Have you applied for 2,000 jobs and not heard back from any of them? You are probably a victim of the Numbers Game Mindset. That is, you have been told that finding a new job is a numbers game, so you’re going to apply for anything that you could possibly do. As the post title says, this is also known as the Spray and Pray Method. And it doesn’t work.
Why doesn’t it work? Let’s engage in a quick thought experiment:
Imagine you’re a recruiter for Giant Company A. You have 723 applications for a position that you need to get through before you move on to your next topic of consideration, a role that has 804 applications, and then the one that has 419—after the applicant tracking system has already weeded out the people who aren’t qualified. You glance at the first resume in your pile and see that it doesn’t match the title you’re recruiting for, doesn’t contain a skills summary detailing why the person is a fit, and lists a job title that seems unrelated to your posting. What are you going to do? If you’re like most recruiters, you’re going to chuck that application into the Great Recycle Bin in the Sky and move on to the next one. Oh, oops, that one has the name of a piece of software that’s essential to the job misspelled. This one doesn’t show the required education stated in line one of the description. On to the next.
You get the picture.
As a general rule, recruiters are probably going to spend less than 10 seconds looking at each resume that comes in (again, after the robots have made the first cuts) so you have very little time to make an impression.
What can you do so that your application gets noticed? Customize it. Really tailor it so it highlights as much from the job description as you can. Match their language and tone, use the words they emphasize, weed out any irrelevant information, give yourself the same title they use in the posting.
As you can see, this means you aren’t going to be able to apply for hundreds and hundreds of job postings. In fact, you may only be able to manage 2 or 3 a week, but that’s not actually a problem. For one thing, you aren’t likely to spend this amount of time on things you aren’t actually interested in or couldn’t do. For another, slowing down this way will let you start to identify places and people who might be a good match for you. That allows you to follow particular employers (hint: it’s not unusual for jobs to get posted on the company site first), and to reach out to people within the organization with whom you would like to connect.
Almost any career counselor or coach will always tell you to slow things down and only apply for things when you’re a good match, but this is even more important in a difficult hiring landscape. So instead of blasting out as many applications as you possibly can, slow down, take a deep breath, and instead focus on things you actually want and could do.
