12 ms·

The buried lede here seems to be "In real life, folks need to apply to 150-250 jobs to get a job". I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what

The buried lede here seems to be "In real life, folks need to apply to 150-250 jobs to get a job". I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what causes these types of numbers. Are there just enormous numbers of applicants for every job? Are people applying for jobs they aren't qualified for? How does this compare in tech vs the rest of the job market? The signal/noise ratio must be absurdly low if this is possible.

hayksaakian 9y ago
1) Yes. Any job with entry level requirements will get 20-100 applications on craigslist in seattle (my experience). More or less applications on more or less popular platforms 2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. 3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and increased interest in "working in tech" (without any personal interest / passion in technology)
- whorleater 9y ago
  >without any personal interest / passion in technology Can I not work in tech without being passionate?
  - username223 9y ago
    Tech work is like sex work: you don't need to feel the passion, but you do need to be able to fake it.
    - your-nanny 9y ago
      Touche
    - lr4444lr 9y ago
      I'm stealing that line.
  - stagbeetle 9y ago
    It's a cultural-fit thing. You can, but there are the zealous who will deny you.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    You have to have had some level of passion to bother learning about it. It takes time to learn a topic, that's a form of passion - a drive. That's not to say you have to burn all hours on it tho. Which I think is what you're assuming there. That's honestly somewhat unhealthy and only super passionate people (and lucky ones at that) can do that for any length of time.
    - vonmoltke 9y ago
      Passion requires enthusiasim, not merely drive.
      - abritinthebay 9y ago
        And spending effort to learn something requires some level of enthusiasm
        vonmoltke 9y ago
        I disagree. I have learned plenty of things I had no enthusiasm for because they were a means to an end.
    - rifung 9y ago
      Not really.. I have friends with no interest in computers but who studied CS because they knew it would lead to a well paying job. They work at Amazon and Google now so I guess it worked out for them. One requires motivation, but that motivation does not necessarily have to be interested or passion.
      - abritinthebay 9y ago
        In that case they have a passion for making money ;) That’s what motivated them to learn. I doubt that’s what causes them to stay. If it is tho... That’s enough.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    Passion is a relative term. Nobody goes to work at Facebook or Google thinking "wow, I'm so passionate about adverts and tracking, I want to build a world with more ads and tracking in more places". It's normal not to be passionate about your work in that sense. However, some people find computers frustrating, stupid or boring. Such a person probably wouldn't enjoy a job working with them all the time - and it's difficult to build the skills that let you advance your career if you're averse to or bored by practising them. You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it.
    - vonmoltke 9y ago
      > You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it. That is a major abuse of "passion". While the original definitions are even stronger, something you are "passionate" about is something you actively seeking out to do. Something that is merely "sufficiently non-loathsome" is not a passion.
      - betterbeehome 9y ago
        This. How can people say something so wrong headed like "Passion is a relative term." No you're just manipulative.
      - michaelt 9y ago
        That is a major abuse of "passion". That's just the gap between what employers hope for when they place a job advert, and what they get. I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. Someone I can promote, and trust with more responsibility and less supervision. But I'll tolerate someone who does 75% of the expected amount of work, because I'm realistic about the hiring market.
        dvtv75 9y ago
        > I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. I had a job where I did this. Know what the employer did? He whined I wasn't doing enough, and gave me more to do then expected me to stay even later to do it. I was eventually spending more time at work than I was at home - I no longer work for free. If an employer wants extra hours out of me, they pay or I head home at clock out time. Employment isn't about your dream being fulfilled, it's a commercial agreement between two parties where one agrees to pay the other for time spent at the workplace. I don't live to work, I work to live, and I have other stuff to do. On my death bed, the one thing I can guarantee that I will never think is "I wish I'd worked an extra evening for free on that project for my employer." It's far more likely to be "I wish I hadn't worked that evening for free, so I could have seen the sun set just one more time."
  - holografix 9y ago
    Yes you can, I’ve been in tech companies where a fair few of my colleagues are not interested in tech. They want to be part of a “winning” organisation and make money. I sure as hell wouldn’t hire someone who has no interest in what my company is doing and that level of interest would have to increase relative to the role. What tends to happen is you get very slick operators who don’t produce anything because they don’t understand/don’t care and all they do is get information from A spin it in a way that makes them look fantastic and push it to B. Given enough people like that in a tech org it’ll collapse.
    - nopassion 9y ago
      I used to work on email archival. Anyone who says they’re passionate about that is either lying or doped up on barbiturates.
      - stevenwoo 9y ago
        How did you get hired for email archival? Started looking at online applications and every single one has something like "Why do you want to work for us?" and yesterday I saw "How do you add to our diversity?"
        gaustin 9y ago
        What's the problem with those questions?
        stevenwoo 9y ago
        Sorry, was trying to figure out how the commenter got past those filtering questions.
        bartread 9y ago
