3 Reflections After 63 Job Applications
Learnings and reflections from my very first job hunt.
After blazing my own trail for 10 years, I finally decided to get a 9–5.
For the first time, I experienced first-hand the “resume black hole,” went through the gauntlet of interviews, negotiated offers, and spent a long weekend deliberating which company I want to choose.
Two weeks ago, I started my first day at a startup, Searchlight.ai, as their #1 employee. It was a long and windy road and these are some of my reflections.
#1 Companies use hiring funnels. You can too.
Here were my final statistics in applying for SDR (sales development rep) roles:
63 applications
19 phone screens (30.16%)
8 second-round interviews (42.11%) / Presented with 6 take home assignments (36.84%) — some companies did both, others did one or the other
3 on-site interviews (30%)
3 offers (100%)
My application — offer ratio was about 1:20!
Applying through the front-door of resumes and cover letters is not numbers-friendly. If someone gave me a heads up in the beginning of the process, I might have been compelled to apply to 100+ companies instead.
Also, given these ratios, in retrospect, it was not a surprise that out the top 10 companies I was most excited to interview with, I only interviewed with 2 and got no offers from them.
#2 There are a TON of reasons why a company says ‘no’
I was definitely surprised by some of these numbers.
# of companies that never responded to my application: 33 (52.38%)
# of companies that rejected me after reviewing my cover letter/resume: 11 (17.46%)
# of rejections after any round of interviewing: 6
# of companies that ghosted me after at least 1 interview: 4
# of companies that filled the role or froze hiring during my application process: 3
Companies might have really poor processes, they might have froze their hiring, they might have had someone accept an offer and filled the role, and of course, they might think that I’m not qualified for many reasons.
Seeing all those numbers reinforces, in my mind, the idea of creating a funnel for myself the next time I go job hunting. It also helped me to not take rejections personally.
The suckiest part of job hunting is feeling like your skills and abilities are not wanted. The easiest way to overcome this is to play the numbers game because there’s so many reasons — that are to no fault of the candidate — why a company may reject you.
The contrast between my all-in, 30-day job hunt and the prior 60 days of casual one-off applications was night and day in terms of my mental health and emotional balance.
#3 Interviewing is a compounding skill
On my very first phone interview, I felt like I bombed. I stumbled over my answers, didn’t feel very prepared, and felt pretty nervous through most of it.
And then I found out that they moved me on through the next round.
My confidence brimmed when I got through to the 2nd round for the next company as well — that was when I realized I already had the core interviewing competencies down already (clarity of thought and articulation, self awareness, and conversational fluidity).
By the time I hopped on my 5th or 6th phone interview, I was coasting, hardly even prepped.
I’m really glad that I staggered my applications and applied to companies that I was less excited about first, that way I could practice on lower-stakes companies and feel extra prepared for the ones that mattered.
This is something I will definitely keep with me for future job transitions.
Conclusion
Job hunting can be a very de-humanizing process if you don’t play the numbers game (or have a strong network for referrals).
It pays dividends to develop the baseline competencies for interviewing.
I did a fuller, more in-depth reflection here, and for the data nerds, it also includes the spreadsheet I used to track all the stages I went through with each company.