9 ms·

I Built a Bot to Apply to Thousands of Jobs at Once

186 points by miraj 10y ago

bigiain 10y ago
And people wonder why the hiring process is so broken. Of course recruiters and HR departments need to treat every application/resume like crap... Except yours. Because you're a unique snowflake and they can easily discern your application from this guy's spam... (And I fully expect commission-renumerated recruiters are doing this pro-actively without even having any candidates yet to get ever-so-slightly-warmer intros than their cow orkers...)
- schrodinger 10y ago
  In my country we pay great money to those who ork the cows
  - oblio 10y ago
    Of course, we can't be really sure if you pay the orkers, one might say that at the same time you pay them and you don't.
    - smoyer 10y ago
      I've learned the hard way not to look up what I believe to be non-words in the urban dictionary.
KarinneLima 10y ago
Good article! I've found out while working for the career center at a major university in the US that one should spend 80% of their job-searching energy in networking vs 20% applying. Even though applications are part of the process and personalized cover letters and thank you notes take up a lot of time, the odds are definitely in favor of those who make an effort to connect with the right people, who show genuine interest in their experience and learn as much as possible about the opportunities they pursue. Keeping a good relationship with former coworkers and employers is another great way to keep a healthy network. You never know where the next job or project will come from.
- watwut 10y ago
  but ... but ... we are ... meritocracy ...
failrate 10y ago
The best jobs are not only not posted, they are jobs that don't exist until you create them yourself.
- toehead2000 10y ago
  --Jaden Smith
- wrsh07 10y ago
  You can kind of think about it probabilistically: good jobs should be filled quickly because they're desirable (and they should be reasonably effective at attracting good talent to fill them) Good candidates should get offers quickly. Thus, the best way to get a good job is to be there the moment it's posted (or even better, before) The dual is true for candidates, too.
  - twelve40 10y ago
    "good jobs" is very simplistic. There are good jobs for every individual at every stage of their life. Are they all the same? Some like shit for salary while getting the thrill of being a cofounder, some may like a flashy brand and half the comp in stock, others might prefer a lesser brand but more cash. There are also boring 9-5 jobs that leave tons of time to be with the family. Which one is a "good job"?
    - wrsh07 10y ago
      All models are wrong, some are useful. I don't think your nit undermines any of the point I was making
donovanm 10y ago
So according to this article, most jobs aren't posted and most jobs are filled through referrals. Even if you somehow make it through the arbitrary automated tracking system gatekeeper you're still really unlikely to get the job from a random application. Any hiring managers here that can share if this matches their experience?
- wiradikusuma 10y ago
  curious, if that's the case, what's their point for posting the job ads? legal?
  - quickConclusion 10y ago
    Article says that in many cases it is the mandatory job posting to hire H1Bs. Answers are ignored.
    - cardine 10y ago
      The article is incorrect - there are no mandatory job postings to hire H1Bs. That is only required when sponsoring green cards.
      - outworlder 10y ago
        Everyone's correct here :) There's a mandatory job posting requirement to hire H1Bs - at the worksite -. A Sunday newspaper job posting needs to happen for the green card process.
  - chris11 10y ago
    Some companies do it to just get an idea of what's available. I had a job as a contractor at a startup and when they decided they wanted to convert me to full-time they had me apply to their job ad.
- hectormalot 10y ago
  As a department head I've hired almost 100 people over the last 12 months (We are growing very fast at the moment). The majority of these are applications that come in through a normal application, although I'm not sure how many resumes never make it past recruiting. Next to this, we have grown the team by moving over employees from other departments asking for internal transfers, these have about the same success rate as external applicants. And then there are referrals from people who already work in the department (can be for people who already work for the company). The success rate on these candidates is indeed higher. I think this is because the person referring them has already thought about whether the person referred is a fit or not. We give them the same interview process, and don't always tell the interviewer that the candidate is a referral. That said, I see 3 things that might push the reality closer to what you said "most jobs are filled through referrals".: 1. If you're hiring only a few people, the statistics will probably bias towards referrals. It is easy to get a few referrals for a specific position if you need them. 2. Referrals might end up on the desk of the hiring manager earlier (e.g. from employee to hiring manager) compared to an official application (webform to recruiting to manager). Sometimes we can close a position before the first resumes from recruiting even land on my desk. 3. As jobs get more senior, a hiring mistake becomes more expensive, and in that sense hiring a strong referral is on average going to reduce this risk. So, for higher level jobs I think indeed that many are filled through networking or targeted reach-outs rather than open applications.
mcguire 10y ago