        I wouldn't be surprised to find that in the UK it's illegal to ask a candidate "How do you add to our diversity?" because it could be seen as a thinly veiled way to, for example, discover a candidate's sexual preference - something you are outright not allowed to ask about, except in very specific circumstances[1]. (Also, it's an insufferably pretentious question, even if not actually illegal.) [1] E.g., it might be legally acceptable for a role in a religious organisation.
  - thenanyu 9y ago
    I think it always helps to care about the quality of your craft. "Passion" seems to be the prevalent HR-speak for that concept.
  - koolba 9y ago
    Yes but you have to be able to fake it for at least the duration of an interview.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    > Can I not work in tech without being passionate? You can, but from the employer's perspective many markets have more applicants than positions. The employer can choose those who are closer to the ideal employee. One of the qualities of such an employee is often someone who throws themselves with passion into doing the job. Put another way, why should an employer with a stack of applicants pick those who aren't as motivated or qualified as others? That is why entry-level positions require 3 years of experience.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Yes you can. Many people work in tech and are not passionate. And plenty of them are very good and responsible. Tech is not something special, you can lean it like anything else.
  - lobotryas 9y ago
    Anecdata: to me and others I've spoken to 'passion' is short hand for a person having personal work standards. i.e.: a person who won't half-ass their work, who'll often go the extra distance for polish or feature completion, and who'll proactively help raise issues if their experience indicates the team is heading down the wrong path. And yes, a person who'll very occasionally stay late and pitch in when the whole team is crunching on something.
- godelski 9y ago
  > 2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. I mean if you are calling something "entry level position" and have "requires 3 years experience in the field", I'd expect people to apply anyway. I remember when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience. If you don't apply to those positions then you really aren't applying to anything.
  - vegetablepotpie 9y ago
    >when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience Same. That struck me as particularly BS'y. I asked career counselors at my school about that and they said to "embellish" my background a bit, but not to lie. The specific advice I got was if you worked as a developer on a short term project a year ago that would count as a year of work. If asked about it the advice was to just explain what you really meant. It made me feel uneasy because if seemed disingenuous, but I went with it because I needed a job. This made me really question what does a "year of experience" really mean? 60 Hrs/wk for a year is not the same as 20 Hrs/wk for a year. If you could use a month of work a year ago as a year of experience, what else could you stretch? At that point you could question what does anything really mean on an application? If it has super high qualifications, how could you take it seriously? You can just rationalize away anything! Can't you? 4+ years of experience? I basically got that. 2+ years in some specific programming language? How different could it be from C++? I got the basic concepts down, I can figure out the rest, just give me money! You miss 100% of the shots you don't take and the worst you will hear is the word 'no'. You need a job to pay off the loans you needed to get the degree to apply to the jobs in the first place. If experience inflation is a reaction to an insurmountable volume of applications then what businesses are really doing is filtering out the honest people.
    - aczerepinski 9y ago
      I've noticed that people conflate "years of experience" with "time elapsed since the first time you did the thing" all the time. I would love to see job postings that require 2,000+ hours of experience for junior level or 10,000+ hours for senior level.
- reificator 9y ago
  I don't ignore requirements or fudge them, but I do interpret them based on what they want done. If they want 10 years of Ruby/Rails experience with a focus on performance/scalability, maybe your 5 years of Python/Django is not applicable. But if they want 3 years of Ruby/Rails experience and you've got 5 years of Python/Django, and feel comfortable with the transition to Ruby, absolutely you should apply for that position. Be upfront about it and be prepared to demonstrate your ability, but that's what the interview is supposed to be about in the first place.
- fiblye 9y ago
  >2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of exposure to half of them. It's not surprising that unreasonably underqualified people respond to job postings with unreasonably high expectations, and that all job postings end up not being taken seriously.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, This is what you put in a job advert when you want to hire your mate who matches that description but feel obliged to publicly tender the job instead.
    - sudomake 9y ago
      Has c++14 existed for 15 years yet?
pagnol 9y ago
I've similarly always struggled to make sense of these kinds of claims, because in my life so far I was offered a job every time I applied, so I'm wondering if I'm either living in an area where the job market is much less competitive or if I'm aiming too low. It's out of the question that I'm some kind of hotshot, on the contrary my CV is a mess and I dropped out ouf college.
- ehsanu1 9y ago
  Probably a function of your industry and where you are.
- orangeshark 9y ago
  From my personal experience in the entry level job market, I have never successfully gotten a job offer to anything I applied to. Only have my current job because a friend recommended me.
  - reificator 9y ago
    If that's your first job and you can hold it down for awhile, then I think your next job hunt will go better. Especially if you start the next job hunt while still employed. That's an important signal to your employer, that someone else was willing to hire you. It also helps to ensure you're not desperate, because your next paycheck is not hinging on the current interview.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Congratulations but you’re probably an outlier. I’ve applied to hundreds of companies throughout my career (~20 years), probably an average of around 40 applications per job switch. I’ve applied to some companies multiple times, sometimes right after getting the rejection. Most people I know are in the same boat. Tech companies are so picky and there is so much inherent variance in hiring. It’s a numbers game.
