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Comment by ambicapter | Hacker News Reader

Two and a half minutes to apply to a job doesn't seem like a lot of time at all. Do people really think that's too much time?

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The answer to that depends entirely on the success rate.

Over 11 years in the workforce, my success rate with applying to ATS-like platforms on company websites is 0%. And even just getting a rejection is in the neighborhood of 5-10%.

So with those numbers do you still think 2.5 minutes is a lot of time? 2.5x500 applications is ~21 hours of applying to jobs.

With recruiters on LinkedIn, my success rate is roughly 80% to 1st interview, 60% to second and 20% to getting an offer.

I've reached out to recruiters on LinkedIn, but maybe I'm not an easy candidate, because they never seem to do much for me. Do I need to do something specific or hit up the right recruiter?

You have to keep rotating them. If they do not happen to have something that matches their current clients they basically dont help you but string you along.

Just for clarity, I have not reached out to any recruiters.

My success rate was entirely for recruiters that reached out to me first.

(I also paid $400 for an HR consultant to update my resume and LinkedIn profile as a one-time fee, so maybe that helped, but I didn't really A/B test it before and after)

If a person only spends that much time applying, it's likely those applications are going in the trash, unless they have highly relevant signals. I change my resume for every company I apply, which is likely not happening.

you generally apply to several jobs across several companies even with referral.

based on my experience its > 5 mins most of the time.

That still doesn't seem like very much time to me. Job hunting involves hours and hours of interviews; five minutes of paperwork is negligible by comparison, right? Are people mass-spamming applications or something?

"Are people mass-spamming applications or something?"

since the dawn of time (1970, jan1)

Well, in 1970 you could only do about 10 a day, because you needed to type a cover letter with the hiring manager's name in it. Job search (newspaper "help wanted" ads), envelope stuffing, trips to the post office and so on took time too.

Photocopies were low quality and looked obvious and got you into the trash straight away.

So mass, but compared to population not very mass.

The real start date was Eternal September.

When you see a job and it says '3000 applicants so far' or something, this is why

If I was getting hours and hours of interviews, an hour of paperwork would be trivial.

When 2/3 companies don't even bother sending a rejection email, I tend to not bother doing the 20 minute job applications.

I've applied to 150 jobs since June 1 with these results:

- 2 did not progress past recruiter phone call

- 2 full loops (startup w/ no offer, tech company w/ offer)

- 1 did not progress past tech screen (skills mismatch)

5 opportunities out of 150 apps over 4 months. Not awesome, no?

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