"It’s not how you apply, it’s who you know. And if you don’t know someone, don’t bother."
- taneq 10y ago
  If there's only a 0.1% chance of getting a job from a completely cold contact, but you send out 1000 of them, your chances of getting a job out of it are pretty high. Of course, there's also the matter that if you keep it up, your name is going to be instantly associated with application spam and probably blacklisted.
abraae 10y ago
Fascinating but flawed. > By targeting internet companies in particular, I’d chosen an industry with a high likelihood of reliance on resume-processing algorithms. Internet companies hire knowledge workers/creative types/snowflakes. By contrast banks, insurance companies and departments like call center hire armies of drones. You are much more likely to find automated resume analysis in the latter, it works much better there.
- autokad 10y ago
  its really hard to apply to a large number of non-tech companies though. they make you go through sign up processes, ask you to fill out everything you already put on your resume, etc.
- theparanoid 10y ago
  Programming is nothing special. You're an employee just like any other.
  - piptastic 10y ago
    I don't think that's 100% true. It's like hiring an NFL player.. you get the talent you pay for (sometimes)
  - lostboys67 10y ago
    So you think a professional job is exactly the same as working on a supermarket checkout? An attitude like that will get you filtered out as not a culture match in a lot of places.
    - _pmf_ 10y ago
      > So you think a professional job is exactly the same as working on a supermarket checkout? > An attitude like that will get you filtered out as not a culture match in a lot of places. There are people who are able to work with people who do not much their culture perfectly, you know. There are even people who like working with people of differing experience levels instead of perpetuating their frat boy days well into their thirties; do you believe it?
ghufran_syed 10y ago
I think this data is interesting, like the author, I would have assumed some difference between the version that effectively said "written by a bot" and the other one. On the other hand, the conclusions are identical to what Richard Bolles [1] has been telling job seekers for the last 47 years. If you've never read this book, you really should, I remember when I first read it and realized "Oh, THESE are the actual rules of how to get a job, no wonder my job application success rate is so dismal" [1] http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/537247/what-color-is-your-parachute-2017-by-richard-n-bolles/9780399578212/ http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/537247/what-color-is...
- mdorazio 10y ago
  Perhaps you could actually tell HN readers what Richard Bolles said, rather than teasing it and pointing to a book link?
  - ghufran_syed 10y ago
    Oh, my apologies, I thought the conclusion of the article was pretty unambiguous: it ends with 3 paragraphs under a sub-heading of "Less applying, more networking". Or did you draw some other conclusion from the article? "Perhaps you could actually tell HN readers" what that alternative conclusion was? :)
    - mdorazio 10y ago
      Based on a skim of Bolles's book, he actually comes to significantly broader conclusions than this article. For example, I believe a significant chunk of the book is about determining what you actually want to do before even looking for a job. Another chunk of the book is about how to make a resume that employers will look at and actually like. Another is about how looking for a job should itself be a full-time job and how you should basically be applying everywhere, networking non-stop, knocking on doors, etc. Another part is about negotiating salary. Etc. I have to disagree that Bolles entirely agrees with the conclusion of the article - he takes a more holistic view of jobhunting.
ploggingdev 10y ago
Does anyone have experience with job marketplaces? I don't mean the mainstream ones, but ones like Stackoverflow jobs or Github jobs. Do they get closer to solving the problem of resume blackholes?
JSoet 10y ago
I was disappointed with the direction this article took - when he said he built a robot to send personalized applications I was hoping it would be reading the requirements and then sending personalized resumes and cover letters specifically built to get past the robot stage, but then waste the recruiter's time to show how stupid the automated system is and how easy it is to game... Something like that anti-spam bot that was posted here a few months ago...
ge96 10y ago
I wonder if you could just scrape the text in the job application the key words like "Bachelor's in Computer Science" and "3-5 years experience in .NET" or whatever bundle of credentials they strap together and submitted that. That's a definite match right? You'd get some notification, "Hey uhh... we saw your resume." I'm just griping because I'm obsolete.
r3bl 10y ago
Am I the only one who's really interested in the actual bot? The article doesn't say a lot about this, but from what it does, I can't figure out the approach used. Did he scrape LinkedIn? I would say no, LinkedIn has a high level of understanding what bots are. Did he scrape some random websites? How did he apply to a different number of jobs in two different versions of the software? Was the whatever job posting his bot was looking at drastically changing the number of open positions or something? Also, how did he tweak the input over time? Did he had some set of, let's say, 10 different versions of the resume and the cover letter, and then the bot just chose one randomly or was there something else? There's so many things I'm unable to figure out on the technical side from the article that I'm leaning towards this whole "I built a bot" thing is an over-exaggeration from the author to get the message across.
