First route is through personal contacts/network/referral/nepotism/cronyism. In this case, your strategy of customizing resume and application is an effective strategy as you know your application will be reviewed a relavant human.

The second route is through applying to job listings when you don't have any contact. With this route the chances of your application being reviewed by relevant human is extremely low. In this case, you are better of reaching out to as many opportunities as possible. Pre-application suitability filtering and application customization is waste of job applicant's time. Instead have an standard application and just apply to all positions in your area of interest. Any filtering by job hunter happens once an interested company has made contact.

I thought there is a shortage on devs these days.

The last 2 years I only worked with companies I found online on some recruiting platforms.

No. It's difficult to evaluate and hire, and the process generally takes much longer than companies would like, for a whole bunch of reasons (some good, some bad).

Which people confuse with "a shortage of qualified devs".

Seattle is estimated to have over 15,000 dev openings. My last company wanted to hire several hundred on its own. All the people we wanted had multiple offers. There seemed to be more jobs than people, but to be fair, it could be because we were all missing a bunch of good people. But it was hard to even get people to apply, they were tired of companies bugging them to interview. It sure felt like there was a shortage devs, because they didn't even want to interview with us.

http://www.workbridgeassociates.com/posts/images/1835/3054/C...

Look for personal contacts that can help you get through the endless blitz of resumes. Look for a company recruiter on linked in or the web that hires people with your background, connect up with them, tell them you might be a good candidate. Respond quickly to their email. Look for user groups in your area, go to them. Ask your profs. Doesn't your college have a job counseling office, usually you can keep using it even after you graduate.

Sometimes I painstakingly craft out a cover letter and tailor my CV, but that seems to actually have a negative impact. My success rate is best when I don't write a cover letter at all; just attach your SO's CV to a blank email.

My guess is that it shows you don't really need their job, which makes you a more attractive candidate.

That number is alarmingly accurate from the other side of the table too. I can't speak for any other companies, but from what I have personally observed, from 100 interviewed candidates we hire about 9. (Which translates to >90% rejection/non-hire rate.) The anecdotes from around the London tech scene imply that our numbers are not that different.

Basically, every company struggles with the same problem.

I even wrote about the experience as an interviewer some time ago: https://smarketshq.com/notes-on-interviewing-engineers-a4fa4... ; interviews are not easy. Regardless of the side of the table you're on.

When businesses spam people they are getting customers, so if they are converting 5.4% out of hundreds of thousands they can get some nice change, but when a job seeker is spamming potential employers he only needs one acceptable offer.

Of course, spamming and getting multiple offers can give you leverage or comfort, but unlike companies which are not advised to put all their eggs in one basket by getting a very large customer, job seekers usually can only be in business with one company.

So I think it would be better to consider Customer Acquisition Cost instead of conversion here, even if the CAC is hard to measure because when talking about job applications it's more about time investment.

The reasoning is that when you spam thousands of job openings you heavily reduce your cost or effort to apply for a job, sending resumes selectively means a higher cost of acquisition but if it lands you the 'big one' it means a higher return on investment.

For people who don't see the key takeaway, my read is that it's something like the following: (a) consistency and hard work pays off: it is, or can be, a numbers game (b) thinking like a business can be a useful approach when looking for a job

> * 1300 applications > * ~70 interviews (~5.4% conversion) > * About 6 offers

Which result in:

> [T]he bar here isn't all that high because you only need to make one sale to land a job. ... I had too many interviews to really optimize any more than I did.

We have to ask ourselves if the most effective use of the author's (and employer's) time is doing 64 failed interviews, or whether some portion of those 64 prospects could have been "funneled out" with a lower-cost pre-qualification step in the funnel.

(edit: Another criticism is whether the author is filling his funnel with the "best" jobs by using job postings Angel.co. Do a web search for "the hidden job market" for more on this.)

From the post:

"It's of note that these conversion rates, are likely lower than their eventual steady state rates because I ended up accepting an offer which essentially stopped the process."

My strategy and success rates are similar to yours, but I don't think that identifying good matches really explains all of the high response rate. The other piece of the puzzle is that when you go through this process you necessarily do a lot of work learning about the company/position and tailoring your application, and that work shows itself in your application package and your interview. You will stand out from the crowd of people who shotgunned a generic resume and cover letter.

That has been my experience as well; smaller, "boring" companies (that I still genuinely want to work for), project list attached to CV priorized according to the company -> response rate of > 70 percent

Domain experience helps tremendously, if only because it builds some rapport with the interviewer.

Deep customization of CV / project list is lost for larger companies because it never reaches a person who understands it, leading to the abysmally low response rate.

> It's of note that these conversion rates, are likely lower than their eventual steady state rates because I ended up accepting an offer which essentially stopped the process.

His numbers aren't accurate.

My most recent job search had an 85% response/interview rate, and 42% of the total applications resulted in an offer... of course I only applied to 7 jobs :)

This is the fallacy of percentages rather than absolutes.

He got 6 offers.

How is that bad?

You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Sending 1300 applications and attending 70 interviews feels like a huge waste of time.

EDIT: Also, is sending an application still a thing? Being LinkedIn user for a while I really stopped watching job boards and just rely on offers sent directly to me.

Admittedly, in the context of recruiters, it could be different, but doesn’t have to be. Personal relationships are a strong signal for many people.

I've never heard of a job without an interview.

How tightly that correlates to "good" is pretty debatable.

As Drucker used to say.. "focus first on being effective, then on being efficient"

How does that work? Did they already know about you and/or have direct evidence of your work?

Regarding the offer that required no interview - turned out hiring manager and me had some mutual friends, so he just reached out to one of them to get an opinion about me.

For the other offer I had an interview, but it was very short - I think my resume speaks for itself, so it was more like loose talk about my previous projects than real evaluation of my technical knowledge.