I applied to 250 jobs and timed how long each one took | Hacker News Reader

I applied to 250 jobs and timed how long each one took

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45 pointstaubek36 comments

The process is pretty bad from a hiring manager's perspective also. The company I work for requires uploading a resume and filling out some basic questions, along with applying via LinkedIn. It's fairly easy and not much of a burden for the applicant. What this translates to on my end is 200 resumes per day for a basic entry-level engineer role, half of which don't even meet the minimum requirements on the posting. To get to a manageable number of resumes to manually review, you either have to use an automated filtering system or have the recruiter filter through them manually. This leads to a lot of rejections, which in turn leads to every applicant applying for basically every single job they are halfway qualified for out of desperation. It's a broken process all around.

I've recently started seeing job postings that say at the bottom "Mail physical resume" - is that the new brown M&M test?

Also, can't the hiring process be improved with optimal stopping?

Wow, 200/day. How of your time does that consume?

Lol recently went for job as a systems engineer. 7 month interview process, handful of psych tests. Still didn't get the role despite being the teams top pick courtesy of some other teams input. IT is honestly horrible to find work in despite the claims of shortages.

Meanwhile, start doing construction. Instantly booked out for the next 4 months with work at a higher rate than I get paid in IT and i got zero tickets. Probably have the next year of jobs booked before the first quarters over.

Tbh all I see in IT is zero job security and companies who go against actual good security posture in chase of a profit. Can't wait til AI automates most of these msp muppets out of business.

Is this for some sort of low end secretarial job where industry does not matter? Or are these fake applications just to test this?

idk these shotgun job searches always blow my mind. 250? Think I’ve applied to maybe 8 jobs in my life

Author mentions applying to engineering roles

>Think I’ve applied to maybe 8 jobs in my life

Someone has life on easy mode.

Or is going it on hard mode where an app follows hundreds of hours of networking and outreach before actually applying.

Not necessarily. I am in the same case as OP. Basically I am a specialist with a PhD in a niche topic. There are at most a handful job postings per year that fit my profile perfectly, but then I have virtually no competition. If you have a generic profile ("frontend developer"), you get hundreds of opportunities per day, but are alao in competition with hundreds of similar applicants.

My position is comfortable, but if interest in my particular combination of skills decreases, things could get quite difficult.

Hundreds of hours of networking? what?

Who does that and why? Are we talking about political jobs? or nepotism?

Not typically hundreds of hours networking for a single position, but it's difficult to overstate the value of that network when you're looking for a job. Anything at all you can do to skip the HR resume filter will put you in a much better spot than 95% of other applicants. All of my major career advancements have come because of a combination of what I know and who I know. I can't see myself ever applying for a role using the HR provided application mechanisms. Any future job will be a referral, just like the last few have been.

Hundreds of hours of networking is an average of 1 (actively networking) hour per week over 5 years. I.e. every couple of weeks go to a short event or get together for the afternoon. It's not something you do for 2 months straight after losing your job. I mean, you could... but it's significantly less effective that way.

If you do this sanely you get more out of the event than just networking as well. Generally it's a great way to learn about new or different things you may not see at your company.

I’ve done that for every job I’ve gotten in the past 20 years.

I’m not sure if everyone does it this way, but I identify an org. Then I look for people who work in that org or near it and find authentic ways to connect with them to learn about the position. And I just work toward a hiring manager until I’m able to spend time with them and demonstrate value.

And then eventually, if it’s a match, they have a position that I apply to and usually their decision is made before I apply.

This seems pretty common in how I hire as well as it’s really useful to be able to meet and identify people who will be a good fit. It’s much harder to sort through tons of applicants.

Just a more networking & recruiter driven approach.

I’d call it efficient rather than easy.

Not all of us are looking to jump jobs every 18 months to Moore's law our salary. Most of us want to focus on the important things like friends and family and hobbies and aren't playing a high score game with our finances.

I'm not sure how the number of jobs someone has applied to relates to how easy or difficult life is.

Is that your experience?

Speaking of IT specifically, the folks I know who have applied to lots of job did that either because they apply for the wrong jobs for their skills, or because they job-hop to get raises more often (which is totally fine, of course, but feels like a self-inflicted difficulty level increase in the game of life).

The folks not in IT that I know (mostly family, so I know them very well) have a not-easy-at-all life mode (in fact, they often rely on financial support from me and other family members) yet they don't apply to many jobs.