hocuspocus 10y ago
I've interviewed with many tech companies and the impact of personalized referrals has been completely anecdotal to me. I got my current job from a cold application. With some companies it can take months before being noticed once you've applied online, but there's been a few cases where I could apply in just one click and get contacted by a recruiter the same day! Admittedly, I assume my experience might have been different if I applied for jobs at early stage startups.
bryanrasmussen 10y ago
he needs to do one with a nonsense cover letter, and one with varying length cover letters. I bet the robots that check there are cover letters make sure they are long enough to show that you care about getting the job, but not so long that you come off as needy.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Larger employers usually use a recruiter, either in-house or external. They simply don't have time to sift through tens of thousands of cold-call resumes. The best thing, as the article admits, is simply to know people inside an organization that you want to work for. There's no better or more reliable way to get a foot in the door. You achieve that by networking like crazy and just getting to know lots of people. Go to every conference and industry event that you can, talk to lots of people there, get active in entrepreneurial groups (in Massachusetts it's Enet and MITEF among others) and keep your LinkedIn profile updated. You never know when that casual conversation around the coffee urn turns into a more serious discussion that can lead to a job offer. I've seen it many times. The next best practice, at least with larger traditional companies, is to cultivate a good recruiter or two, do a couple of contracting gigs and earn a reputation as a reliable worker, and then they will enthusiastically promote you to hiring managers. Stay away from the crappy, sleazy recruiters - you can recognize them from their spam, lack of response to inquiries, lack of track record. Go with one that has an industry track record and a reputation to protect. A bot to apply to thousands of jobs? It's a bit of a joke, really. The guy didn't get an offer so that tells you how much that effort was worth.
logfromblammo 10y ago
Nitpick here. > Referrals are the minority of applicants but are five times more likely to be hired. From the article: P(referral) = 0.06 P(non-referral) = 0.94 P(referral|hired) = 0.29 P(non-referral|hired) = 0.71 What we're looking for is P(hired|referral) / P(hired|non-referral) = ? So reversing the two known conditionals, and dividing to eliminate the unknown probability for P(hired): P(hired|referral) = P(referral|hired) * P(hired) / P(referral) P(hired|non-referral) = P(non-referral|hired) * P(hired) / P(non-referral) P(hired|referral) / P(hired|non-referral) = P(referral|hired) / P(non-referral|hired) * P(non-referral) / P(referral) = 0.40845 * 15.667 = 6.3991 Referrals are actually 6.4 times as likely to be hired. This is why stat and math classes are important, journalists.
- azurelogic 10y ago
  This. And I would bet that it's even higher if you focus exclusively on STEM jobs.
azurelogic 10y ago
Every time one of those "Ask HN: How do I get a job" comes around, I comment on the importance of networking over throwing resumes into an abyss. Inevitably, someone talks about how they got a great job with a cold application. It's not that it is impossible, it is that it is less probable. It's great to see articles that can support and explain this fact. As engineers, we tend to want to see raw brain power and experience be the yard stick for hiring. But for better or worse, "people" get involved, and suddenly there are a whole bunch of other metrics. The reality is that the 100+ year old phrase is still largely true today: "It's not what you know, it's who you know" (http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/its_not_what_you_know_but_who_you_know/ http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/its_...).
- antisthenes 10y ago
  It's because not knowing anyone is a catch-22. You can't start networking if your baseline of knowing anyone is 0. For example, I know of 0 people in the finance industry. The barrier to entry for me to start networking in it is orders of magnitude higher than sending out cold applications online. This is additionally compounded that networking is extremely dependent on factors entirely unrelated to your actual skills: attractiveness, charisma, social skills, class signaling, quite possibly race and sex. And you wonder why people don't "just network!".
  - azurelogic 10y ago
    Usually these posts are in regards to programming or related jobs (data science). While I know that many devs are not wired up to be super outgoing, it is not that hard to find a proper meetup in your area (as long as it exists). And I have also found that even shy developers tend to relax and get to know people once they realize that they're in a place that they can be themselves. Just getting to know people and being nice can be enough to plant the seeds.
robert1er 10y ago
I'm the guy who wrote the article. I just came across this conversation and I have to say that you folks have touched on a ton of really interesting elements that I didn't have the space to write. Overall, I agree with a ton of what I'm reading here and the critiques are also mostly fair. I just joined so that I could thank you all but I'd be happy to answer specific questions if anyone would like. Honestly, this is one of the most thoughtful discussions about the article I've come across. Thanks!

