Whilst I sympathise with the desire to see more of this kind of information particularly given EA jobs being notoriously competitive, I’d be concerned that the signals sent out by raw numbers might be misleading and deter suitable applicants
The classic example is LinkedIn, which does display applicant numbers. Having seen the other side of LinkedIn job ads, I’m well aware that a job with 30+ applicants probably has about 25 who one-click apply to everything vaguely related to their field even when lacking basic qualifying criteria such as visa status. If I hadn’t seen that side of things, I’d probably be deterred from applying based on not meeting a bullet point or two where actually I’d probably be in the top 10% of qualified candidates.
What I think would be valuable to some people is those organizations with relatively complex processes involving exercises and application forms choosing to indicate roughly how many people completed exercises for similar jobs in the past (as a marginal candidate I’m a lot more likely to fancy my chances of standing out if it’s 10 than if it’s 70), but that’s a helpful thing before people devote considerable time to a process rather than something to search for.
Whilst I sympathise with the desire to see more of this kind of information particularly given EA jobs being notoriously competitive, I’d be concerned that the signals sent out by raw numbers might be misleading and deter suitable applicants
The classic example is LinkedIn, which does display applicant numbers. Having seen the other side of LinkedIn job ads, I’m well aware that a job with 30+ applicants probably has about 25 who one-click apply to everything vaguely related to their field even when lacking basic qualifying criteria such as visa status. If I hadn’t seen that side of things, I’d probably be deterred from applying based on not meeting a bullet point or two where actually I’d probably be in the top 10% of qualified candidates.
What I think would be valuable to some people is those organizations with relatively complex processes involving exercises and application forms choosing to indicate roughly how many people completed exercises for similar jobs in the past (as a marginal candidate I’m a lot more likely to fancy my chances of standing out if it’s 10 than if it’s 70), but that’s a helpful thing before people devote considerable time to a process rather than something to search for.
Good point.