Why applying to jobs the “normal” way usually doesn’t work

In this chapter, we’ll examine how most people apply to jobs, but we’re going to focus most on what a recruiter’s day and thought process is like. By seeing your application from the recruiter’s perspective, it will help understand why the most common approach to applying doesn’t work well for many applicants.

The goal of this chapter is to convince you that the conventional job searching approach, in which you send out dozens or hundreds of online applications, doesn’t work well. In the next chapter, we’ll look into a system my clients and I have had a lot more success with.

The frustration of applying without getting interviews

“We’ve decided to move forward with other candidates.”

“We’ll keep your resume on file.”

“Thank you for taking the time to apply, but you were not selected for an interview.”

Or the worst reply of all: no response at all, as if you’d never taken the time to make and submit a personalized application.

Applying to jobs over and over and getting these sorts of formulaic replies is one of the most common sources of anger and sadness among job seekers I speak with. They’re putting in time to make a great resume, find companies with open roles, personalize the application, submit it, and finally hope that this effort is rewarded with an first-round interview.

And when they get denied dozens or hundreds of times, it leads to questioning their own goals or dreams. I’ve worked with clients who questioned whether they’d be able to:

switch careers to a job they felt was a better fit
switch industries to something that made them feel excited instead of bored
move between countries and find a similar job
find a position that provided health benefits for their child on the way

All of these people were qualified for the move they wanted to make and eventually made a successful job change, but at first, they didn’t know how to get past applying and getting rejected. This is understandable, since not getting first-round interviews is the hardest part of job searching to be stuck on, because you’re not getting any feedback on how to improve. Once you start getting interviews, even if you’re nervous or rusty at first, you can start learning from the interviewers’ reactions and getting a picture of what you need to work on to get better at interviewing. But when you get that form rejection to your job application, you haven’t learned anything new about what to change for the next one.

A rough sketch of how most people apply to jobs

As our first step to moving past that frustration, we need to understand the typical job application process. But before we get into what the typical application process looks like, I’d ask you to focus on two things.

First, if you’re applying in the way I’m about to describe, you shouldn’t feel defensive or bad. This is how we’ve been taught, by everyone from our parents to our schools to the employers themselves. The approach I’m about to describe is what I did in my first job search, where I applied 38 times and got only 2 responses.

Second, even if your application process doesn’t look exactly like this, I’d suggest you read the next section on the recruiter’s perspective before deciding your system is significantly better. Ask yourself “Does my existing system solve these problems that the recruiter faces when looking at my application?”

Keeping those things in mind, let’s get into the typical process.

How the majority of job applications are sent

Most people get their resume ready pretty early in the job search process. If they’re personalizing heavily, they might have a few different resumes for different positions or industries.

Once they have a resume, they go to job board or search tool appropriate for their industry. This might mean AngelList for startups, LinkedIn or Indeed for mature tech companies, or another site. They’ll then search for jobs: maybe they start with companies they like and look for jobs there, maybe they start with job title matches and then check out the company. This searching gives them some roles that could be a fit.

Once they have a role that could be a fit, these websites make applying easy. If the applicant is personalizing the applications, they might do some company research first or make a cover letter. They’ll then submit the resume and possibly cover letter / short blurb on why they’re interested, and move on to the next one. Hopefully the recruiter likes what they see and responds requesting an interview!

What’s nice about this method is that you can send up to 10 applications an hour, even with some personalization. It feels like this should up the odds that you get an interview, because you’re applying to so many places.

If this process seems pretty familiar, don’t worry, it’s how almost everyone does it. And if you’re taking the time to read this book, it’s probably not working very well for you. To understand why, let’s now look at what a recruiter sees when you send in that application.

What a recruiter’s day is like

Now imagine you’re a recruiter. Let’s say you’re arriving at work on a normal Wednesday at 9AM, and you need to leave by 5PM to be on time for a Meetup you’re attending, where you’re going to try and find some leads for a developer position you’ve had open for a few months.

In the next eight hours, you’ve already got:

Five first-round phone screens scheduled for the Product Manager and Frontend Developer openings at your company. Each needs a bit of resume pre-reading to refresh yourself, a half-hour phone interview, and then written feedback after.
Two meetings, with the hiring managers for the Product Manager and for the Frontend Developer roles, to go over the candidates so far and decide if any interview questions or standards need tweaking. Each is a half-hour meeting with work afterwards.
Three candidates coming in-person for later-round interviews. You don’t have to interview them yourself, but you have to give an office tour, make sure their interviewers are ready to hand them off to one another, and walk the candidates out afterwards to answer any questions they have.
Debriefing meetings with the interview panels from those later-round interviews. Each meeting will take 15 minutes to decide whether to advance the candidate to the final round, and then you have to give the candidate the good or bad news.

