ARTICLE IS CURRENTLY BEING WRITTEN
I applied to around 2100 job listings in a 4 month period. My goal was to fill my calendar with up to 5 interviews per day. The lag time from application to first call was typically 1 to 2 weeks if the application was accepted.
You need high volume. You should be applying to everything. You should be able to spam apply to 100 listings per hour. You need the ability to fill up your calendar with interviews.
- It took me around 400 applications per offer
- Every stage will have high attrition
- Spam applications will be necessary to fill out your calendar
Spam applications
- Try to keep the cadence up (100 applications per hour)
- Close out time wasters
- Anything that requires an account (Workday)
- Anything with ridiculous questions
- Read title and location
- Don’t bother reading the listing
FLOW DIAGRAM (new roles open all the time so these steps need to be repeated )
- Targeted applications to top tier companies
- Check Built in City for roles
- Wellfound application spam
- Google search spam applications until your calendar fills out
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Changing your mindset
You need to have a high volume mindset. I often see the sentiment that someone is excited about a single interview they have coming up that they got from the 50 applications they did while unemployed for the past 6 months. They don’t even realize that they should have done 5,000 applications and hundreds of interviews in that time. They don’t even know that there’s a 50% chance they won’t even make it to the loop stage. It’s sad they don’t even realize the high chance of the interview dropping them for no reason.
I still get a negative mood from rejections after thousands of applications and hundreds of interviews.
Focus
- Focus your initial applications on high quality companies.
- Source high quality companies from reputation and Levels.fyi data. I define high quality as a tech focused company with high pay.
- Companies will let you re-interview after a period of time, often 6 months or 1 year. Getting in as many good attempts as possible at your target company involves applying to them early and often.
- These companies typically have well designed interview cycles that you can prepare for
- Think FAANG, unicorns.
- Think companies currently in a high rate of growth with a large amount of positions to fill.
- Leverage LinkedIn, blind, any connections for referrals.
Extension
Use spam applications to fill out your calendar. This step should be done after completing your targeted applications. In periods with low role availability and high layoffs like 2023 your interview calendar will likely be barren. This is even more extreme for candidates with lower levels of experience.
The stack:
- Simplify browser extension for the autofill capability
- Google search targeted to country, role, and website to find the roles.
Avoid
You should avoid these trends in general unless you are specifically targeting the company or extremely desperate. Companies will
Some prestigious and well paying companies use patterns listed below and you should still complete those applications. For example, I would gladly complete a FAANG company’s application on Workday and then complete homework. The issue comes in with many terrible and mediocre companies wasting your time.
Workday
- Workday requires you to create an account for every different company. I probably have hundreds of Workday accounts. The correct response to seeing a Workday application is to close the tab. You can complete 10 other applications in the time it takes you to fill out 1 Workday application.
Homework
Do not do homework unless you are extremely desperate.
- Usually takes longer than advertised.
- Often multi-stage with edge cases to account for.
- Extremely low return on investment from the applicant’s point of view.
- Consider from the employer’s point of view, they have 5,000 applications and only want their recruiter to call 50 of them. This is how they cut down their candidate pool by 99%.
Boomer companies
- More likely to use cumbersome application sites like Workday.
- Boomer companies have extremely slow hiring processes.
- They will have low investment steps such as homeworks, iq tests, and automated behavioral interviews.
- More prone to random calls instead of coordinating over email.
- More likely to ask random trivia questions
Cover letters
- The time to reward ratio is low here. Don’t bother unless you really want
Anything with no investment from the employer
Ghost chance is through the roof. You will still get ghosted even if you ace the homework that’s 8 hours long and technically challenging.
- Homework
- Automated behavioral interviews where you film yourself responding to a prompt. Enjoy spending 1 hour talking to your computer just to get ghosted.
- Online exams
- Online IQ tests
Anecdote: I did multiple online IQ tests (1.5 hours) and spoke with a recruiter 3 times before the hiring manager rejected me for not having enough years of experience which was listed on my resume. Anecdote: I spent 8 hours on a homework, submitted it, and was then ghosted. This homework was in an area I had hundreds of hours of experience in and was technically correct. I reached out for feedback on it or any response and still received nothing. Anecdote: I spent 6 hours on a homework and moved onto the loop phase. I was rejected from the trivia round because I missed questions like “What’s the difference between single and double quotes in bash?“. Anecdote: I spent 8 hours on a homework and moved onto the hiring manager screen. The round was a simple overview of the position, my experience, and going over my resume. I was rejected afterwards.
Conclusion: Homework is just a way of reducing the candidate pool from 5,000 to 500 people. Recruiters and hiring managers don’t care that you spent the past 10 hours on it. Many hiring managers I talked to didn’t even know how long their homework took to complete or what it involved.
Levels.fyi data
Levels.fyi is a public salary aggregation website for tech roles. Software engineers have the most data but there is also information for other roles such as Product manager. It has a vast amount of anonymously submitted compensation data for company, role, level, location, and years of experience. If the company is bigger than a startup then you can probably find compensation information on them here
This is an extremely valuable resource and should always be checked for any company you are interviewing with or thinking about interviewing with.
Main use cases:
- Finding companies to apply to.
- Deriving your offer level from the terms offered.
- Knowing how much you can negotiate your offer upwards.
Power ranking
S Tier Greenhouse Lever
F Tier Workday
Simplify Jobs (Addon)
Simplify.jobs is a browser extension that auto fills job applications. It’s a requirement for rapidly spamming out applications.
Sources
Targeted Application
Greenhouse
Lever
Indeed
Issues with Indeed
- The high proportion of terrible jobs it shows me. It seems to have some learning mechanism and it learned terribly for my profile.
Issues with linkedin
- Unemployed people connecting with eachother instead of searchers connecting with recruiters
- Low success rate of easy apply
Easy apply
Using it as an aggregator to find roles
Adding recruiters
Asking for referrals
Looking up hiring manager job listing posts
LinkedIn Resume and open to work
Wellfound
Wellfound is a job board targeting startups. The main strength of this site is the speed at which you can spam apply to decent roles. Roles are generally new and well updated.
In general I found Wellfound to be a good resource to check weekly and rapidly spam out 100 applications. Would recommend.
The strategy:
Weaknesses:
- Be wary of rate limits, if you open too many tabs or apply too quickly they will hit you with CAPTCHAs on every page.
- Lower compensation companies in general.
- Startups are vague about their equity compensation
- Startups often have low equity compensation, such as needing the equity to 10x in value to reach a larger company’s compensation
- Startup
Google search
Hacker News Monthly Thread
Hacker News posts a thread for companies to list their roles on the first of every month. These roles will be anything from top tier tech overlords to boomer insurance companies to 3 person startups. Many times the application process is more informal, such as just emailing your resume to the address they have listed.
Positives:
Built In (City)
Many large US cities have job boards specifically targeting tech roles in that city. They are a great resource to
Examples:
- Built in Austin
- Built in NYC
- Built in LA
See all: https://builtin.com/tech-hubs