Hey HN - I timed how long it took me to go through the application process of 250 jobs. Some of my key findings:<p>- On average, it took a bit over two and a half minutes (162 seconds) to apply to a job.<p>- If company size doubles, the application time increases by 5%. If company size increases by a factor of 10, then the app time increases by 20%.<p>- Being a government company is the single largest determinant of a long application, followed closely by aerospace and consulting firms.<p>- The longest application time went to the United States Postal Service (10 minutes and 12 seconds).<p>- On the other hand, It took me just 17 seconds to apply to Renaissance Technologies.<p>- Older ATS like Workday and Taleo make job applications as much as 128% longer.
I appreciate this guy taking the time to test this stuff out, but... 2.5 minutes per application seems really reasonable and short? Even the Post Office application that took 10 minutes seems fine. I get that you might have to apply to a lot of different jobs, but at that rate in 2-3 hours of focused work, you could apply to nearly a hundred different jobs.<p>The fact that it's that <i>easy</i> to apply belies the tone the article takes, which generally bemoans how hard job applications are. But they didn't demonstrate that it's hard at all! Moreover, the author even says in the beginning that they didn't use any of the products that help you, like LinkedIn Easy Apply.<p>Anyway seems interesting but this mostly just confirmed my perception that applying to jobs is pretty easy. Interviews, on the other hand...
Oh goodness, someone else who shares my irrational antipathy for Workday!<p>Workday is such junk from a user facing perspective. It’s a huge pain to index content from. I have to omit a bunch of big semiconductor companies from my job site because it’s fucking impossible to get job data out of Workday.<p>If you work in talent at either NXP or Qualcomm, please God read this essay. You are actively harming your own recruiting prospects by using Workday!<p>I don’t have this problem at all with the more modern ATS’es - Lever, Greenhouse, and Workable all provide nice, easy to consume APIs for this.
I overheard a guy at the gym a couple of weeks back saying that he's automated (gpt4) the keyword-optimised CV/cover letter process to the point where he was able to apply to - I'm a bit suspect on this bit, but the generation at least is believable - 75 jobs in an hour and a half.<p>We've raised the noise floor significantly.<p>Ps. If you're here mate I hope it worked out for you.
Everything about the Workday UX is an absolute freaking dumpster fire.<p>Just as an example, but one that trips me up a lot, every action seems to be controlled by an orange button (Submit?) way down in the lower right corner of your browser, even if the information you're working on is way up in the upper right corner.
2.5 minutes seems short for every application but it's literally mindlessly re-entering information that's literally already on your resume. It's definitely the frustration more than the time IMO...<p>PSA: I built a browser extension that autofills your job application so you don't have to manually re-type your resume on every job -> <a href="https://simplify.jobs/copilot">https://simplify.jobs/copilot</a> (we're also YC backed!)
I have found that tailoring my resume to a specific job listing increased my response time significantly. I've seen so many articles about people answering 50+ job ads and getting no response.
Will you follow up with stats and analysis on response rate and further steps in the application/evaluation process? I'd be interested in that.
I only apply to companies I really, really want to work for. Might sound a bit kitsch, but I work a lot on my cover letter to show how eager I am to work with them.<p>Of course it could be luck, but so far I wrote only two applications in my life and got both got accepted + for job offer from both (after interviewing).<p>When I tell people about my cover letters some say that HR don’t even read cover letters, but I want to believe otherwise :D
Most job application flows are suboptimal, but job seekers need to stop maximizing the number of applications they submit and instead create a few really great applications.<p>I typically spend two or three hours writing a cover letter and customizing my resume for each job application.
I always tell my friends that i apply to 100 jobs, go through interviews with 15 companies, get 5 offers. In my experience as a generalist it's possible to find _something_ interesting about the position once you get an interview, there's no reason to pre-filter self to a very specific tech stack. As long as they pay!
I assume career page quality is related to how important immigrant visas are to staffing, where "unable to find qualified local labor" is a criteria. No idea how to quantify that though.
I remember applying to RenTech and getting a rejection email in 3 hours and let me tell you it was quick.<p>Most companies I have applied to would probably take a week or more than a week
Seems like even though multiple industries were tried these are all for tech positions, right? I wonder how long it would take for non-tech positions. I remember applying online for a minimum wage job at Burger King around 2010 and the application took about 45 minutes. Not only did you need to upload your resume, you need to enter every detail again in a long web form, and then there was a "personality test".<p>Funny sidenote, my manager told me I was the first application he received that got a perfect score on the personality test. The next best applicant in the queue at the time was 85%. The questions were all things like "If a customer is complaining do you: Smile and listen to their complaint? Or Tell them it's fast food and to deal with it?" or "A customer accidentally included an extra 5 dollar bill when giving you their payment. You could keep this $5 without anyone knowing, do you keep it?" Just all very obvious answers and I don't understand why you wouldn't at least lie.
