Most people have the wrong mental model of how hiring works in tech. They think it's a straightforward process: submit applications online, get selected for interviews, nail the interviews, and get the job. After years of experience on both sides of the hiring process, I think this couldn't be more wrong.
Here's how hiring actually works in tech today, and what you need to do about it.
The Problem with Traditional Job Applications
Here's what happens when you apply for a job through a job board or online application:
Your resume joins thousands of others (we regularly saw thousands of applications per role at both Benchling and Palantir).
All resumes are processed using an ATS, which extracts the key structured fields from your resume and makes it easy to filter, sort, and categorize your application.
A recruiter looks through some subset of resumes, often filtered by keyword, or university, or last-in-first-out, or some other, relatively arbitrary, criteria. The recruiter can’t look at all of them! The recruiter selects a few and passes them to the hiring manager.
The hiring manager is busy (they have a job outside of just recruiting). They decide which candidates to interview and which to decline from the subset they see.
The interview happens.
Offers are made to a significant percentage of people who interview.
Here’s the problem: No one has time to read every application. And since the rate-limiting step in getting the job is getting through the first step (passing the first application review and getting in front of a hiring manager), that means that the vast majority of candidates that submit applications cold do not even get seen by a decision maker.
1. Get referred
Let’s see if we can break down the initial screening step a little more.
In general, there are just three paths to getting in front of the hiring manager. 1) the standard application online, which the recruiter maybe looks at and passes on, 2) getting a referral to the recruiter, which the recruiter definitely at least looks at, and 3) getting a referral to the hiring manager directly. Here’s my rough guess for pass rates in each case.
From what I can tell, the pass rate for cold applications may even be optimistic with the advent of AI, as the number of bad applications (where the candidate is not even remotely qualified for the role) has gone way up.
Interestingly, because the ATS systems prevent duplicate applications, you also are possibly burning your future opportunities with a company by applying cold - especially if the recruiter has already reviewed and declined your resume.
One of our engineers at Benchling had actually applied three times before joining. The first time he applied, a recruiter dismissed his resume for some vague and random reason.
The next two times he applied, no one even saw it, because the system had already rejected him.
How did he finally get hired? The fourth time, he didn’t even submit an application. Instead, his name was mentioned directly to the hiring manager. He got an interview, crushed it, and became one of our most productive engineers.
2. Be a sniper, not a shotgun
One paradigm that I’ve shared with multiple advisees is to rethink their approach for finding a job. The goal is not to submit as many applications as possible to as many companies as you can - because the odds are just not enough in your favor. If you use just the “base rate” for the application funnel above, you’d have to apply to 2500 jobs just to get 1 offer.
Instead, the right approach is to increase your odds with just one, specific, company. I’ve likened the proper job application process to preparing for a single sniper shot. Take your time to crawl to the right position, use your wind gauge, wait for the perfect time, then pour all of your energy into one trigger pull.
Your goal shouldn’t be “I submitted a resume to company X”, it should be “company X would have to be crazy not to interview me after what I’ve shown them and how much I can do to help them”.
Many companies have the “official process” (which doesn’t work, as described before) and the “unofficial process” described in blog posts and tweets. For example, at Palantir, the head of commercial describes the best way to get a job there is to build something using their platform, and share it:
Palantir isn’t the only one, here’s Adam from Tailwind, where the last candidate to get hired built an app using Tailwind:
Do the thing that sets you apart, and you can guarantee that you at least are given a real look by someone with hiring authority, which is the hardest part. The rule of thumb I’ve suggested in the past is to pour at least 20 hours of work into building or showing something super specific to the company you’re applying to, to prove that you’re the right shape of person to solve the problem they have.
3. Pick up the phone!
One thing I see overwhelmingly in people who are looking for jobs is the unwillingness to pick up the phone. They know, abstractly, that they should be working their network to get a job. But if you look practically, the vast majority of their network is unused.
Interestingly, the more you talk to people about what you’re searching for, the more likely you’ll find a great company and opportunity. Even if you don’t know many hiring managers, you almost certainly know people who know hiring managers. You need to take advantage of the rule of six degrees.
Sending individual emails and making individual phone calls is far more effective than any sort of broad message you send out. In that sense, putting “open to work” on your LinkedIn profile, or sending a message saying you're available to a large slack channel, is quite possibly the laziest and least effective way of finding an opportunity.
You should be getting coffee, getting a beer, chatting on the phone, messaging over email, etc. as many people as you can. And your outreach should not be limited to only people you know personally - the ability to cold message people you don’t know is a superpower, and almost no one uses it.
4. Do a work trial
One way of seeing the interview process is to see it as a way of minimizing risk to the employer. As hard as hiring is, getting rid of someone who isn’t a fit for the business is really, really hard. So the main goal during a hiring process is not to hire the best person per se, it’s to avoid hiring someone you’ll have to fire later.
That means that, in most cases, your application will be subject to a box-ticking exercise, where, by definition, the vast majority of applications (including yours) will not check all the boxes.
Companies hate it. Candidates hate it.
One thing that younger startups are beginning to do is run paid work trials. If you have an opportunity to do it, I’d strongly recommend it.
As part of running Partly, I’ve seen dozens of companies run paid work trials, and many of them never go back - they would rather pay to assess candidates in an actual on-the-job short-term engagement than assess arbitrary resume or interview quirks and hope those are a proxy for effective performance.
And on the candidate side, a paid work trial gives you the opportunity to accurately assess what it’s like working somewhere and, maybe most importantly, prove to the company that you are the right person for the job.
In summary
Get referred, ideally to the hiring manager, but if not to the recruiter. Do not submit applications online without a referral.
Be a sniper, not a shotgun. Spend way more time on an individual application to guarantee that the company would have to be crazy not to consider you.
Pick up the phone. Send individual emails, texts, and get as coffee with as many individuals as you can. Your network of networks is really really large.
Propose a work trial. Show the company you can do the job and they’ll be extremely inclined to hire you.
Great suggestions.
It only makes sense that employers would want the right hire, and the easiest way to know is a work trial. I'll definitely propose a work trial and report back :)
P.S. Inversion works everywhere, hiring is no exception. Most recruiters aren't thinking about how can I make a great hire (perhaps founders care more about that), all they're worried about is making sure they don't hire someone who's culturally not the right fit. Scaling an org, becomes much easier if you eliminate noise instead of optimizing for signal.