Applying to jobs online is like navigating a maze.
Amidst the special torture that is resume parsing software, the inability to reuse information across different application tracking systems (ATS), and the existence of a certain company that rhymes with every day of the week, it can get pretty frustrating.
I wanted to explore what factors make a job application more or less frustrating.
For example, what industries have the worst application processes? Do big companies ask for more information than small companies? What is it about websites like Workday that make them really hard to use?
To answer these questions, I applied to 250 jobs. One by one. Click by click. No Linkedin Easy Apply, no shortcuts – just straight from the careers page.
I timed how long it took me to go from “apply to job” to “submit application”.
Make no mistake: I sacrificed my soul for this article. I created over 83 accounts and spent a total of 11 hours scrolling. I was originally going to do this for 500 companies, but wanted to chop my head off halfway.
I did this for a mix of companies – Fortune 500 to early stage startups, spread out across different industries from software to manufacturing. The type of role I applied to was kept constant: engineering / product focused.
The outcome? An average of over two and a half minutes per application—162 seconds of your life you’ll never get back. But as we dig deeper, you’ll discover that these 162 seconds only scratch the surface of an often maddening process.
- Average Application Time: On average, it took a bit over two and a half minutes to apply to a job.
- Company Size Impact: If company size doubles, the application time increases by 5%. If company size increases by a factor of 10, then the app time increases by 20%.
- Industry Influence: Being a government company is the single largest determinant of a long application, followed closely by aerospace and consulting firms.
- Longest Application: The longest application time went to the United States Postal Service (10 minutes and 12 seconds).
- Shortest Application: On the other hand, It took me just 17 seconds to apply to Renaissance Technologies.
- ATS Impact: Older ATS like Workday and Taleo make job applications as much as 128% longer.
If you’d like to access the complete raw data, I can send you the Google Spreadsheet via email here.
Let’s dive in.
The Setup
There’s no real method to the 250 companies I pick. I’m just typing names into Google and trying to vary it up. Where does Trisha work? What was that billboard I saw? It’s all up for grabs.
Here’s the distribution of the 250 companies by size:
Some examples of companies in each range:
- 1-500 → Glean, Quizlet, Gumroad
- 500-5,000 → Notion, Dolby, Moloco
- 5,000-50,000 → Airbnb, Genentech, Logitech
- 50,000-100,000 → HP, American Express, Pfizer
- 100,000+ → Wells Fargo, Lockheed Martin, General Motors
And here’s a look at the different types of industries represented:
I used a mix of Linkedin and Crunchbase for categorization.
Before we get started, if you’d like you can read up on my methodology for applying to each job (aka assumptions I made, what data I chose to submit, and how much effort I put into each application).
What makes a job application so frustrating
Generally speaking, the more frustrating a job application, the longer it takes to complete.
The three main factors that might influence how long a job application is (as measured in my data):
- Company size → I would expect bigger companies to ask more questions.
- The ATS that is being used → I would expect clunkier, older ATS to make job applications longer.
- Company industry → I would expect more “traditional” industries to ask more questions.
We’re going to model the relationship between the above three factors and the amount of time it takes to complete a job application. To do this, we’re going to use a technique called linear regression.
Regression is about the way two measurements change together. It can help us make predictions.
For example, if I add 10 employees to a company, how many seconds will that add to the company’s job application process?
Since we have other factors like ATS and Industry, we will also account for those. For now, though, let’s just focus on each factor one by one.
Company Size
Let’s first plot the data as is:
Yes, I know, this isn’t the most useful graph. I’m going to spruce it up real quick, I promise.
The United States Postal Service has a job application that took over 10 minutes to complete. Navigating their portal felt like using Internet Explorer in 2003:
Netflix’s application was just 20 seconds – their only mandatory requirements are your resume and basic info.
Apple took me 71 seconds, still pretty fast for a company that has over 270,000 employees (PWC, which has a similar number of employees, took me almost six times as long).
Okay, back to the chart. There are a couple of problems with it.
First, the data is not linear. This is a problem if we want to use linear regression.