186 points by miraj 10y ago

And people wonder why the hiring process is so broken. Of course recruiters and HR departments need to treat every application/resume like crap... Except yours. Because you're a unique snowflake and they can easily discern your application from this guy's spam... (And I fully expect commission-renumerated recruiters are doing this pro-actively without even having any candidates yet to get ever-so-slightly-warmer intros than their cow orkers...)

schrodinger 10y ago
In my country we pay great money to those who ork the cows
- oblio 10y ago
  Of course, we can't be really sure if you pay the orkers, one might say that at the same time you pay them and you don't.
  - smoyer 10y ago
    I've learned the hard way not to look up what I believe to be non-words in the urban dictionary.

KarinneLima 10y ago

Good article! I've found out while working for the career center at a major university in the US that one should spend 80% of their job-searching energy in networking vs 20% applying. Even though applications are part of the process and personalized cover letters and thank you notes take up a lot of time, the odds are definitely in favor of those who make an effort to connect with the right people, who show genuine interest in their experience and learn as much as possible about the opportunities they pursue. Keeping a good relationship with former coworkers and employers is another great way to keep a healthy network. You never know where the next job or project will come from.

watwut 10y ago
but ... but ... we are ... meritocracy ...

failrate 10y ago

The best jobs are not only not posted, they are jobs that don't exist until you create them yourself.

