received two offers (yes, that's right, one offer didn't even require an interview).

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.

I agree.. it's not at efficient way of going about finding a job. But it is effective, if the goal is to get a job. And at the end of the day, he has a job.

As Drucker used to say.. "focus first on being effective, then on being efficient"

It also depends. The way I look at it is the really good companies know people will seek them out. So to get really good jobs you have to seek them out. I've never really gotten an offer from a good company from a recruiter approaching me.

The really popular companies have people seek them out.

How tightly that correlates to "good" is pretty debatable.

An offer that does not require an interview is a massive red flag.

Not if it’s based on known job history, personal connection, or other factors that make a candidate known to the one offering. Interviews are typically a means of getting to know a candidate. If you already know them, there’s no need for interviews. I personally know quite a few devs I’d call up to chat about a job/project and give an immediate offer to if they were interested.

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.

It isn't if you know the person hiring you and they know you.

That's a completely different situation though.

Even then, I would expect to have a at-least a small chat for both of us to understand how each other's plans can fit in before accepting an offer.

Red flag warning of what?

I've never heard of a job without an interview.

A red flag regarding the nature of the company. No interview shows lack of diligence. If there is no diligence about who they let in, what else are they not diligent about?

May I ask for your no. of years of experience ? Also, would you kindly direct me to your LinkedIn profile? Would love to see how you did it ? Would you kindly suggest some Ljnkedin job hunting techniques?

There is no "technique" for LinkedIn job hunting that I know of, other than keeping your profile complete and up to date. Me personally, I'm a specialist with 11 years of experience, mostly in Java programmming and SOA architectures. There is a lot of demand for such specialists in my country, so I get contacted by recruiters quite often.

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.

May I ask for your country name?

> one offer didn't even require an interview

How does that work? Did they already know about you and/or have direct evidence of your work?

He lives in a world most of us have never heard of and talks like like that is normal.

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