There's a very specific case I have in mind of a close relative who works in the tourist industry (in a kitchen) and despite several attempts from me to encourage her to apply to jobs in other industries (because her line of work sucks terribly bad compared with IT, not just the pay, also the long, unpredictable work hours, unpredictable free days, work accidents, the probability of which increase with the long hours, to the point that she ends up in the ER at least once a year due to a very nasty cut or burn) doesn't do that because her work/life balance leaves her exhausted enough that she can't think of spending the time and energy to apply for another job. So here's a person in her early 30s who's probably applied to, max, 5 jobs in her life, and most definitely does not have life on easy mode.

Or is very young. I hadn't applied to a lot of jobs when I got my first job. For the second, though, I spent a year unemployed in the middle of the dotcom crisis and must have applied to hundreds.

These days I don't apply to anything but recruiters come to me. That's definitely easy mode, but it's not where I started.

>For the second, though, I spent a year unemployed in the middle of the dotcom crisis and must have applied to hundreds.

I remember in one of his interviews Larry Page said that after the dot-com bubble, Google was getting hundreds of job applications every week or something like that. I know I was shocked when I heard that because it turns out majority of people just want a safe job not necessarily the highest paid job.

One day there will be a genius or group of geniuses who find a way to make job hunting less horrible and we will probably make songs about them.

lolled and closed tab when i quickly realized this was just about time to submitting random job applications and had zero about the problems inherent in the actual technical interview process. thanks for timing how fast you could speed run rote forms i guess?

I wish this also tracked the interview "process".

20 seconds to apply is nice until you then encounter the 10 step interview gauntlet with 5 hours of homework.

Phew, only 5 hours, that's really great. How about a week of 2-3 after-hours work to fit within the time limit, then submitting the PRs and addressing review for each of the 3-4 steps?

That's not an interview that's a job.

Except that’s a regular experience I’ve encountered while job hunting this winter. It’s either that or what, don’t apply to a good job that I want? The applicant has no leverage in these situations.

Seriously, at that point candidates should ask for a 1099 along with a settled rate.

I missed the bit where they timed how long it took for each application to get a reply.

You would still be waiting for most of them. The reply rates, even in polite Switzerland, should make hiring managers blush.

>>Two and a half minutes might not be too long, but it can feel like an eternity when you’re forced to answer the same questions and upload the same documents. Over and over again.

Sounds like an opportunity for some automation — auto-fill the common fields and allow the applicant to focus on reading and writing the unique stuff for each job. Of course the fieldnames aren't standard, so probably needs some LLM-ish ingredients in the sauce

2.5 minutes to apply seems very fast. What does it entail? Surely not the compilation of the entries, I need more than a minute to read a job posting in detail.

Hey I’m the OP who did the experiment - 2.5mins was from start of app to clicking submit. Time does not include me reading the job description.

How do you maintain motivation to keep applying to jobs when tracking with data like this? After seeing countless posts on r/dataisbeautiful or similar where people detail number of applications > number of replies > interviews > eventual success, I tried for myself in the last hunt - and then stopped tracking it once I got to around line 55 in the spreadsheet and only 3 responses - all automated rejections

Eventually figured out it was more worth my time to just go with whatever recruiters were reaching out that week

Full disclosure: I did this as an experiment for an article (https://www.careerfair.io/online-maze) and as such my motivation to keep applying was driven by the piece of content I was creating. In addition, a lot of the time I wouldn't actually press the "submit" button - I would just stop my timer. Again, my goal was to create a cool, accurate piece of content that could spark interesting discussion, which did end up happening (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37753292).

This strategy just seems ripe for improvement through LLMs. You input a stock resume + additional skills and have the resume aligned more for each job you're applying to. The hard part would be stopping hallucinations for skills you don't have. In theory however, this should substantially raise your interview rate. If the companies are using Ai to auto filter people, why can't we fight back?

That seems appealing but then as the applicant you’re at the whim of a LLMs biases, which are even harder to discern than humans.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

30 results for showing HN their AI-resume thingmajig in the past year.

What prevents the LLM from becoming an adversarial model to defeat the LLM that the company uses? Then you're turning the interview process into an arms race of "Who has access to the best adversarial models?" and thereby make it completely redundant since at this point you're paying to get a job.

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