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Applying to 5-10 jobs a day might be (partly) why it took you 6 months to get that job. Unfortunately, tailoring your resume and cover letter to the job increa

Applying to 5-10 jobs a day might be (partly) why it took you 6 months to get that job. Unfortunately, tailoring your resume and cover letter to the job increases your chances of a response quite a bit, and that can easily take you two hours to research the position, the company, write a cover letter (or email), and adjust certain parts of your resume. And if they insist on you manually entering your resume into their Taleo (or similar) software, that can easily take an hour. And if they want code samples, finding (or making) something appropriate and cleaning it up could easily take 2-3 hours (or more). And meanwhile, if you're lucky, recruiters could be calling to interrupt you at any time of day to have the 'getting to know you' conversation or pitch some new company they want to throw your resume at and probably not secure an interview for you. And then at some point you need to actually find the series of jobs to apply to, and if you have any filter at all that can take a good solid 2-3 hours of browsing various job sites. After doing 2, maybe 3 of those a day, I always got pretty drained and sick of doing it instead of going outside and enjoying the day, something you don't usually get to do when you're employed and working all day, so it's a rare opportunity to take advantage of it. Plus, job searching all day every day just drains the life force out of you (well, me at least). I had four different resumes I sent out last time, each highlighting a different type of experience (I'm somewhat of a generalist, so I've got experience in many industries and with different tech), and I still made company-specific tweaks on top of that.

Bartweiss 11y ago
Not only do most applications take time, I've found that no-degree jobs take far longer to apply for than fancy "skilled" jobs like software work. The full interview funnel is long in software, but the first step is something like "upload your resume to some sites". Decent low-education jobs, meanwhile, require proprietary sites and lengthy applications. It's not uncommon to be asked for 5-10 years of past residences and credit information. Verizon (for a floor job) put me through a 2 hour personality test (as an initial application), then never contacted me again. I can't speak to people coming out of trade school, but the only no-degree jobs that you manage 5-10 applications per day for are the really crappy ones like fast food. Anything better than that has a swarm of applicants, so they're free to be as demanding and time-wasting as they want. I can't really imagine doing 10 applications per day for the sort of job where many companies demand several hours work and none of it transfers to the next place.
daemin 11y ago
I think the gist of the parent message was that: in order to get a job, one must apply for (at least) a job. So those people that complain about not being able to get one, but haven't applied for any seems like they just like complaining.

Bartweiss 11y ago

Not only do most applications take time, I've found that no-degree jobs take far longer to apply for than fancy "skilled" jobs like software work. The full interview funnel is long in software, but the first step is something like "upload your resume to some sites". Decent low-education jobs, meanwhile, require proprietary sites and lengthy applications. It's not uncommon to be asked for 5-10 years of past residences and credit information. Verizon (for a floor job) put me through a 2 hour personality test (as an initial application), then never contacted me again. I can't speak to people coming out of trade school, but the only no-degree jobs that you manage 5-10 applications per day for are the really crappy ones like fast food. Anything better than that has a swarm of applicants, so they're free to be as demanding and time-wasting as they want. I can't really imagine doing 10 applications per day for the sort of job where many companies demand several hours work and none of it transfers to the next place.

daemin 11y ago

I think the gist of the parent message was that: in order to get a job, one must apply for (at least) a job. So those people that complain about not being able to get one, but haven't applied for any seems like they just like complaining.