2 Reasons Why Job Application Success Odds Are Better Than You Think

What this week covers:

1. Macro look at the job market

2. Why LinkedIn ‘Applicant’ numbers are inflated

3. How an applicant got an offer with less than 1% odds

4. How to use these insights in your job search

2024 Job Market at a Macro Level

Look, I’m not going to be one of the people whole heartedly denying that the job market is tough right now.

We’ve already seen 37 Tech companies lay off within the first 2 weeks of 2024, ouch. But, I’m still of the mindset that you CAN make your application odds better than you realize if you’re job searching.

This isn’t going to be based on the macro numbers either, because on a macro level it does seem that layoff wise the job market isn’t terrible comparatively to historical reports.

The below is showing the current layoff rate against historical averages from the past 2 years.

But this isn’t about the macro, because if you talk to anyone in the job market right now, they realize that at a MICRO level it is not great. However, even while not great at the micro level for most, the odds still can be more in your favor that you realize as a job seeker.

2 Reasons Why Application Odds Are In Your Favor

1) LinkedIn ‘Application’ Numbers DON’T Matter

Look if you’ve been searching for a job on LinkedIn during the past 12 months, at some point this has probably been you:

Everyone has been there. You get the notification that a job matching your search criteria has been posted, only to see that within 2 hours it has 100 plus applications.

At face value, yeah those odds DO seem bad. Mathematically, the probability would be bad, but let’s dive a little deeper as to why that metric is useless at best.

The number of applications highlighted next to a job on LinkedIn is not an actual measure of candidates who applied for the role. Instead, from what I have been able to decipher, it is only a measure of candidates that click ‘Apply’ on the LinkedIn Job Posting.

So let’s say a candidate sees the posting and is generally interested. They aren’t active, but happy to check out more and maybe throw their hat in to see how the application plays out.

Then they are prompted with the “Create your new Workday account to apply” prompt and decide, as any sane person would, to use their time for something better than applying through Workday and drop out of the application process.

Have they REALLY completed an application from a recruiting perspective? No. They fell off the funnel, and wouldn’t be realistically considered an interested applicant to a recruiter.

However, LinkedIn DOES consider making it this far in the application process as an ‘applicant’ which significantly inflates that number that is advertised to any jobseeker.

Even when trying to understand how LinkedIn measures and displays this, LinkedIn is vague in it’s definitions.

Nothing here states the criteria for an ‘applicant’ advertised on LinkedIn jobs as a candidate that actually APPLIED to a role. It’s criteria are based on the job applications collected through the campaign.

So now that you know that the ‘applicant’ number associated with jobs on LinkedIn is inflated at best, the next aspect is even more impactful for someone looking for a new job.

2) Roughly 5% of Applicants Applying are ACTUALLY qualified

If recruiting was as simple as posting a job and finding the right person, staffing and recruiting agencies wouldn’t be a lucrative industry. Companies wouldn’t be shelling out 20%-30% to these companies, in addition to paying for internal Talent Acquisition teams if it was all this simple.

From my internal recruiting career roughly 50% of hires come directly from applications. 35% come from directly finding and recruiting candidates. 15% from internal hires.

That’s good news for anyone looking. That means a couple things. 1) People are actually hired from applications (groundbreaking, I know). 2) The right people aren’t always applying, which improves your odds of standing out.

You need to understand that majority of applicants applying to jobs ARE NOT qualified, at least on paper, which means you can shift the odds to your favor more easily than you’d think.

Here’s a recent real story showcasing how a candidate stand out within a flood of applications.

How One Applicant Stood Out Among 100s and Got An Offer

Story time to show you the reality of applications and how you can actually stand out.

6 months ago, I was searching for a Digital Analyst who would be working within our Marketing team. They would be creating visualizations using Tableau and that experience was a requirement. The work they would be doing was tied to supporting Digital Marketing strategies.

All of this was called out in the job description. We had 100s of applicants. Great right? 99% of them didn’t call out ANY of that experience.

Here’s what it looked like when I was reviewing applications.

90% of resumes had no specific call out on Tableau experience, but just listed BI visualizations at best. The issue? We needed Tableau experience. Yes, those can translate, but we needed specific experience. It was specifically called out in the description multiple times.

Due to applicant volume, it wasn’t possible to confirm with candidates who were ambiguous on if they had the experience or not. Instead of getting a chance to clarify, they get rejected.

95% of resumes that had Tableau highlighted, only listed it in their skill section. The issue? This can catch attention but doesn’t showcase how you used the tool. It doesn’t directly create interest. Showing how they created impact with Tableau was missing.

This was an issue because this role would have someone creating impact through that tool. Even when having calls with some of these resumes, candidates struggled with answering how they worked with the tool. 99% of the time it became clear they hadn’t worked with it at a professional level.

More often, they would highlight that they used it in past studies but didn’t truly have applicable experience. They couldn’t highlight how they used Tableau in the past to create impact, which is what this role needed.

Less than 1% of the resumes had specific bullets on how they used Tableau in a professional marketing setting and the impact they created.

The candidate we hired literally had one bullet under their experience that led to the initial call.

“Developed Tableau dashboards based on stakeholder feedback for our digital marketing initiatives resulting in 27% decrease in manual reporting time and improved automated weekly reporting.”

That is the bullet that led them to stand out in the SEA of resumes. If it was purely a numbers game, the odds would not have been in their favor. But the resume content was great, that bullet is what I was skimming resumes for and wanted to learn more about. They captured attention and interest with their resume content.

That bullet got the initial call, which led to subsequent interviews and eventually an offer.

I share this story to reinforce how important strong resume content is and how easy it is to stand out. It’s your experience that sets you apart. If it was a numbers game alone, they would’ve had less than 1% chance of getting an offer based on applicant volume.

But it isn’t strictly a numbers game. It is a quality and quantity game, but quantity will win out over time.

How to Improve Your Odds

If you take away anything from this, it’s that the odds are more in your favor than you realize.

Create the strong resume with impactful experience specific to the companies that would value your background. Companies looking to hire the past work you have done. Target companies within industries you have experience. The job market dynamics are going to make it more valuable to position yourself as a specialist than a generalist, your resume should be created with this in mind. Ignore all of the noise around how many applicant there are for every job.

Assume only 5% of applicants are actually qualified on paper, and position your application to get you into that 5% bucket. You will get calls.

If you want a resume template with an example of ‘impactful content’ reply to this email with ‘Resume” and I can send you a free template.

If you want a list of 23 job boards that you can use besides LinkedIn, respond to this email with “Job Boards” and I can send you a list.

Talk next Tuesday at 11am (ET)

Connor