Typical number of job applications nowadays before being offered a job?

[413x]

It may get to the point that simply sending in CVs is redundant.

Anyone now can plug some prompts in to an AI service and have a CV that can get you an interview.

But then you have a flood of CVs to sift through. So do you exclude all AI ones? If you even can?

Or do you (like said) rely on personal effort such as LinkedIn, a recruiter you have had a call with, personal connections?


I see CVs as becoming out of date myself.

 

[Nasher]

It may get to the point that simply sending in CVs is redundant.

Anyone now can plug some prompts in to an AI service and have a CV that can get you an interview.

But then you have a flood of CVs to sift through. So do you exclude all AI ones? If you even can?

Or do you (like said) rely on personal effort such as LinkedIn, a recruiter you have had a call with, personal connections?


I see CVs as becoming out of date myself.

Even on Linkedin you can AI a profile quit easily. Just copy/paste what it gives you in to the text boxes. Professional CV writers etc are pretty redundant now as AI will write you an optimal one (with editing to fit your way of writing) every time.

There isn't really any way around it. "AI detectors" are nonsense so you can't use that to filter it out. Unless they flop during an interview or you have already hired them, you won't really know. But then gaming CVs and interviews has always been a thing, the method just changed.

 

[Epburpee]

646 applications is an insanely high number, but with that many, you would get some kind of process in place and not just do them from scratch each time. And over eighteen months, you would be doing other things as well, not just waiting to hear back.

I work in the NHS, and five years ago I was getting an interview invite on nearly every job application I did. This was because I was essentially overqualified and overexperienced and was applying for the same type of role every time. It can be quite easy to game and wing it in the NHS. Im not saying that as someone who has necessarily succeeded in that regard, I mean that I have seen some complete muppets play the system and get into well-paid managerial roles. I am sure this is the case in other industries.

I don't see CVs becoming irrelevant, not while humans have jobs to do. At the end of the day, you will always need some way to briefly summarise and communicate your skills and experiences. Recruitment processes will just adapt to account for the AI tools. But humans are creatures of habit, and all the HR people will want to keep doing it the same way and using the same systems for a long time to come.

 

[D.P.]

I had a few CVs land on my desk (figuratively of course).....I hadn't realised how insane the hiring market has got. The games industry is pretty straightforward, you look at what studios a candidate has worked at, which projects they were on, and what job titles.....and you've got a decent summary of their experience.

Got a collection of Python CVs the other day....just ROFL. They look like an absolute joke word salad. Made me really miss working in C++ where people actually have to build **** and not just pull in endless reams of dependencies and call themselves a software engineer. Python Package Manager is probably more apt, and I doubt many of them are good that.

There was one decent CV in the pile that actually wrote out their experience in plain english and hadn't run it through an AI service.....but it was eye opening. No wonder people are struggling to get interviews if that was any way representative.....just one pile of meaningless tech stack words next to another hundred piles of meaningless tech stack words.

Pro Tip : Your CV is supposed to give me an idea of YOU, not be just a massive list of keywords. That's not how hiring works.

One if the issues is how HR filters applicants based on keywords. It is likely the job description includes certain technologies and tech stacks, so if these don't appear on your CV your CV won't even be looked at by the hiring committee

 

[D.P.]

Thats perfectly fine if you are a spring chicken or work in STEM.

But if you are 50+ or part of the "Go learn a trade bro!" group. People haven't got the time or energy to be doing that sort of running around.

Also, for most people people with corporate jobs their contract will explicitly prevent any additional work, even if it is volunteering at a charity will require months of arguing with the legal team, getting contracts written etc and the charity or org you would volunteer for would never wait that long or want to get their attorneys involved.

Volunteer work always needs to be very different to your profession. I try to do volunteer work every year as part of the companies policies i can do 10 days a year. The last few times has been helping farmers repair fencing or cutting back trees encroaching on their fields.

All good fun but useless for network. If i volunteered support related to my work area it would first have to go through the company. If i bypassed that i would be swiftly fired and likely face a legal n
battle.