toehead2000 10y ago
--Jaden Smith
wrsh07 10y ago
You can kind of think about it probabilistically: good jobs should be filled quickly because they're desirable (and they should be reasonably effective at attracting good talent to fill them) Good candidates should get offers quickly. Thus, the best way to get a good job is to be there the moment it's posted (or even better, before) The dual is true for candidates, too.
- twelve40 10y ago
  "good jobs" is very simplistic. There are good jobs for every individual at every stage of their life. Are they all the same? Some like shit for salary while getting the thrill of being a cofounder, some may like a flashy brand and half the comp in stock, others might prefer a lesser brand but more cash. There are also boring 9-5 jobs that leave tons of time to be with the family. Which one is a "good job"?
  - wrsh07 10y ago
    All models are wrong, some are useful. I don't think your nit undermines any of the point I was making

donovanm 10y ago

So according to this article, most jobs aren't posted and most jobs are filled through referrals. Even if you somehow make it through the arbitrary automated tracking system gatekeeper you're still really unlikely to get the job from a random application. Any hiring managers here that can share if this matches their experience?

wiradikusuma 10y ago
curious, if that's the case, what's their point for posting the job ads? legal?
- quickConclusion 10y ago
  Article says that in many cases it is the mandatory job posting to hire H1Bs. Answers are ignored.
  - cardine 10y ago
    The article is incorrect - there are no mandatory job postings to hire H1Bs. That is only required when sponsoring green cards.
    - outworlder 10y ago
      Everyone's correct here :) There's a mandatory job posting requirement to hire H1Bs - at the worksite -. A Sunday newspaper job posting needs to happen for the green card process.
- chris11 10y ago
  Some companies do it to just get an idea of what's available. I had a job as a contractor at a startup and when they decided they wanted to convert me to full-time they had me apply to their job ad.
hectormalot 10y ago
As a department head I've hired almost 100 people over the last 12 months (We are growing very fast at the moment). The majority of these are applications that come in through a normal application, although I'm not sure how many resumes never make it past recruiting. Next to this, we have grown the team by moving over employees from other departments asking for internal transfers, these have about the same success rate as external applicants. And then there are referrals from people who already work in the department (can be for people who already work for the company). The success rate on these candidates is indeed higher. I think this is because the person referring them has already thought about whether the person referred is a fit or not. We give them the same interview process, and don't always tell the interviewer that the candidate is a referral. That said, I see 3 things that might push the reality closer to what you said "most jobs are filled through referrals".: 1. If you're hiring only a few people, the statistics will probably bias towards referrals. It is easy to get a few referrals for a specific position if you need them. 2. Referrals might end up on the desk of the hiring manager earlier (e.g. from employee to hiring manager) compared to an official application (webform to recruiting to manager). Sometimes we can close a position before the first resumes from recruiting even land on my desk. 3. As jobs get more senior, a hiring mistake becomes more expensive, and in that sense hiring a strong referral is on average going to reduce this risk. So, for higher level jobs I think indeed that many are filled through networking or targeted reach-outs rather than open applications.

mcguire 10y ago

"It’s not how you apply, it’s who you know. And if you don’t know someone, don’t bother."

taneq 10y ago
If there's only a 0.1% chance of getting a job from a completely cold contact, but you send out 1000 of them, your chances of getting a job out of it are pretty high. Of course, there's also the matter that if you keep it up, your name is going to be instantly associated with application spam and probably blacklisted.

abraae 10y ago

Fascinating but flawed. > By targeting internet companies in particular, I’d chosen an industry with a high likelihood of reliance on resume-processing algorithms. Internet companies hire knowledge workers/creative types/snowflakes. By contrast banks, insurance companies and departments like call center hire armies of drones. You are much more likely to find automated resume analysis in the latter, it works much better there.

autokad 10y ago
its really hard to apply to a large number of non-tech companies though. they make you go through sign up processes, ask you to fill out everything you already put on your resume, etc.
theparanoid 10y ago
Programming is nothing special. You're an employee just like any other.
- piptastic 10y ago
  I don't think that's 100% true. It's like hiring an NFL player.. you get the talent you pay for (sometimes)
- lostboys67 10y ago
  So you think a professional job is exactly the same as working on a supermarket checkout? An attitude like that will get you filtered out as not a culture match in a lot of places.
  - _pmf_ 10y ago
    > So you think a professional job is exactly the same as working on a supermarket checkout? > An attitude like that will get you filtered out as not a culture match in a lot of places. There are people who are able to work with people who do not much their culture perfectly, you know. There are even people who like working with people of differing experience levels instead of perpetuating their frat boy days well into their thirties; do you believe it?

