Do any of you have heuristics for when to “give up” or “pivot” in a job search? Examples could be aiming lower / differently if no response after 10 applications.
Thankfully this is not something I have to worry about for a long time. But I think it’s useful to have some balance to the usual advice of “just keep trying; job searching takes a long time”. Sometimes a job really is unrealistic for a person’s current profile (let’s operationalize that as 1000 job searching hours would still only result in a 1% chance of getting a certain set of jobs).
hey geoffrey, here are a few drafty thoughts that boil down to “You should probably invest a bunch of time before giving up” and “It’s hard to get useful data from rejections”:
Like Dee, I spent months and hundreds of hours applying to ~80 jobs before I found my current role. If I were job hunting right now, I would probably invest a similar or greater amount of effort. My impression from many conversations in my personal life is that more people under-apply than over-apply. There’s almost certainly some amount of effort that’s too much, but I’d guess most people won’t hit it.
Tbc, I’m not making the claim that you should unreflectively apply to any job that you see—you shouldn’t do that! But if you’re doing a lot of reflection and generally think you’re pointed in the right direction, I think the marginal job application is positive EV. Dee’s four questions and resources above are a great start for thinking carefully about the general direction of your search!
I think you should be pretty careful about updating your beliefs about the relevance of any particular rejection to your job hunt because:
Rejections are statistically more likely than not. Rejections from even a high number of jobs don’t necessarily imply that your general job hunt is poorly designed. I don’t know how to put precise numbers on this, but if you have e.g. a 1% chance of getting any particular job, being rejected from 20+ shouldn’t be intellectually dismaying at all (although it’s of course very emotionally discouraging). And, a 1% chance is probably too high—for most jobs I manage, more than 100 applicants seem plausibly qualified at application review.
Some rejections happen because of communications/legibility issues, not because of real lack of fit. Here’s a personal anecdote: I once learned a year after the fact that I was rejected at the application review stage from one organization because my short answers showed insufficient evidence of alignment with effective altruism. That surprised me because at that time of my application I had been involved with EA for nearly a decade, but didn’t know I needed to signpost that on my application. Tbc, I’m not saying that the lesson here is “always say how much you love EA on your applications,” or “you should assume that organizations are wrong to reject you,” or “the organization was correct to evaluate candidates in that way”, just that: It’s relatively easy for a failure mode to happen where candidates and organizations lack shared understanding about (1) what qualities the org is searching for and (2) how candidates ought to display their possession of those qualities. Hiring teams spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that sort of failure mode, but it’s impossible to completely eliminate it.
Many rejections happen because of organization-specific idiosyncrasies, not because of lack of fit with a general type of work. For example, my org might reject someone from a research role because there’s a specific, weird professional trait that’s important in our specific work environment and we don’t think it’s easily trainable. But that doesn’t indicate that (1) the candidate isn’t good at research in general, (2) the candidate couldn’t do a different job at our organization, (3) the candidate shouldn’t pursue work that they consider impactful and motivating.
In most cases, you will not receive informative feedback with a rejection. Because of that it’s just really hard to know if and how you should update your general approach to your job hunt.
Thanks for asking, Geoffrey – I think this is a helpful and important question. My own personal heuristic after switching jobs as a mid-career professional ~2 years ago was something like: if I spend ~100h and get no signal or make any progress, I should either pivot or give up. Now, I think that number could be meaningfully lower or higher for different people and would depend on internal factors like a) time/capacity to search for a job, b) finances (if searching without a steady stream of income in place), and c) intrinsic motivation, and external factors like the “EA job market”.
Granted, when I first started, I broadly took Michael Aird’s advice to not think and just apply, but I burnt out halfway through and ended up volunteering at several orgs instead, along with strategizing the roles I applied to a bit more.