- psyc 9y ago
  My ratio for applications to offers, over 20 years and 7 jobs, is less than two. My last job search lasted 12 hours, from start of search, to signing a contract. I've explained to people in the past that I'm extremely selective about applying. I only apply to jobs I think I would love, where I can clearly communicate why I'd be a great hire. I'm sensitive to early red flags, and avoid job descriptions that don't make sense or have contradictory reqs. I also have only worked in Boston and Seattle, two of the very hottest markets.
kushalc 9y ago
These numbers vary dramatically by location and specialty, e.g. a Marketing Assistant in Chicago has very different prospects (and expected # applications to job offer) vs. a Software Engineer in SF vs. an HR specialist in Ohio. We did an analysis on this awhile ago, specifically about # of days to get a job, but it also has some analysis about # of applications: https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-60-days-if-youre-in-hr-or-sales/ https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...
- csense 9y ago
  Amazing website, I'll have to keep talent.works in mind next time I'm looking for a job!
jdavis703 9y ago
If you're applying to that many jobs, you're not being deliberate in the search. I've found all of my post-highschool jobs either from people in my network advertising something, or recruiters reaching out to me. When I was in highschool I did not understand that it was really about who you know (I was homeschooled, so I didn't have a school network to reach out to for jobs), and went applying for typical highschool retail/fast food jobs willy nilly and never got an offer. It's because I was lacking someone who could "intro" me in to the organization. Now I can't really imagine trying to apply for a job cold.
iamthepieman 9y ago
In the U.S. at least, in order to continue receiving unemployment in many states, you need to apply for a certain number of jobs to show that you are "actively looking" for a job. These leads to many applicants to entry level jobs who are applying for a result other than getting hired. Indeed, many applicants of this type have no intention of ever even answering the phone/email if you try to contact them. Though some will just so they can say to the unemployment office that they "Have an interview next week."
amorphid 9y ago
I was a recruiter for 8 years, and maybe 1 in 100 applications turned into a hire. I suspect a big factor is the barrier to entry for applying has been lowered. Just fill out a quick form and click submit, so people will apply to any job that looks remotely relevant. An increase in applications makes sifting through those applications increasingly burdensome, and tools have not really made mentally parsing a resume easier, so mental energy gets sucked up trying to filter more content. The more energy you burn, the more tired you are. The less energy you have, the less you can focus on the applicants, and you start responding to fewer applications. Fewer recruiter responses to an application means job seekers need to send more applications. Repeat.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  I was also a recruiter for a while and when hiring I am always amazed at the absolute dismal amount of effort given when people apply for good jobs. Hiring is hard, someone with the right skill set will have a terrible mentality, hiring for the mentality is extremely tricky and can lead you down the road of groupthink if you're not careful. I'm still amazed how entirely incompetent people rise to managerial levels on who they know but its very, very hard to break into even with a modicum of talent.
  - 80386 9y ago
    If you have to apply to 250+ jobs just to get one, you can't invest much effort into each application. I've been a part-time developer for three years (and worked full-time on top of that), and I'm looking for a full-time position. I gave up on tech after applying to 500+ jobs and getting three interviews and zero offers. The closest I got was a consulting outfit in a small city in the Inland North, where one of the interviewers got hostile about my major (philosophy) and eventually rejected me over it. But even now that I'm only applying for positions that just need warm bodies with degrees, my ratio of applications to phone screens is upwards of twenty to one, and every phone screen I've gotten in the last month has rescheduled last-minute on me, sometimes more than once. And I have to put up with shit like getting rejected at the door because the interviewer doesn't like my [perfectly ordinary and unremarkable] shoes. How in the world am I supposed to find the time to put effort into applying for hundreds of jobs?
eitally 9y ago
I'm currently trying to hire cloud solution architects, including in Bangalore. I have had >2000 applicants for the role. About 15 made it through resume & phone screens. I have found 1 so far that could make it through onsite interviews. This is just one data point from the opposite POV: especially in tech, it's extremely hard to find qualified people at the time and place you need them, especially if you need specialists.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  This is because recruiters are lazy. In my bunch of years I found exactly 2 non-lazy third party recruiters. Thus actually manually finding the company you want to work with and then sending the resume and cover letter directly has a decent chance of success if you're not a hack or fake. The trouble is, they so not like to give out salary brackets.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jasonkester 9y ago
There's a distribution there that needs to be mentioned, because most job applications are submitted by unqualified applicants. My last half dozen gigs have taken 0-2 emails to secure. The 2 was a genuine job search where I identified two possible fits and reached out. The zeros all were people seeking me out. Contrast that to the guy applying for your Sr. Developer position who can't FizBuzz. He has applied to 1000 such jobs already. Every one he's seen. All over the country. Every once in a while a company will make the blunder of hiring one of those people (they make up 99% of the applicant pool, because they are always on the market, whereas skilled devs are not), he will skew your number. So yeah, that guy averages a couple hundred applications before scoring. But you don't want to emulate his tactics, or you'll find yourself lumped in with him and filtered out of every job you apply to.

