Yes, you should apply to that job with 400 applications...

Sponsored by

The Only AI That Knows All Your Work

Most AI tools start from scratch every time. ClickUp Brain already knows the answers.

It has full context of all your work—docs, tasks, chats, files, and more. No uploading. No explaining. No repetitive prompting.

ClickUp Brain creates tasks for your projects, writes updates in your voice, and answers questions with your team's institutional knowledge built in.

It's not just another AI tool. It's the first AI that actually understands your workflow because it lives where your work happens.

Join 150,000+ teams and save 1 day per week.

Try ClickUp Brain Free

Sponsors help me keep this newsletter free, so if you like reading, it’s free to click and show our sponsors some love! 🙂 

Happy Wednesday! I’m currently on a flight to my first creator even with Tiktok! I was recently asked to join their educational content creator program which is a program specifically to support creators who created educational content (in my case, lots of career advice and some perspectives on current events). Really excited to learn more and grateful to Tiktok for how much they do to support their creators!!

Career Resources

• Find our job board, a referral link to Zapier, and more here.

• I joined the Workfluencer podcast about balancing work with content creation! I think content creation is an awesome and fun side project and if it’s something you’re interested in, check it out here.

A deep dive into 140 applications

I posted a role for our Support team on Sunday, and yesterday, about 48 hours later, I sat down to review 140 applications. I tracked specifics of each application as I reviewed them so I could help break down what’s actually happening in the job market for y’all.

This is the process I use when reviewing apps:

1. I give the application and resume a quick (10s) glance. In this review, I’m looking for:
   - location alignment - in this case, we could ONLY consider candidates in the GMT to GMT +3 time zones so I needed people in locations aligned to that.
   - experience that aligns with the role (so if a role calls for 2+ years of SaaS tech support experience, I’m checking that they have some SaaS tech support experience; if it calls for 5 years of progressive experience in HR, I’m looking for at least 2 HR roles, etc.
   - application completion; at this stage, I’m not checking quality. But I am looking that they completed the application and didn’t just leave things blank or write “see resume” everywhere.

2. If the candidate doesn’t check those 3 boxes, I reject them. If they do, I move them ahead for a more thorough review. At that stage, I’ll be reviewing for the quality of application responses and experience.

Of the 140 applications, I rejected 120 of them in my initial review. Over 90 of them were actually in the wrong location. Even with AI (which about 80% of applicants used on the app), some people skipped out on the application instead.

So only 20 candidates actually made it to the deeper review.

The common protests I get when I share the above

“We have to submit so many applications, you can’t expect us to fill out everything.”

“If you contact a candidate, they could give you more insight into their experience. Don’t make assumptions.”

“A lot of those people could probably do the job if you give them a chance and some training. Why did you even let 140 people apply?”

And my answer to all of this: I get that the market is tough. But the reality is that there are 20 people who were able to meet the minimum requirements of the job, and put at least a baseline level of effort into the application. It won’t make sense to even interview all 20 of those so we’re going to need to prioritize further. So it certainly wouldn’t make sense to invest more time in people who checked even fewer of the boxes.

Now, back when I worked in education, if we had a crappy application from someone with a great resume, we might have called them up because we often had very few remotely qualified candidates for our roles. Or we might have contacted the candidate with a really great application even though they didn’t have the exact right experience.

That’s just not the case at a remote tech company. So we aren’t going to invest more time in trying to figure out if someone might be a match if we have a bunch of people who are clearly a match. Just like every other professional, we have expectations around using our time efficiently and delivering results. And it would be a poor use of our time and organizational resources to engage in 40 conversations when we know we only need to talking to 7-8 people to make a hire.

So what’s the takeaway for you?

Don’t let the high app volume discourage you. Chances are that a lot of those applications weren’t very good.

When you see those posts of people frustrated that they’ve applied to 500 jobs with no interviews, remember, many are submitting applications to jobs without reading the details, using AI appliers that don’t match qualifications very well, etc.

Last week, I chatted with a subscriber who has been landing interview after interview. We were chatting about challenges at the late stages, but the reality is that she’s submitted a pretty low number of apps and gotten many interviews on them, including at some companies that are household names, and a bit outside of her industry experience.

And the main thing she shared she’s doing is submitting a really strong application.

In the News

• Expect AI tools to embrace advertising soon. If anyone has used Microsoft Copilot, it will feed you adds for products aligned to your search. Looks like Open AI is considering the same thing. Of course it’s not surprising that these tools are looking for more revenue streams, but I do worry it will erode further the quality of responses, and send them down the same enshittification spiral we’ve seen social media take.
  

🙋Answering Your Questions🙋

Each week, I’ll answer one (or more!) of your questions in this section. You can submit your questions here.

An ATS won’t auto-reject anyone for this. If a recruiter sets a firm filter for exactly 5 years of experience, and has a knockout question around this, then it might but most recruiters I know wouldn’t do that. Granted there are also lots of incompetent recruiters out there so who knows.

I do wonder if they aren’t taking the start-up experience seriously since it overlaps two other full-time jobs so perhaps they are viewing that as a side-hustle type thing vs considering it full-time employment?

One thing you could try is A/B testing a resume that focuses on your L&D experience putting that front and center and listing teaching as a “previous experience”? Maybe that will help the 5 years of experience stand out.

That said, I think the larger issue is probably that L&D is really competitive with many transitioning teachers and lots of people in HR and L&D looking for work. Any HR-related role we post gets hundreds of applications on the first day. So I would probably lean more heavily into connecting with people in the HR department when you apply and trying to bring attention to your app.

I would also make sure you’re applying to places where you have industry alignment, have worked on similar projects to those outlined in the posting, etc. They are likely able to hire someone with more experience than they’re looking for so I think that hurts candidates who are at the lower end of experience.

First, please note that any time relocation is involved, the employer sees risk, and that means they’re less likely to choose you over other candidates if they have a lot of options.

Why is this risky? Because we’ve all seen these scenarios fall down multiple times:

• someone is theoretically open to relocation, but they are of course applying to local jobs and if one of those pans out, you lose them.

• they claim they are willing to relocate but at the offer stage, push for a relocation package which the employer isn’t able to offer.

• they are open, but require visa sponsorship which the employer isn’t able to offer.

• they accept the offer but then their spouse pushes back and they back out.

• they accept the offer and then push back their start date multiple times because moving is tough.

• they are relocating for a partner’s job and the partner gets laid off.

Even if you don’t personally feel like you’re risky, people use their previous experience and are going to focus on less risky candidates.

So what can you do?

1. If you’re moving no matter what, list your new location or say “relocating to GA in August 2025” to make it clear the move is happening.

2. If you’re open to relocation, you can note “open to relocation, relocation support not needed” on your resume/application.

3. If you’re actively applying because you

_{For more resources to support you in your search, check out my Linktree.}
My content is seen by over 8 million people each month. Need help getting the word out about your brand? Let’s connect!