That’s not including lunch, offer negotiations, defining new roles, scouting LinkedIn for hours to source new candidates, and much much more. Recruiters are BUSY.

Now imagine you have 20 new applications on top of all of that work. You’re not going to have a lot of time to read each of those in detail, right? This motivation to spend a low amount of time on each applications is further justified because your job as a recruiter is not to give every applicant a fair and equal amount of consideration. Your real job is to find exactly one person per role who will be a great fit for the company and will accept the offer.

Based on my interviews with recruiters, as well as working as one myself for a few months, you might spend as little as 30 seconds on the first pass of a resume, to decide whether to send a form email rejecting the application or to spend 2-3 minutes reading the application in more detail. Recruiters read this fast by applying a few rules to the resumes, and if your resume breaks a rule, they don’t read further.

An example of screening out over 90% of applications

As an example, at one point I was screening candidates for a Product Manager role, and the hiring manager had decided we weren’t looking for candidates with under a year of real PM experience. So on that first read, regardless of how nice the candidate’s resume was, or how applicable their internship experience or other jobs or certifications were, I rejected applications without a year of experience doing the exact same job. There were one or two exceptions based on incredibly applicable industry experience or a truly unique cover letter, but generally if a candidate didn’t have what I was looking for, they were out in 30 seconds. That also means that if they had portfolio projects, case studies, recommendations, etc. I didn’t take the time to look at those things, because my job as a recruiter is to find one great candidate. Unfortunately, the odds are that if someone doesn’t have the in-role experience I’m looking for, they’re not my one great candidate.

This might feel frustrating and unfair, but it’s the reality you face as a job applicant, and I don’t think most people understand quite how aggressive the screening process usually is.

The reason I had to screen this aggressively is that I had 400 applications and we granted about 30 first-round interviews. This is not uncommon. For every person with a nice resume but not enough experience, I had another candidate I could use instead that had both the resume and the experience I was looking for. And every interview I did was another half-hour of my week gone--imagine the time commitment to run 30 interviews, let alone 400!

Two big problems with applying the “normal” way

This leads to the first big problem with applying to jobs “normally”: if you’re not a perfect fit on paper, the recruiter usually has many applications from people who are a fit on paper. No matter how good your portfolio or related experience is, or how thoughtful your resume and cover letter are, if you apply to jobs where you don’t fit the exact definition of what they’re looking for--often “you’ve done this job for 2 years before somewhere else”--you’re almost never going to get a first-round interview by submitting an application online.

Additionally, as an applicant, you’re incredibly easy to reject at this point. In the recruiter’s mind, you’re often not even a real person in that 30 second review. They don’t know about your strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and hobbies. They don’t know what you look like or how you’ve made a big difference at your previous jobs. All they know is a few of your experiences on a piece of paper, as they quickly skim your application in the three minutes they have between one phone screen ending and another meeting beginning. They certainly don’t have to think very much about how you’ll feel when they send you a template rejection email.

On the other hand, think about one of your friends--not your best friend, but someone you care about. If they ask you a reasonable favor in person, perhaps to help them move to a new apartment, it’s hard to say no even if you’re really unexcited about spending a Saturday hauling couches up and down the stairs.

This illustrates the second big problem with applying to jobs “normally”: it is much, much harder to reject a person than a piece of paper, and when you apply online with no personal connection, you’re not really a person to the recruiter. If you don’t change that, and somehow motivate the recruiter to take more than 30 seconds to understand your story and why you’d be perfect for this job even though you don’t fit all the requirements, your applications will continue to have a low success rate.

So what does work?

Now that we’ve looked through a recruiter’s eyes and seen how incredibly busy they are, we’ve found two big problems with the “normal” way of applying:

If you’re not a perfect fit, the recruiter has other options that look better on paper.
It’s easy to reject a piece of paper but hard to reject a person, and the recruiter isn’t thinking of you as a person yet.

In the next chapter, we’ll explore an alternate system of applying that I and my clients have used which takes a lot longer per application but has a massively higher success rate in getting first-round interviews.

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