hayksaakian 9y ago

1) Yes. Any job with entry level requirements will get 20-100 applications on craigslist in seattle (my experience). More or less applications on more or less popular platforms 2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. 3) Tech has even more noise than my personal experience due to higher pay scales and increased interest in "working in tech" (without any personal interest / passion in technology)

whorleater 9y ago
>without any personal interest / passion in technology Can I not work in tech without being passionate?
- username223 9y ago
  Tech work is like sex work: you don't need to feel the passion, but you do need to be able to fake it.
  - your-nanny 9y ago
    Touche
  - lr4444lr 9y ago
    I'm stealing that line.
- stagbeetle 9y ago
  It's a cultural-fit thing. You can, but there are the zealous who will deny you.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  You have to have had some level of passion to bother learning about it. It takes time to learn a topic, that's a form of passion - a drive. That's not to say you have to burn all hours on it tho. Which I think is what you're assuming there. That's honestly somewhat unhealthy and only super passionate people (and lucky ones at that) can do that for any length of time.
  - vonmoltke 9y ago
    Passion requires enthusiasim, not merely drive.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      And spending effort to learn something requires some level of enthusiasm
      - vonmoltke 9y ago
        I disagree. I have learned plenty of things I had no enthusiasm for because they were a means to an end.
  - rifung 9y ago
    Not really.. I have friends with no interest in computers but who studied CS because they knew it would lead to a well paying job. They work at Amazon and Google now so I guess it worked out for them. One requires motivation, but that motivation does not necessarily have to be interested or passion.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      In that case they have a passion for making money ;) That’s what motivated them to learn. I doubt that’s what causes them to stay. If it is tho... That’s enough.
- michaelt 9y ago
  Passion is a relative term. Nobody goes to work at Facebook or Google thinking "wow, I'm so passionate about adverts and tracking, I want to build a world with more ads and tracking in more places". It's normal not to be passionate about your work in that sense. However, some people find computers frustrating, stupid or boring. Such a person probably wouldn't enjoy a job working with them all the time - and it's difficult to build the skills that let you advance your career if you're averse to or bored by practising them. You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it.
  - vonmoltke 9y ago
    > You need to be passionate in the sense of finding the work sufficiently non-loathsome that you can readily motivate yourself to do it. That is a major abuse of "passion". While the original definitions are even stronger, something you are "passionate" about is something you actively seeking out to do. Something that is merely "sufficiently non-loathsome" is not a passion.
    - betterbeehome 9y ago
      This. How can people say something so wrong headed like "Passion is a relative term." No you're just manipulative.
    - michaelt 9y ago
      That is a major abuse of "passion". That's just the gap between what employers hope for when they place a job advert, and what they get. I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. Someone I can promote, and trust with more responsibility and less supervision. But I'll tolerate someone who does 75% of the expected amount of work, because I'm realistic about the hiring market.
      - dvtv75 9y ago
        > I would like someone who loves their work so much they do 150% of the expected amount of work, freely chooses to stay late to make the Foo they're working on the best Foo the world has ever seen. I had a job where I did this. Know what the employer did? He whined I wasn't doing enough, and gave me more to do then expected me to stay even later to do it. I was eventually spending more time at work than I was at home - I no longer work for free. If an employer wants extra hours out of me, they pay or I head home at clock out time. Employment isn't about your dream being fulfilled, it's a commercial agreement between two parties where one agrees to pay the other for time spent at the workplace. I don't live to work, I work to live, and I have other stuff to do. On my death bed, the one thing I can guarantee that I will never think is "I wish I'd worked an extra evening for free on that project for my employer." It's far more likely to be "I wish I hadn't worked that evening for free, so I could have seen the sun set just one more time."
- holografix 9y ago
  Yes you can, I’ve been in tech companies where a fair few of my colleagues are not interested in tech. They want to be part of a “winning” organisation and make money. I sure as hell wouldn’t hire someone who has no interest in what my company is doing and that level of interest would have to increase relative to the role. What tends to happen is you get very slick operators who don’t produce anything because they don’t understand/don’t care and all they do is get information from A spin it in a way that makes them look fantastic and push it to B. Given enough people like that in a tech org it’ll collapse.
  - nopassion 9y ago
    I used to work on email archival. Anyone who says they’re passionate about that is either lying or doped up on barbiturates.
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      How did you get hired for email archival? Started looking at online applications and every single one has something like "Why do you want to work for us?" and yesterday I saw "How do you add to our diversity?"
      - gaustin 9y ago