Yeh; am done with “professional careers”.<p>De-urbanizing and moving to a more rural location. Will get a job at a grocery store to avoid all the future dead people in office jobs whose toxic positivity psychosis is leading them to believe they’re leaving behind the most important outputs for the future.<p>Such jobs are not meaningful. They’re just <i>a</i> form of social organization, like religion before us.<p>Signal attenuation due to generational churn comes with loss of experience and an obligation on the future to re-discover and encode that knowledge. We only propagate the species, social norms are not fractal and immutable; nothing we’re doing is preserved. We’re just jumping through elites hoops for bigger paychecks.<p>Been there, done that. It gets just as banal and repetitive as everything else. It’s drug addiction, chasing dopamine highs. Physics will end the species and all this effort will be for naught.<p>Given that there’s little point to being a court jester and dancing for the high court.
It'll be much more interesting to know how long the "behavior assessment" that you get sent immediately after applying.
Having just attended one mind numbing assessment from Citibank, which took more than an hour
These are some really interesting results that I have felt empirically, but is great to put some data to. One thing this doesn’t take into account is the best practice of tailoring resumes to job descriptions. This is a time-intensive task that does actually improve call back rates. A bit of a self-plug, but I’ve made Resgen[0] to help do this for you.<p>[0] <a href="https://resgen.app" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://resgen.app</a>
> - The longest application time went to the United States Postal Service (10 minutes and 12 seconds).<p>My spouse is not in tech but in comms. The quickest I know she's done an application has been O(hours) primarily due to writing cover letters, personalizing resume and often sending in clips.<p>Having seen that, I find it amusing that we techies (yes me too) get annoyed when we have to provide our Linkedin AND all the information on that page.
Is how long it takes to submit your generic CV a valuable statistic? Is there a benefit for companies to make it easy for you to apply to them?<p>I don't think anyone is sitting around going 'We just have <i>no</i> good candidates, if only people could apply in 71 seconds instead of 160, <i>then</i> we'd finally see the applicant quality increase'
I remain confused by the absense of a sizeable reverse headhunter industry.<p>Headhunters are trying to find a best fit for a company. Why is there no one trying to find a best fit for a candidate? The inherent problem in hiring, on both sides, is search costs.<p>I'm probably going to be searching for a new job sometime next year. I think that, to avoid the time spent on these appliations, and to ensure a relatively good fit, I'd be willing to pay quite a bit, or to try and align incentives pay a percentage of the pay increase from my current job for a period of time or something like that.<p>But essentially, it seems like free money on the ground to be able to pay people to solve these search frictions.<p>I realize headhunters exist on the company side, but it really seems like A) there should be more of that and B) there should be a reciprocal industry representing the applicants.
I guess this is interesting research, but for me not personally useful.<p>I've had a lot of jobs in my long career, and I have spent a considerable amount of time researching and applying for the few ones I am interested in. I have a pretty good hit rate.<p>Do people really apply for hundreds of jobs?
When I was involved in hiring at a major enterprise, our HR recruiting lead advised against reviewing candidates directly from the ATS. The reason? Due to our company's reputation as a top workplace, many applicants indiscriminately applied to every role available. Our HR lead essentially served as a human spam filter.
No notes.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/9o8yvc/if_you_created_workday_i_fucking_hate_you/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/9o8yvc/if_you_created...</a>
Why do HR people demand the duplication of efforts including manual entry of the very same information on a resume or LinkedIn profile, two resources that many HR people request. This is abusive, lazy, and easily solvable issue. I don’t bother applying with any company that feels entitled to ware my time.
Nice write up! If anything, this proves that the job application process is a total mess, and of course, when things are chaotic, it opens opportunities to data miners, scammers, and the likes.
Okay and how many of them responded ? What was the success rate? If you are going to document all this work, why not include the success rate? How many called you back?
It's been a decade ago, but I remember the nightmare of using Taleo to apply for a job. I always thought I could write something better in about a week.
Now we just need a resource about which companies will ghost you at some point in the process.<p>I can take being rejected. Disappearing into the night is so disrespectful.
great now time how many hours HR phone screening, hiring manager phone screening, take home tests, (multiple) all day onsite interviews take if you want to follow through on like 3 employers.
The tldr seems to be that it's exceptionally quick and easy to apply for jobs, perhaps too quick and too easy, there's essentially no barrier to applying to any and every job advert seen given it apparently takes less than 10 minutes in the "worst" case.
Apply to Procter & Gamble, and <i>as part of the application itself</i> enjoy being put through 1-2 hours of ambiguous personality/morality testing and Mensa-style math, memorization, and logic puzzles! With adaptive difficulty!<p>It's the most surreal and absurd experience. There are actually prep courses you can pay for just to improve your odds on the P&G testing process just to get someone to actually see your resume. Be warned though: if you don't score sufficiently high for the position you've applied to, you're banned from applying for any job at the company for a year!