I sent over 100 applications to jobs relevant to me yesterday. I have already received an email asking about an interview.
This shows that it is better to have one really good resume relevant to any relevant field position, which can be shot off to over 100 applications than to have ten mediocre resumes tailored and sent off to 10 identical jobs.
Job hunting comes down to two conversions… how many applications turn into interviews and how many interviews turn into offers.
If you have a 10% application-to-interview conversion rate and a 10% interview-to-offer conversion rate, you need at least 100 applications to get one offer. With EasyApply and a decent resume, I find that a 10% application-to-interview is what I get in reality.
The remaining factor is how long it takes you to do the hunt. If you don’t have a good resume, you should expect to spend up to 2 hours writing it out, reviewing it, and sending it to friends to review and give you feedback. If you already have a good resume, 10 minutes will be enough. This is a fixed cost of a job hunt.
If you go the old-fashioned Taleo path and write a new resume for every job, every job could take you 30 minutes to fill out the same form every day. If you spend 8 hours applying to jobs this way, you will submit 16 daily applications. This could lead to 1 interview and will likely end in 0 offers. It will take you almost two weeks to get to the 100 applications you need to get to the probability of getting one offer. That is a long time. That is time you didn’t spend improving your skills, time you didn’t spend making projects to share on LinkedIn. That is the ultimate price of the old fashioned model. Even if the Taleo method increases your probability of getting an interview to 20% per application due to fewer applicants, it will take you the better part of a week to get ten interviews, with only a 2% chance of having one offer. This is a bad proposition.
Instead, you have already spent between 10 minutes and 2 hours writing a good, versatile resume focused on your desired jobs. Your LinkedIn profile is strong, and if you are new, you have asked someone with more experience to read over your profile and give you recommendations. You then search for your desired job role in your desired application and only apply through EasyApply. You spend one day, and you send in over 100 applications. 10% of them call you back. You now have 10 interviews. With a 10% interview-to-offer conversion, it is the most likely way to get one true offer.
It’s just like picking stocks. You can try picking a few stocks and hoping some of them work out, but you will probably fail. It is better to buy the entire market, the equivalent of sending in over 100 EasyApply applications. As n approaches infinity, the probability you will find a good stock or get a good offer approaches 1.
That is how I hunt for jobs.