It took me 5 months, >20 applications, and ~100 hours of research, prep, interviews and tests to land the right role, or any role, which happened to be the highest impact for me. I did not apply for any role I wouldn’t be excited by, and assumed others would feel the same way, so competition was high. Throughout the job search, though, the key thing that kept the needle moving for me was that through rejections, I was making progress, and the most helpful bit was receiving rejections at later stages. The later in the process I received a rejection, the more information I received about my fit for the role and general performance, though granted, some of that signal was noisy and much of it was self-interpreted.
I think the ways one could tailor applying to roles better is through tiering their search by:
Seniority of the role
Organization (how impressive and aligned/relevant their work is to you/your experience)
This both helped shape my perspective on whether I was applying to the right org and the right level.
If, through this process, the answer to the below questions is a resounding no, I’d consider rethinking my approach, pivoting, or an upskilling phase:
Have I received any positive signals from processes I’ve been a part of?
Do I have a competitive advantage over any of the roles I want?
Would another 100-200 hours meaningfully shift the odds?
Are there any roles that seem to fit my skills (but I think I just didn’t perform well)?
Haven’t read much here, but just flagging that the first sentences of my post were not merely “just apply” but rather:
Don’t spend too long thinking about the pros and cons of applying to an opportunity (e.g., a job, grant, degree program, or internship). Assuming the initial application wouldn’t take you long, if it seems worth thinking hard about, you should probably just apply instead.” [emphasis changed]
This is indeed ideally complemented by heuristics about which specific things to apply to, and with some other career-capital-building moves like doing courses or bootcamps.
And I expect some people did further than ideal with “just apply” due to my post (e.g. reading the title alone), but that it was on net a useful nudge.
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but building on Calum’s and Dee’s points—I think it might also be helpful to first clarify what approach you’re taking in your job search, since different strategies have very different success rates and timelines.
It might be helpful to think of job searching as existing on a spectrum—on one end, you have applying through job boards and official channels, and on the other end, you have less structured approaches like networking, volunteering and turning that into a full-time role, creating your own side projects, etc.
For the more structured application approach, I personally use a tiered approach that balances my long-term career vision (the one I spend 100s of hours discerning) with current personal constraints (needing a salary, visa sponsorship, supporting family). It may look like something like this, where I allocate a percentage of my job hunting time to specific roles under the following tiers:
Tier 1: Organizations I genuinely want to work for or roles I want to be in—these align with my 10-year career goals (70% of the time I budget for structured applications)
Tier 2: Roles that could be stepping stones to Tier 1 positions i.e., can help me build career capital for my dream role (20% of my time)
Tier 3: Positions that meet my immediate financial or other personal needs (10% of my time)
However, the actual number of roles I apply for varies significantly—I have a very specific career path in mind, so there aren’t many positions that fit Tier 1, especially when factoring in my personal constraints. This means I might apply to fewer Tier 1 roles in absolute numbers compared to Tier 2 or 3, but invest more time crafting each Tier 1 application.
This approach of focusing on time invested rather than sheer number of applications is useful because it takes into account the realities of the job market (e.g., how many jobs that fit Tier 1 are actually available right now), the actual amount of time you have for job hunting (which varies depending on whether you have full-time work, etc.), and other personal factors (like whether you’re prioritizing an impactful role right now instead of meeting immediate financial needs). I also spend about half my time exploring the less structured approaches to job searching—mixing both helped me land my current and previous roles. Worth noting that everyone’s situation is different—those with strong safety nets might focus more % of their time on Tier 1 roles, while others might need to prioritize Tier 2 or 3 initially.
A helpful estimate someone told me during my freshman year in college that I still use today is expecting around 1 response per 10 applications. This might even be optimistic given that there are likely 50-500 (sometimes even more) applicants per role and only 1 person will be hired, but it helps me set realistic expectations and stay motivated rather than getting discouraged. During my last job search, I remember applying to at least 50 jobs within 1 month.
I agree with Calum about being careful about updating your beliefs based on rejection data—many factors beyond your individual qualifications and fit for the role affect outcomes.
Do any of you have heuristics for when to “give up” or “pivot” in a job search? Examples could be aiming lower / differently if no response after 10 applications.