ghufran_syed 10y ago

I think this data is interesting, like the author, I would have assumed some difference between the version that effectively said "written by a bot" and the other one. On the other hand, the conclusions are identical to what Richard Bolles [1] has been telling job seekers for the last 47 years. If you've never read this book, you really should, I remember when I first read it and realized "Oh, THESE are the actual rules of how to get a job, no wonder my job application success rate is so dismal" [1] http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/537247/what-color-is-your-parachute-2017-by-richard-n-bolles/9780399578212/ http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/537247/what-color-is...

mdorazio 10y ago
Perhaps you could actually tell HN readers what Richard Bolles said, rather than teasing it and pointing to a book link?
- ghufran_syed 10y ago
  Oh, my apologies, I thought the conclusion of the article was pretty unambiguous: it ends with 3 paragraphs under a sub-heading of "Less applying, more networking". Or did you draw some other conclusion from the article? "Perhaps you could actually tell HN readers" what that alternative conclusion was? :)
  - mdorazio 10y ago
    Based on a skim of Bolles's book, he actually comes to significantly broader conclusions than this article. For example, I believe a significant chunk of the book is about determining what you actually want to do before even looking for a job. Another chunk of the book is about how to make a resume that employers will look at and actually like. Another is about how looking for a job should itself be a full-time job and how you should basically be applying everywhere, networking non-stop, knocking on doors, etc. Another part is about negotiating salary. Etc. I have to disagree that Bolles entirely agrees with the conclusion of the article - he takes a more holistic view of jobhunting.

ploggingdev 10y ago

Does anyone have experience with job marketplaces? I don't mean the mainstream ones, but ones like Stackoverflow jobs or Github jobs. Do they get closer to solving the problem of resume blackholes?

JSoet 10y ago

I was disappointed with the direction this article took - when he said he built a robot to send personalized applications I was hoping it would be reading the requirements and then sending personalized resumes and cover letters specifically built to get past the robot stage, but then waste the recruiter's time to show how stupid the automated system is and how easy it is to game... Something like that anti-spam bot that was posted here a few months ago...

ge96 10y ago

I wonder if you could just scrape the text in the job application the key words like "Bachelor's in Computer Science" and "3-5 years experience in .NET" or whatever bundle of credentials they strap together and submitted that. That's a definite match right? You'd get some notification, "Hey uhh... we saw your resume." I'm just griping because I'm obsolete.

r3bl 10y ago

Am I the only one who's really interested in the actual bot? The article doesn't say a lot about this, but from what it does, I can't figure out the approach used. Did he scrape LinkedIn? I would say no, LinkedIn has a high level of understanding what bots are. Did he scrape some random websites? How did he apply to a different number of jobs in two different versions of the software? Was the whatever job posting his bot was looking at drastically changing the number of open positions or something? Also, how did he tweak the input over time? Did he had some set of, let's say, 10 different versions of the resume and the cover letter, and then the bot just chose one randomly or was there something else? There's so many things I'm unable to figure out on the technical side from the article that I'm leaning towards this whole "I built a bot" thing is an over-exaggeration from the author to get the message across.

hocuspocus 10y ago

I've interviewed with many tech companies and the impact of personalized referrals has been completely anecdotal to me. I got my current job from a cold application. With some companies it can take months before being noticed once you've applied online, but there's been a few cases where I could apply in just one click and get contacted by a recruiter the same day! Admittedly, I assume my experience might have been different if I applied for jobs at early stage startups.