        What's the problem with those questions?
        stevenwoo 9y ago
        Sorry, was trying to figure out how the commenter got past those filtering questions.
        bartread 9y ago
        I wouldn't be surprised to find that in the UK it's illegal to ask a candidate "How do you add to our diversity?" because it could be seen as a thinly veiled way to, for example, discover a candidate's sexual preference - something you are outright not allowed to ask about, except in very specific circumstances[1]. (Also, it's an insufferably pretentious question, even if not actually illegal.) [1] E.g., it might be legally acceptable for a role in a religious organisation.
- thenanyu 9y ago
  I think it always helps to care about the quality of your craft. "Passion" seems to be the prevalent HR-speak for that concept.
- koolba 9y ago
  Yes but you have to be able to fake it for at least the duration of an interview.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > Can I not work in tech without being passionate? You can, but from the employer's perspective many markets have more applicants than positions. The employer can choose those who are closer to the ideal employee. One of the qualities of such an employee is often someone who throws themselves with passion into doing the job. Put another way, why should an employer with a stack of applicants pick those who aren't as motivated or qualified as others? That is why entry-level positions require 3 years of experience.
- watwut 9y ago
  Yes you can. Many people work in tech and are not passionate. And plenty of them are very good and responsible. Tech is not something special, you can lean it like anything else.
- lobotryas 9y ago
  Anecdata: to me and others I've spoken to 'passion' is short hand for a person having personal work standards. i.e.: a person who won't half-ass their work, who'll often go the extra distance for polish or feature completion, and who'll proactively help raise issues if their experience indicates the team is heading down the wrong path. And yes, a person who'll very occasionally stay late and pitch in when the whole team is crunching on something.
godelski 9y ago
> 2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. I mean if you are calling something "entry level position" and have "requires 3 years experience in the field", I'd expect people to apply anyway. I remember when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience. If you don't apply to those positions then you really aren't applying to anything.
- vegetablepotpie 9y ago
  >when I was fresh out of college all the entry positions I saw required several years of experience Same. That struck me as particularly BS'y. I asked career counselors at my school about that and they said to "embellish" my background a bit, but not to lie. The specific advice I got was if you worked as a developer on a short term project a year ago that would count as a year of work. If asked about it the advice was to just explain what you really meant. It made me feel uneasy because if seemed disingenuous, but I went with it because I needed a job. This made me really question what does a "year of experience" really mean? 60 Hrs/wk for a year is not the same as 20 Hrs/wk for a year. If you could use a month of work a year ago as a year of experience, what else could you stretch? At that point you could question what does anything really mean on an application? If it has super high qualifications, how could you take it seriously? You can just rationalize away anything! Can't you? 4+ years of experience? I basically got that. 2+ years in some specific programming language? How different could it be from C++? I got the basic concepts down, I can figure out the rest, just give me money! You miss 100% of the shots you don't take and the worst you will hear is the word 'no'. You need a job to pay off the loans you needed to get the degree to apply to the jobs in the first place. If experience inflation is a reaction to an insurmountable volume of applications then what businesses are really doing is filtering out the honest people.
  - aczerepinski 9y ago
    I've noticed that people conflate "years of experience" with "time elapsed since the first time you did the thing" all the time. I would love to see job postings that require 2,000+ hours of experience for junior level or 10,000+ hours for senior level.
reificator 9y ago
I don't ignore requirements or fudge them, but I do interpret them based on what they want done. If they want 10 years of Ruby/Rails experience with a focus on performance/scalability, maybe your 5 years of Python/Django is not applicable. But if they want 3 years of Ruby/Rails experience and you've got 5 years of Python/Django, and feel comfortable with the transition to Ruby, absolutely you should apply for that position. Be upfront about it and be prepared to demonstrate your ability, but that's what the interview is supposed to be about in the first place.
fiblye 9y ago
>2) Yes. Half or more of the applications I've reviewed are totally unqualified. Either they ignored the requirements or fudge it and flop on the interview. Common advice is that job posters put insane requirements on their posting because they don't really expect an entry level applicant to have 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, just a little bit of exposure to half of them. It's not surprising that unreasonably underqualified people respond to job postings with unreasonably high expectations, and that all job postings end up not being taken seriously.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > 15 years experience in HTML5, Joomla, C++14, Bootstrap, Hypercard, Quechua, nuclear physics, and Go, This is what you put in a job advert when you want to hire your mate who matches that description but feel obliged to publicly tender the job instead.
  - sudomake 9y ago
    Has c++14 existed for 15 years yet?

