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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking exactly the same. Feel like it's more like 3 in 5, if not 4 in 5.

I recently commented on another thread about how I managed 2 interviews and 1 offer out of ~500 applications. Which is kind of telling, since it only took 2 actual interviews to get another job (alas for less money that I make right now anyway)... If the jobs were real, it should be far easier to get them.

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I remember a few years ago I posted that throughout my career, during market ups and downs, my average application:interview:offer ratio was around 100:10:1 and half of HN thought I was exaggerating, or there was something wrong with my interviewing, or that I was shotgunning my resume, and so on. We've got an industry full of young employees who are seeing the first bear market of their lives.

500:x:1 doesn't seem outrageous at all in a down market. The 2:1 interview:offer ratio is actually outstanding, especially where the industry is today.

I guess as a "newer employee" (8 years now) I see that and say "yeah, that was pretty much my first job search. Maybe a bit better reply rate". I may not have been applying for jobs in 2008, but I feel this bust isn't just about low hiring. And that's what makes it all the worse.

For reference, these 8 years and 3 jobs later, I'm probably around 300-20-0. Or 1 if you the count the part time freelancing that just showed up out of the blue. But I didn't even apply for that.

The part I don’t get is that 6 months later I get responses to applications. I’ve talked to recruiters and the picture they paint is hundreds or thousands of resumes in the inbox. They keep shuffling their search criteria and sometimes someone interesting pops out.

That doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but something is clearly quite broken, and it seems to be as much due to incompetence as fraud

I’ll never forget getting a boilerplate rejection email from Lockheed Martin 13 months after I applied for an internship for the upcoming summer.

I'll try to upstage that!

20+ years ago I applied, and interviewed for a Federal Gov of Canada job. 18 months later they called me to tell me I got the job.

I'd been at another job for 16 months!

Glad I didn't take it. Government and traditional big corp are very stodgy, slow to change.

This one's not as bad but still amusing: I applied to a well-known telecom company that rhymes with "May Pee and Pee" and got to the final onsite interview, after which they ghosted me. Afterwards, I did the whole round of interviews at a different company, got hired, moved my family across the country, and got established in that new job. A few months later, I got an E-mail from the telecom company saying "We would like to interview you one last time. Please let us know when you are free." LOL

Gov of Canada, famously, has some of the most braindead slow hiring practices in the country. Their HR teams are incredibly bad at their jobs. It's genuinely astounding. Last I checked the time from application to starting your job could be anywhere from 9 to 18 months. Everyone, including the employees, know it, so everyone gets "Bridged In" through an internship or hires internally. The rules are totally different with internal postings and you can get hired in a week if you're a good candidate.

If you get an interview you are already on a short list. The process I usually see is 100's of applications -> screening by recruiter and hiring manager -> phone screen 10-20 -> coding challenge 3-7 -> onsite 2-3 -> hire 1.

>out of ~500 applications

Yea, the process is eating itself. Recruiters automate screening and applications automate submitting, so there is so much noise, it's difficult.

I'm not saying there aren't ghost jobs, I'm just saying an already arduous process is even more so with automation being leveraged on both sides.

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