Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Figures
| Event | Figure |
|---|---|
| First application | May 3, 2023 |
| First interview | May 18, 2023 |
| First offer | September 29, 2023 |
| Total emails in my Job Search 2023 folder | 4,182 |
| Approximate applications | 2,097 |
| Initial recruiter calls | 99 |
| Ghost count after at least 1 call | 26 (26.3%) |
| Homeworks completed | 9 |
| Companies offering interview feedback | 1 |
| NDAs signed | 6 |
| Times flown out for onsites | 2 |
| Total offers | 5 |
| Recruiter spam emailing lists I was added to | 5+ |
| Most applications without an interview | Microsoft (19) |
| Applications to the company I accepted | 10 |
| Fastest rejection email after interview | 3 hours |
| Fastest rejection in an interview | 5 minutes (1 question) |
| Longest time between application and result | 114 days |
| Applications per offer | 419.4 |
| Leetcodes completed | 300 |
Ghosting definition: Application accepted, at least one phone call with a hiring manager or recruiter, and then the company halting all contact without notice.
Interviews By Month
Interview count by day, from May 2023 to October 2023
This is a heat map generated from my calendar events.
| Month | Number of Interviews |
|---|---|
| May | 2 |
| June | 18 |
| July | 44 |
| August | 42 |
| September | 46 |
| October | 31 |
| Total | 183 |
There will be some minor discrepancies in numbers:
- Recruiters will randomly call at all times of the day which isn’t shown here.
- Loops may count as 1 to 4 interviews, depending on how the company sent calendar invites.
Application flow
Application flow by stage
Conversion rates
| Stage | Conversion Percentage |
|---|---|
| Application to recruiter call | 4.7% |
| Recruiter call to Loop | 14.1% |
| Loop to offer | 35% |
This is a simplified view of the process but it gives the idea. There are stages missing such as:
- Hiring manager screen
- Homework
- Online assessments
- Roles closing or filling
- Executive interviews
I expect the largest difference would be 50% of recruiter screens converting to a hiring manager screen and then around 50% of those converting to the loop. I would have to go through each interview process to figure this out.
Takeaways
- Every stage has massive rates of attrition. Even recruiters are heavily filtering candidates who are then heavily filtered by the hiring manager.
- Every interview needs to have a highly positive result to continue to the next stage.
- Even the interviews where I do extremely well have a high rate of failure.
- Many roles are closing or being filled by internal transfers.
- 2023 salaries and leveling are significantly lower than 2021.
- The vast majorities of homework and takehome exercises are a waste of time and should be avoided unless you are specifically targeting that company or extremely desperate.
- Startups offer low equity and pay to mid level software engineers. The company valuation would have to increase by 100x for me to get a $1,000,000 payout from equity.
- Companies are getting so many applications that they’re filtering for unicorn candidates. It’s not enough to just have years of experience in a domain, you need to have years of experience in a specific technology that they happen to use in that domain.
- Many interviewers would ask trivia questions from deep within documentation (like Kubernetes docs) as a way to weed out candidates.