pagnol 9y ago

I've similarly always struggled to make sense of these kinds of claims, because in my life so far I was offered a job every time I applied, so I'm wondering if I'm either living in an area where the job market is much less competitive or if I'm aiming too low. It's out of the question that I'm some kind of hotshot, on the contrary my CV is a mess and I dropped out ouf college.

ehsanu1 9y ago
Probably a function of your industry and where you are.
orangeshark 9y ago
From my personal experience in the entry level job market, I have never successfully gotten a job offer to anything I applied to. Only have my current job because a friend recommended me.
- reificator 9y ago
  If that's your first job and you can hold it down for awhile, then I think your next job hunt will go better. Especially if you start the next job hunt while still employed. That's an important signal to your employer, that someone else was willing to hire you. It also helps to ensure you're not desperate, because your next paycheck is not hinging on the current interview.
ryandrake 9y ago
Congratulations but you’re probably an outlier. I’ve applied to hundreds of companies throughout my career (~20 years), probably an average of around 40 applications per job switch. I’ve applied to some companies multiple times, sometimes right after getting the rejection. Most people I know are in the same boat. Tech companies are so picky and there is so much inherent variance in hiring. It’s a numbers game.
psyc 9y ago
My ratio for applications to offers, over 20 years and 7 jobs, is less than two. My last job search lasted 12 hours, from start of search, to signing a contract. I've explained to people in the past that I'm extremely selective about applying. I only apply to jobs I think I would love, where I can clearly communicate why I'd be a great hire. I'm sensitive to early red flags, and avoid job descriptions that don't make sense or have contradictory reqs. I also have only worked in Boston and Seattle, two of the very hottest markets.

kushalc 9y ago

These numbers vary dramatically by location and specialty, e.g. a Marketing Assistant in Chicago has very different prospects (and expected # applications to job offer) vs. a Software Engineer in SF vs. an HR specialist in Ohio. We did an analysis on this awhile ago, specifically about # of days to get a job, but it also has some analysis about # of applications: https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-a-job-60-days-if-youre-in-hr-or-sales/ https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...

