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...)
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.
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)
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"?
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?
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.
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.
> I'm not sure how many resumes never make it past recruiting
I've asked the recruiters at my company about this (we hired roughly similar numbers). Their response was that they filter a surprising number of applicants, but they are almost always from people who are completely unqualified for the job. The referral helps fast track them through this, but it doesn't provide much more than getting their foot in the door.
I saw a post the other day where a guy set up a fake job posting on craigslist. He got hundreds of applications and around 40% even had master's degrees. Like 5% were self-taught. If each job posting gets potentially thousands of resumes, you really need to stand out and the easiest way is to know someone.
From my experience at startups, I feel like causality is backwards here. We get very few leads through our website compared to referrals and recruiters, so naturally most of our hires don't come through cold website leads. Its not like we get thousands of website resume submissions that we then just ignore. I do think referrals (including from a good recruiter) are likely to have a higher quality since they are pre-vetted a bit, but I'm more than happy to hire direct and save $20,000+ in recruiter fees.
When I was recruiting, a generic application wasn't an automatic deal breaker, but it wasn't good. If you can't take the time that you're applying to a specific job for a specific reason, that's usually a sign that you've basically "swiped right" on a job that sounded interesting. Usually a generic application for a qualified person goes to the bottom of the pile of people worth considering.
My observation was that job applicants who tried to get the job by making a notable effort to show genuine interest in a specific opportunity seemed to be the one's who eventually got the job. Being interested doesn't make one qualified, but it does tend to make one stand out.
Getting a good job is hard, and you can't always tell from the outside if a job is one you'd want. It doesn't take much time to show genuine interest in any opportunity that's worth applying to, no matter how prestigious the company may be.
Anything that makes you a strong fit or that makes you really like the position. Even if you don't have much to say, anything that makes your application not look like spam, and spamming out a resume is exactly what the author of this article is doing, is a good start.
"I wrote one of the open source packages you use!"
This'd imply your company is so interesting, that it warrants a cover letter.
When I job hunt, I email literally every posting, as does everyone I know. When you're looking for 'strong fit' - what you're really selecting for is desparation.
When I was a junior, I wrote cover letters for every job. Now that I'm senior, I haven't written one in years and get more callbacks than ever before.
And I bet you don't need to write a spam bot to spam your resume out to N * 10^50 job postings. It sounds like you've outgrown the need to seeks answers to questions you might have asked earlier in your career. That is a nice position to be in :)
Still, one could argue that flirting w/ the company a bit at the point you make a first impression, possibly in a cover letter, is in your best interests. If someone needs you, they'll offer to pay what they need to. If someone wants you, they'll pay whatever it takes to retain you. Sometimes those numbers are the same. But if a company would be willing to go the extra mile to make you happy, and you give them no reason to feel that way, you're leaving money on the table.
Out of personal experience hiring many new staff members, this might be true for entry level to mid-level jobs with broad supply of candidates being a good match with their (claimed) skill set.
Unfortunately even that oversimplifies the actual situation - there is not one type of job and there is not one type of organisation hiring.
The higher up the ladder you go the less likely it becomes that you would get a job based on your resume / skills alone. You will need an endorsement of some kind that might come from inside the company or through a trusted external referrer (e.g. a specialised senior / executive placement agency aka head hunter used by the company for pre-selecting candidates - sometimes this is visible when the agency is advertising the role, sometimes not when the role is advertised under the company name).
Many of these roles are still advertised like other roles mainly to follow process - advertising every vacancy to the public is almost always a step to tick off in hiring processes.
While some companies - mostly fast growing or start-ups - are more open to "outsiders", in others the public advertising while still providing some transparency has long become a complete illusion.
My most extreme examples here would be with government agencies for permanent senior or above roles. This can be best demonstrated with United Nations post advertising.
The UN has a series of job boards where the public can apply to any of the jobs and all posts vacant should be on these (not sure if they still include the most senior ones - you normally find these in the Economist).
What they don't tell you is that a lot of them only take internal candidates and are not really open to external applicants - this can go that far that even staff members from other UN agencies wont through the first selection round when applying.
Other (non-professional) jobs might only be filled locally, e.g. if you would be in the UK and the job is in Switzerland don't bother...
After that, applying for senior posts when you are not "part of the system" is a completely useless endeavour. Here even skills seem to become secondary - with most of them you will have to be endorsed by your government. There might be a very small number of people that made it onto senior posts in the last 10-15 years without government endorsement, but tmk all of them had very strong internal / organisation support behind them. And most of them had an enormously hard time to fight off the "cronies" after they got the post - no surprise that even less survived the first 2 years.
Overall, job boards might be a good starting point for entry level positions or contract work. It helps you to identify potential opportunities, but there is normally no direct road to get a job from the advert alone.
Often you have a better chance to apply directly on the company web sites, or on sites like Kaggle or HackerRank.
Most importantly you need to find a way to stick out from the crowd.
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.
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.
> 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?
Oh dear sounds like you have missed some of the subtle clues here. Wasn't taking about your "ethnic" culture.
It's the unwritten rules of professional jobs i.e. read a broadsheet and not a tabloid paper - this is what the infamous "The Unofficial Goldman Sachs Guide To Being A Man" is all about.
BTW I went to a bog standard comprehensive and did not go to Uni
I wish this culture would die. The sooner we realize that most programming is a skills trade and not a profession, the better it will be for the industry.
Banks hire knowledge workers/creative types/snowflakes.
