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.
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.