Talent.Works is back, elaborating on the applicant characteristics that relate to landing an interview. While the majority of applicants has a meager ~2% chance of getting invited to an interview, some applicants do way better! What accounts for their success?
Nathan Yau – the guy behind the wonderful visualizations of FlowingData.com – has been looking into job market data more and more lately. For his latest project, he took data of the Current Population Survey (2011-2016) a survey run by the US Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. This survey covers many topics, but Nathan specifically looked into people’s current occupation and what they were doing the year before.
For his first visualization, Nathan examined the percentage of people switching jobs (a statistic he dubs the switching rate). Only occupations with over 100 survey responses are shown:
Nathan concludes that jobs that come with higher salaries and require more training, education, and experience have lower switching rates. The interactive visualization can be found on FlowingData.com
Next Nathan looked into job moves within job categories, as he hypothesizes that people who decide to switch jobs look for something similar.
Nathan concludes that job categories with lower entry boundaries are subjected to more leavers. Original on FlowingData.com
The above results in the main question of the blog: Given you have a certain job, what are the possible jobs to switch to? The following interactive bar charts gives the top 20 jobs people with a specific job switched to. In the original blog you can specify a job to examine or ask for a random suggestion. I searched for “analyst” in the picture below, and apparently HR professional would be a good next challenge.
The interactive visualization can be found on FlowingData.com
Nathan got the data here, prepared it in R, and used d3.js for the visualizations. I’d have loved to see this data in a network-kind of flowchart or a Markov-chain. For more of Nathan’s work, please visit his FlowingData website.
Searching and applying to jobs can be a costly activity, requiring many hours upon hours of perfecting your motivation letter and CV. Hence, it can be very frustrating to get ghosted (not receiving a reply) for a job. Luckily, Talent Works is able to give us some general tips when it comes to improving the success of your applications. You might remember them from their Interactive Map of the US Job Market.
Using a sample of about 1600 job applications, Talent Works recently conducted all kinds of statistical analyses to look at the hiring process. For instance, they examined the time it takes to get from the application stage to your first day on the job. Split out for various jobs, it seems Mechanical Engineers spend quite a while in the interview stage whereas Software developers are put to work within three weeks.
The numbers of days spent in each application stage per job (Talent.Works)
In a different analysis, Talent Works examined how to minimize your risk of getting ghosted on a job application. For instance, they found that during the “Golden Hours” (the first 96 hours after a job gets posted), your chances of getting an invitation for an interview are up to 8 times higher than afterwards.
If you submit a job application in the first 96 hours, you’re up to 8x more likely to get an interview. After that, every day you wait reduces your chances by 28% (Talent.Works)
Based on the above they come to the following three timeframes in the application cycle:
“Golden Hours”: Applications submitted between 2-4 days after a job is posted have the highest chance of getting an interview. Not only is there a difference, there’s a big difference: you have up to an 8x higher chance of getting an interview during this period, even if you’re submitting the same application.
Twilight Zone: Chances quickly decrease from OK to really bad: every day you wait after the “Golden Hours” reduces your chances by 28%. The longer you wait, the higher the risk that employers have already checked their inboxes and setup interviews with candidates that met their “good enough”-bar.
Resume Blackhole: According to Talent.Works it’s nearly not worth applying after 10 days. On average, job applications during this phase have a meager ~1.5% of getting an interview. Put another way, if you send out 50 job applications, you might hear back from one (if you’re lucky).
Next, Talent.Works investigated on a more granular level what would then be the best time to apply for a job.This resulted in the following figure
The best time to apply for a job is between 6am and 10am. During this time, you have an 13% chance of getting an interview — nearly 5x as if you applied to the same job after work. Whatever you do, don’t apply after 4pm (Talent.Works)
Again, they provide a summary of their conclusions:
The best time to apply for a job is between 6am and 10am. During this time, you have an 13% chance of getting an interview.
After that morning window, your interview odds start falling by 10% every 30 minutes. If you’re late, you’re going to pay dearly.
There’s a brief reprieve during lunchtime, where your odds climb back up to 11% at around 12:30pm but then start falling precipitously again.
The single-worst time to apply for a job is after work — if you apply at 7:30pm, you have less than a 3% chance of getting an interview.
If you want to see more, please visit Talent.Works. Here, you can let them process your CV and help you improve your hiring chances (see also this blog post).
The people at Predictive Talent, Inc. took a sample of 23.4 million job postings from 5,200+ job boards and 1,800+ cities around the US. They classified these jobs using the BLS Standard Occupational Classification tree and identified their primary work locations, primary job roles, estimated salaries, and 17 other job search-related characteristics. Next, they calculated five metrics for each role and city in order to identify the 123 biggest job shortages in the US:
Monthly Demand (#): How many people are companies hiring every month? This is simply the number of unique jobs posted every month.
Unmet Demand (%): What percentage of jobs did companies have a hard time filling? Details aside, basically, if a company re-posts the same job every week for 6 weeks, one may assume that they couldn’t find someone for the first 5 weeks.
Salary ($): What’s the estimated salary for these jobs near this city? Using 145,000+ data points from the federal government and proprietary sources, along with salary information parsed from jobs themselves, they estimated the median salary for similar jobs within 100 miles of the city.
Delight (#): On a scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most delight), how easy should the job search be for the average job-seeker? This is basically the opposite of Agony.
The end result is this amazing map of the job market in the U.S, which you can interactively explore here to see where you could best start your next job hunt.
paulvanderlaken.com 