And then there is just the practicality of it. Standard working hours for software engineers are 50-65hours/week. If uou jave a family, and take some time for sports/hobbies/fitness, when exactly do you volunteer regularly? Fine if you are unemployed i guess

 

[mid_gen]

Also, for most people people with corporate jobs their contract will explicitly prevent any additional work, even if it is volunteering at a charity will require months of arguing with the legal team, getting contracts written etc and the charity or org you would volunteer for would never wait that long or want to get their attorneys involved.

Volunteer work always needs to be very different to your profession. I try to do volunteer work every year as part of the companies policies i can do 10 days a year. The last few times has been helping farmers repair fencing or cutting back trees encroaching on their fields.

All good fun but useless for network. If i volunteered support related to my work area it would first have to go through the company. If i bypassed that i would be swiftly fired and likely face a legal n
battle.

And then there is just the practicality of it. Standard working hours for software engineers are 50-65hours/week. If uou jave a family, and take some time for sports/hobbies/fitness, when exactly do you volunteer regularly? Fine if you are unemployed i guess

I sometimes wonder if you live in some alternate reality from me.

50-65 is certainly not 'standard working hours' for a software engineer. I have never worked more than 45 hours on a regular basis, across many industries, and several countries. I've been on 37.5 hour weeks for at least half my career. Perhaps in the US things are higher, but not UK/Europe, or Asia in my experience. Even at my most intense working environments in finance in HK I was doing 45-ish most of the time. But then I don't do performative office-loitering that some people do to pretend they're being productive, I get my job done well in the hours I'm contracted to and make sure I maintain a healthy personal life.

The UK does seem to be slowly succumbing to US work culture and a lot of work-life martyrdom, but I have no sympathy for people that work themselves into an early grave. It's a choice.

 

[D.P.]

I sometimes wonder if you live in some alternate reality from me.

50-65 is certainly not 'standard working hours' for a software engineer. I have never worked more than 45 hours on a regular basis, across many industries, and several countries. I've been on 37.5 hour weeks for at least half my career. Perhaps in the US things are higher, but not UK/Europe, or Asia in my experience. Even at my most intense working environments in finance in HK I was doing 45-ish most of the time. But then I don't do performative office-loitering that some people do to pretend they're being productive, I get my job done well in the hours I'm contracted to and make sure I maintain a healthy personal life.

The UK does seem to be slowly succumbing to US work culture and a lot of work-life martyrdom, but I have no sympathy for people that work themselves into an early grave. It's a choice.

Google’s Sergey Brin Urges Workers to the Office ‘at Least’ Every Weekday

The tech giant’s co-founder said that if employees worked harder and were in the office more, the company could reach an artificial general intelligence breakthrough.

www.nytimes.com

Everywhere i have worked 50-60 hours is just standard, with longer hours when meeting deadlines. You might have been lucky, perhaps in the games industry working hours are lower.
Time in the office will certainly be less, but adding in the evenings and weekends i am rarely less than 50-55. My team in India almost certainly works closer to 60-65 hours

 

[Liquiduk]

I dished out about 150 tailored applications over the course of 6 weeks before I landed my job in April of which of course none of those were for.

 

[Demon]

And then there is just the practicality of it. Standard working hours for software engineers are 50-65hours/week. If uou jave a family, and take some time for sports/hobbies/fitness, when exactly do you volunteer regularly? Fine if you are unemployed i guess

Not around these 'ere parts.. SW Eng's are only doing minimum hours and you can achieve a 6 figure salary for 36 hours a week in our business..

I've never 'needed' to work more than the contracted hours, I have always chosen to do 45+ hours per week throughout my working life but then I've always been progressing and I just don't know any different, no one has told me I have to do it or set any form of expectation.. it really does depend on the industry/area.

 

[Ali195]

The article is showing what most new graduates are going through now.

Spend a crap load of money to go to uni "because society told me to" End up leaving and cant land the most basic job, never mind a job related to their degree. They are in a pool of 10,000 other people who have just left uni combined with others who have been working for years and also seeking employment due to lay offs, etc.

Working in IT for the last 20 years, apply for jobs today compared to 10 years ago, not only is the application progress is soul destroying when applying for so many jobs. Completing the form, to get an generic "Thank for your application but we picked someone else", ghosted or if you get an interview its so many unnecessary stages. You make it through that to get an low ball offer.