bryanrasmussen 10y ago

he needs to do one with a nonsense cover letter, and one with varying length cover letters. I bet the robots that check there are cover letters make sure they are long enough to show that you care about getting the job, but not so long that you come off as needy.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Larger employers usually use a recruiter, either in-house or external. They simply don't have time to sift through tens of thousands of cold-call resumes. The best thing, as the article admits, is simply to know people inside an organization that you want to work for. There's no better or more reliable way to get a foot in the door. You achieve that by networking like crazy and just getting to know lots of people. Go to every conference and industry event that you can, talk to lots of people there, get active in entrepreneurial groups (in Massachusetts it's Enet and MITEF among others) and keep your LinkedIn profile updated. You never know when that casual conversation around the coffee urn turns into a more serious discussion that can lead to a job offer. I've seen it many times. The next best practice, at least with larger traditional companies, is to cultivate a good recruiter or two, do a couple of contracting gigs and earn a reputation as a reliable worker, and then they will enthusiastically promote you to hiring managers. Stay away from the crappy, sleazy recruiters - you can recognize them from their spam, lack of response to inquiries, lack of track record. Go with one that has an industry track record and a reputation to protect. A bot to apply to thousands of jobs? It's a bit of a joke, really. The guy didn't get an offer so that tells you how much that effort was worth.

logfromblammo 10y ago

Nitpick here. > Referrals are the minority of applicants but are five times more likely to be hired. From the article: P(referral) = 0.06 P(non-referral) = 0.94 P(referral|hired) = 0.29 P(non-referral|hired) = 0.71 What we're looking for is P(hired|referral) / P(hired|non-referral) = ? So reversing the two known conditionals, and dividing to eliminate the unknown probability for P(hired): P(hired|referral) = P(referral|hired) * P(hired) / P(referral) P(hired|non-referral) = P(non-referral|hired) * P(hired) / P(non-referral) P(hired|referral) / P(hired|non-referral) = P(referral|hired) / P(non-referral|hired) * P(non-referral) / P(referral) = 0.40845 * 15.667 = 6.3991 Referrals are actually 6.4 times as likely to be hired. This is why stat and math classes are important, journalists.

azurelogic 10y ago
This. And I would bet that it's even higher if you focus exclusively on STEM jobs.

azurelogic 10y ago

Every time one of those "Ask HN: How do I get a job" comes around, I comment on the importance of networking over throwing resumes into an abyss. Inevitably, someone talks about how they got a great job with a cold application. It's not that it is impossible, it is that it is less probable. It's great to see articles that can support and explain this fact. As engineers, we tend to want to see raw brain power and experience be the yard stick for hiring. But for better or worse, "people" get involved, and suddenly there are a whole bunch of other metrics. The reality is that the 100+ year old phrase is still largely true today: "It's not what you know, it's who you know" (http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/its_not_what_you_know_but_who_you_know/ http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/its_...).

antisthenes 10y ago
It's because not knowing anyone is a catch-22. You can't start networking if your baseline of knowing anyone is 0. For example, I know of 0 people in the finance industry. The barrier to entry for me to start networking in it is orders of magnitude higher than sending out cold applications online. This is additionally compounded that networking is extremely dependent on factors entirely unrelated to your actual skills: attractiveness, charisma, social skills, class signaling, quite possibly race and sex. And you wonder why people don't "just network!".
- azurelogic 10y ago
  Usually these posts are in regards to programming or related jobs (data science). While I know that many devs are not wired up to be super outgoing, it is not that hard to find a proper meetup in your area (as long as it exists). And I have also found that even shy developers tend to relax and get to know people once they realize that they're in a place that they can be themselves. Just getting to know people and being nice can be enough to plant the seeds.

robert1er 10y ago

I'm the guy who wrote the article. I just came across this conversation and I have to say that you folks have touched on a ton of really interesting elements that I didn't have the space to write. Overall, I agree with a ton of what I'm reading here and the critiques are also mostly fair. I just joined so that I could thank you all but I'd be happy to answer specific questions if anyone would like. Honestly, this is one of the most thoughtful discussions about the article I've come across. Thanks!