Thankfully this is not something I have to worry about for a long time. But I think it’s useful to have some balance to the usual advice of “just keep trying; job searching takes a long time”. Sometimes a job really is unrealistic for a person’s current profile (let’s operationalize that as 1000 job searching hours would still only result in a 1% chance of getting a certain set of jobs).
hey geoffrey, here are a few drafty thoughts that boil down to “You should probably invest a bunch of time before giving up” and “It’s hard to get useful data from rejections”:
Like Dee, I spent months and hundreds of hours applying to ~80 jobs before I found my current role. If I were job hunting right now, I would probably invest a similar or greater amount of effort. My impression from many conversations in my personal life is that more people under-apply than over-apply. There’s almost certainly some amount of effort that’s too much, but I’d guess most people won’t hit it.
Tbc, I’m not making the claim that you should unreflectively apply to any job that you see—you shouldn’t do that! But if you’re doing a lot of reflection and generally think you’re pointed in the right direction, I think the marginal job application is positive EV. Dee’s four questions and resources above are a great start for thinking carefully about the general direction of your search!
I think you should be pretty careful about updating your beliefs about the relevance of any particular rejection to your job hunt because:
Rejections are statistically more likely than not. Rejections from even a high number of jobs don’t necessarily imply that your general job hunt is poorly designed. I don’t know how to put precise numbers on this, but if you have e.g. a 1% chance of getting any particular job, being rejected from 20+ shouldn’t be intellectually dismaying at all (although it’s of course very emotionally discouraging). And, a 1% chance is probably too high—for most jobs I manage, more than 100 applicants seem plausibly qualified at application review.
Some rejections happen because of communications/legibility issues, not because of real lack of fit. Here’s a personal anecdote: I once learned a year after the fact that I was rejected at the application review stage from one organization because my short answers showed insufficient evidence of alignment with effective altruism. That surprised me because at that time of my application I had been involved with EA for nearly a decade, but didn’t know I needed to signpost that on my application. Tbc, I’m not saying that the lesson here is “always say how much you love EA on your applications,” or “you should assume that organizations are wrong to reject you,” or “the organization was correct to evaluate candidates in that way”, just that: It’s relatively easy for a failure mode to happen where candidates and organizations lack shared understanding about (1) what qualities the org is searching for and (2) how candidates ought to display their possession of those qualities. Hiring teams spend a lot of time thinking about how to avoid that sort of failure mode, but it’s impossible to completely eliminate it.
Many rejections happen because of organization-specific idiosyncrasies, not because of lack of fit with a general type of work. For example, my org might reject someone from a research role because there’s a specific, weird professional trait that’s important in our specific work environment and we don’t think it’s easily trainable. But that doesn’t indicate that (1) the candidate isn’t good at research in general, (2) the candidate couldn’t do a different job at our organization, (3) the candidate shouldn’t pursue work that they consider impactful and motivating.
In most cases, you will not receive informative feedback with a rejection. Because of that it’s just really hard to know if and how you should update your general approach to your job hunt.
Thanks for asking, Geoffrey – I think this is a helpful and important question. My own personal heuristic after switching jobs as a mid-career professional ~2 years ago was something like: if I spend ~100h and get no signal or make any progress, I should either pivot or give up. Now, I think that number could be meaningfully lower or higher for different people and would depend on internal factors like a) time/capacity to search for a job, b) finances (if searching without a steady stream of income in place), and c) intrinsic motivation, and external factors like the “EA job market”.
Granted, when I first started, I broadly took Michael Aird’s advice to not think and just apply, but I burnt out halfway through and ended up volunteering at several orgs instead, along with strategizing the roles I applied to a bit more.
It took me 5 months, >20 applications, and ~100 hours of research, prep, interviews and tests to land the right role, or any role, which happened to be the highest impact for me. I did not apply for any role I wouldn’t be excited by, and assumed others would feel the same way, so competition was high. Throughout the job search, though, the key thing that kept the needle moving for me was that through rejections, I was making progress, and the most helpful bit was receiving rejections at later stages. The later in the process I received a rejection, the more information I received about my fit for the role and general performance, though granted, some of that signal was noisy and much of it was self-interpreted.