csense 9y ago
Amazing website, I'll have to keep talent.works in mind next time I'm looking for a job!

jdavis703 9y ago

If you're applying to that many jobs, you're not being deliberate in the search. I've found all of my post-highschool jobs either from people in my network advertising something, or recruiters reaching out to me. When I was in highschool I did not understand that it was really about who you know (I was homeschooled, so I didn't have a school network to reach out to for jobs), and went applying for typical highschool retail/fast food jobs willy nilly and never got an offer. It's because I was lacking someone who could "intro" me in to the organization. Now I can't really imagine trying to apply for a job cold.

iamthepieman 9y ago

In the U.S. at least, in order to continue receiving unemployment in many states, you need to apply for a certain number of jobs to show that you are "actively looking" for a job. These leads to many applicants to entry level jobs who are applying for a result other than getting hired. Indeed, many applicants of this type have no intention of ever even answering the phone/email if you try to contact them. Though some will just so they can say to the unemployment office that they "Have an interview next week."

amorphid 9y ago

I was a recruiter for 8 years, and maybe 1 in 100 applications turned into a hire. I suspect a big factor is the barrier to entry for applying has been lowered. Just fill out a quick form and click submit, so people will apply to any job that looks remotely relevant. An increase in applications makes sifting through those applications increasingly burdensome, and tools have not really made mentally parsing a resume easier, so mental energy gets sucked up trying to filter more content. The more energy you burn, the more tired you are. The less energy you have, the less you can focus on the applicants, and you start responding to fewer applications. Fewer recruiter responses to an application means job seekers need to send more applications. Repeat.

cannonedhamster 9y ago
I was also a recruiter for a while and when hiring I am always amazed at the absolute dismal amount of effort given when people apply for good jobs. Hiring is hard, someone with the right skill set will have a terrible mentality, hiring for the mentality is extremely tricky and can lead you down the road of groupthink if you're not careful. I'm still amazed how entirely incompetent people rise to managerial levels on who they know but its very, very hard to break into even with a modicum of talent.
- 80386 9y ago
  If you have to apply to 250+ jobs just to get one, you can't invest much effort into each application. I've been a part-time developer for three years (and worked full-time on top of that), and I'm looking for a full-time position. I gave up on tech after applying to 500+ jobs and getting three interviews and zero offers. The closest I got was a consulting outfit in a small city in the Inland North, where one of the interviewers got hostile about my major (philosophy) and eventually rejected me over it. But even now that I'm only applying for positions that just need warm bodies with degrees, my ratio of applications to phone screens is upwards of twenty to one, and every phone screen I've gotten in the last month has rescheduled last-minute on me, sometimes more than once. And I have to put up with shit like getting rejected at the door because the interviewer doesn't like my [perfectly ordinary and unremarkable] shoes. How in the world am I supposed to find the time to put effort into applying for hundreds of jobs?

eitally 9y ago

I'm currently trying to hire cloud solution architects, including in Bangalore. I have had >2000 applicants for the role. About 15 made it through resume & phone screens. I have found 1 so far that could make it through onsite interviews. This is just one data point from the opposite POV: especially in tech, it's extremely hard to find qualified people at the time and place you need them, especially if you need specialists.

AstralStorm 9y ago
This is because recruiters are lazy. In my bunch of years I found exactly 2 non-lazy third party recruiters. Thus actually manually finding the company you want to work with and then sending the resume and cover letter directly has a decent chance of success if you're not a hack or fake. The trouble is, they so not like to give out salary brackets.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jasonkester 9y ago

There's a distribution there that needs to be mentioned, because most job applications are submitted by unqualified applicants. My last half dozen gigs have taken 0-2 emails to secure. The 2 was a genuine job search where I identified two possible fits and reached out. The zeros all were people seeking me out. Contrast that to the guy applying for your Sr. Developer position who can't FizBuzz. He has applied to 1000 such jobs already. Every one he's seen. All over the country. Every once in a while a company will make the blunder of hiring one of those people (they make up 99% of the applicant pool, because they are always on the market, whereas skilled devs are not), he will skew your number. So yeah, that guy averages a couple hundred applications before scoring. But you don't want to emulate his tactics, or you'll find yourself lumped in with him and filtered out of every job you apply to.