In fact, they hire the absolute best-credentialed and most-experienced in the market. Our receptionists, mail and facilities staff at minimum had a Masters degree, went to a Tier 1 school and did something very interesting/exceptional with their off-time.
They just try to turn them into drones via compensation schemes and internal politics.
Girlfriend has climbed the ranks in a bank over the years to a pretty decent pay right now. The tellers you talk to when you walk in generally have a degree to a masters level education, and make about 28k to 35k CAD. Outside of tech and a select few other industries, jobs like this are pretty competitive with limited payoff. That 60k entry job (here at least) that is the norm for CS and other eng disciplines is a pipe dream for many with more general degrees.
It's a situation a lot of us here forget or don't even know exists.
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...
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? :)
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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_...).
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.
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.
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!
70 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 97.7 ms ] thread(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...)
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.
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"?
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.
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.
> I'm not sure how many resumes never make it past recruiting
I've asked the recruiters at my company about this (we hired roughly similar numbers). Their response was that they filter a surprising number of applicants, but they are almost always from people who are completely unqualified for the job. The referral helps fast track them through this, but it doesn't provide much more than getting their foot in the door.
"Dear Sir or Madam,
<generic blob of text>
Sincerely, <applicant name>"
If you're someone like google or in a very specific niche that I'd like to be in then I'd write a cover letter, but that is not most jobs.
Getting a good job is hard, and you can't always tell from the outside if a job is one you'd want. It doesn't take much time to show genuine interest in any opportunity that's worth applying to, no matter how prestigious the company may be.
"I wrote one of the open source packages you use!"
"You make software used in my toaster!"
"Your office it two blocks from my house!"
When I was a junior, I wrote cover letters for every job. Now that I'm senior, I haven't written one in years and get more callbacks than ever before.
Still, one could argue that flirting w/ the company a bit at the point you make a first impression, possibly in a cover letter, is in your best interests. If someone needs you, they'll offer to pay what they need to. If someone wants you, they'll pay whatever it takes to retain you. Sometimes those numbers are the same. But if a company would be willing to go the extra mile to make you happy, and you give them no reason to feel that way, you're leaving money on the table.
Unfortunately even that oversimplifies the actual situation - there is not one type of job and there is not one type of organisation hiring.
The higher up the ladder you go the less likely it becomes that you would get a job based on your resume / skills alone. You will need an endorsement of some kind that might come from inside the company or through a trusted external referrer (e.g. a specialised senior / executive placement agency aka head hunter used by the company for pre-selecting candidates - sometimes this is visible when the agency is advertising the role, sometimes not when the role is advertised under the company name).
Many of these roles are still advertised like other roles mainly to follow process - advertising every vacancy to the public is almost always a step to tick off in hiring processes.
While some companies - mostly fast growing or start-ups - are more open to "outsiders", in others the public advertising while still providing some transparency has long become a complete illusion.
My most extreme examples here would be with government agencies for permanent senior or above roles. This can be best demonstrated with United Nations post advertising.
The UN has a series of job boards where the public can apply to any of the jobs and all posts vacant should be on these (not sure if they still include the most senior ones - you normally find these in the Economist).
What they don't tell you is that a lot of them only take internal candidates and are not really open to external applicants - this can go that far that even staff members from other UN agencies wont through the first selection round when applying.
Other (non-professional) jobs might only be filled locally, e.g. if you would be in the UK and the job is in Switzerland don't bother...
After that, applying for senior posts when you are not "part of the system" is a completely useless endeavour. Here even skills seem to become secondary - with most of them you will have to be endorsed by your government. There might be a very small number of people that made it onto senior posts in the last 10-15 years without government endorsement, but tmk all of them had very strong internal / organisation support behind them. And most of them had an enormously hard time to fight off the "cronies" after they got the post - no surprise that even less survived the first 2 years.
Overall, job boards might be a good starting point for entry level positions or contract work. It helps you to identify potential opportunities, but there is normally no direct road to get a job from the advert alone.
Often you have a better chance to apply directly on the company web sites, or on sites like Kaggle or HackerRank.
Most importantly you need to find a way to stick out from the crowd.
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.
> 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.
It's like hiring an NFL player.. you get the talent you pay for (sometimes)
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?
It's the unwritten rules of professional jobs i.e. read a broadsheet and not a tabloid paper - this is what the infamous "The Unofficial Goldman Sachs Guide To Being A Man" is all about.
BTW I went to a bog standard comprehensive and did not go to Uni
Would you suggest a surgeon is just a tradesman after it just cutting meat so its totally like a butcher.
Banks hire knowledge workers/creative types/snowflakes.
In fact, they hire the absolute best-credentialed and most-experienced in the market. Our receptionists, mail and facilities staff at minimum had a Masters degree, went to a Tier 1 school and did something very interesting/exceptional with their off-time.
They just try to turn them into drones via compensation schemes and internal politics.
I would have thought it would be difficult to convince a graduate from an Ivy League university or similar to take a janitorial job?
It's a situation a lot of us here forget or don't even know exists.
This was a highly-regarded financial.
I have to disagree that Bolles entirely agrees with the conclusion of the article - he takes a more holistic view of jobhunting.
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.
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.
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.
> Referrals are the minority of applicants but are five times more likely to be hired.
From the article:
What we're looking for is So reversing the two known conditionals, and dividing to eliminate the unknown probability for P(hired): Referrals are actually 6.4 times as likely to be hired. This is why stat and math classes are important, journalists.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!".