I think the ways one could tailor applying to roles better is through tiering their search by:
Seniority of the role
Organization (how impressive and aligned/relevant their work is to you/your experience)
This both helped shape my perspective on whether I was applying to the right org and the right level.
If, through this process, the answer to the below questions is a resounding no, I’d consider rethinking my approach, pivoting, or an upskilling phase:
Have I received any positive signals from processes I’ve been a part of?
Do I have a competitive advantage over any of the roles I want?
Would another 100-200 hours meaningfully shift the odds?
Are there any roles that seem to fit my skills (but I think I just didn’t perform well)?
I think this 80k podcast: Serendipity, weird bets, & cold emails that actually work, is a treasure trove of helpful and varied advice for people generally thinking about their career. I also find it useful to read about founders’ incredibly difficult decisions to shut down their charity (e.g., this incredibly thorough post shutting down MHI). I hope this helps!
Haven’t read much here, but just flagging that the first sentences of my post were not merely “just apply” but rather:
This is indeed ideally complemented by heuristics about which specific things to apply to, and with some other career-capital-building moves like doing courses or bootcamps.
And I expect some people did further than ideal with “just apply” due to my post (e.g. reading the title alone), but that it was on net a useful nudge.
(What Dee writes above looks useful to me.)
This doesn’t directly answer your question, but building on Calum’s and Dee’s points—I think it might also be helpful to first clarify what approach you’re taking in your job search, since different strategies have very different success rates and timelines.
It might be helpful to think of job searching as existing on a spectrum—on one end, you have applying through job boards and official channels, and on the other end, you have less structured approaches like networking, volunteering and turning that into a full-time role, creating your own side projects, etc.
For the more structured application approach, I personally use a tiered approach that balances my long-term career vision (the one I spend 100s of hours discerning) with current personal constraints (needing a salary, visa sponsorship, supporting family). It may look like something like this, where I allocate a percentage of my job hunting time to specific roles under the following tiers:
Tier 1: Organizations I genuinely want to work for or roles I want to be in—these align with my 10-year career goals (70% of the time I budget for structured applications)
Tier 2: Roles that could be stepping stones to Tier 1 positions i.e., can help me build career capital for my dream role (20% of my time)
Tier 3: Positions that meet my immediate financial or other personal needs (10% of my time)
However, the actual number of roles I apply for varies significantly—I have a very specific career path in mind, so there aren’t many positions that fit Tier 1, especially when factoring in my personal constraints. This means I might apply to fewer Tier 1 roles in absolute numbers compared to Tier 2 or 3, but invest more time crafting each Tier 1 application.
This approach of focusing on time invested rather than sheer number of applications is useful because it takes into account the realities of the job market (e.g., how many jobs that fit Tier 1 are actually available right now), the actual amount of time you have for job hunting (which varies depending on whether you have full-time work, etc.), and other personal factors (like whether you’re prioritizing an impactful role right now instead of meeting immediate financial needs). I also spend about half my time exploring the less structured approaches to job searching—mixing both helped me land my current and previous roles. Worth noting that everyone’s situation is different—those with strong safety nets might focus more % of their time on Tier 1 roles, while others might need to prioritize Tier 2 or 3 initially.
A helpful estimate someone told me during my freshman year in college that I still use today is expecting around 1 response per 10 applications. This might even be optimistic given that there are likely 50-500 (sometimes even more) applicants per role and only 1 person will be hired, but it helps me set realistic expectations and stay motivated rather than getting discouraged. During my last job search, I remember applying to at least 50 jobs within 1 month.
I agree with Calum about being careful about updating your beliefs based on rejection data—many factors beyond your individual qualifications and fit for the role affect outcomes.
Hope this was helpful!