I had an interview a few years back over 6 weeks for an Azure Cloud Engineer role. 5 stage interview, to be told "Sorry, we need someone with more experience." They could have figured that out from looking at my CV or from the first interview stage. But no, drag it out over 6 weeks, stupid aptitude tests and booking a day off work to attend the in person interview

Also you have my friend, going through an 8 stage Software Engineer role....yeah, he didn't get the job either.

15 to 20 years ago. Applying for jobs was simple. You know after 1st stage if you got the job or not. Maybe an 2nd stage for the finally decision within a week. Or you left uni straight into a decent job after applying for a few roles, not 650! Now it’s dragged out wasting peoples time.

I can personally testify to these silly number multi-stage interviews, which are really only appropriate for c level type roles, or for larger firms a regional (ie you cover EMEA, AMER or APAC) or global role. But this business of doing 5 plus interviews for a team role is out of hand.

My firm does it…basically amounts to “make sure they’re not bs about experience, not an ***hole or someone with a chip on their shoulder etc”. Then this process is essentially repeated at a team leader and middle management level.

 

[mid_gen]

Google’s Sergey Brin Urges Workers to the Office ‘at Least’ Every Weekday

The tech giant’s co-founder said that if employees worked harder and were in the office more, the company could reach an artificial general intelligence breakthrough.

www.nytimes.com

Everywhere i have worked 50-60 hours is just standard, with longer hours when meeting deadlines. You might have been lucky, perhaps in the games industry working hours are lower.
Time in the office will certainly be less, but adding in the evenings and weekends i am rarely less than 50-55. My team in India almost certainly works closer to 60-65 hours

I've worked in services, consultancy, wholesale, retail, and finance, and games as a software engineer, in several countries, firms like JPMC, RBS, HSBC, Microsoft etc.

In my experience, no software engineer is doing good quality work after they've been sat a desk for 8 hours as a matter of course. They are either under genuine pressure and doing increasingly poor quality work, or they're not actually doing concentrated work most of that time. Regularly doing 50-60 hours is just a failure of management imo. You can do bursts of extended hours for a couple of weeks but that's no way to run a software engineering team long term, a recipe for high turnover and sickness. People will get on the treadmill and grind until they get what they want from the job and bugger off.

My team in HK stayed in the office til very late but it turns into a social for them in the evening, I walked out the door at 6pm every day which raised some eyebrows but in my experience in my nearly 25 year career, the people whose opinions actually matters respect people that prioritise a sensible work/life balance, because they're happier, more productive employees that are going to be around a long time.

Since Covid when I'm working from home, I always leave my desk at 4pm, go to the gym, go climbing, go for a walk, whatever. I might do a little work later on in the evening, but I am very strict about it, and I bring this up in interviews and make it clear that's how I work. Some people need to see a few post-4pm meeting invites declined before they get the message, but being consistent is key!

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

My next door neighbour's son used to be a tiler. Worked as an apprentice for a local company, easily could have set up himself. He's a nice lad, wouldn't say boo to a goose and would be one of those tradespersons you get to do a good job for a very fair price. Seen his work and he does a really good job.

Son has now decided he wants to be in IT and is studying an Open University programming course. Can't help but think it's a bad move but hey, it's not me!

 

[NickK]

I've come to the conclusion that over 50, unless you have specific immediate skills, then you're not going to be hired by someone looking for something, but rather a known-someone looking for someone they know has the skills. Case in point at a BBQ at the weekend, a java developer that I used to work with 1998-2007 is still a java dev and an acquaintance was at the BBQ said he was looking for java, will put a job spec over this week and send it over. All at the BBQ had worked in Java and together in the past, but we've all moved on a little.

I suppose I'm now feeling the product of my lack of relationships and working across a number of things that ultimately the role got made redundant.. the issue is any recruiter looks at the course of my career and then simply passes. Rather annoying.

So I think the only way to get beyond this is (a) develop a brand with a set of skills, (b) develop the relationships where people go "he's useful and suggests the recruiter follow up".