By Josh Siatkowski | Staff Writer
LinkedIn, the corporate equivalent of Instagram, has made it easier than ever to find your dream job. All you have to do is open your phone. But has it made it easier to actually get that dream job? The numbers say not really.
In 2003, Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn to build professional networks and share job opportunities. In 2024, job opportunities still exist, but the extent to which they’ve helped the job market is questionable.
With a scroll through LinkedIn, you find a job with a six-figure salary. It’s in the perfect city and it even matches your previous experiences.
You get excited as you begin to feel the endless job search coming to a close. Finally, you’ve found a position that you can really see yourself not just doing, but enjoying. You click apply, and things are starting to look up.
But here’s the catch: the job was posted three hours ago, and 117 other people just went through the exact same dance as you.
Because you understand that one-to-118 are not odds you’d wager your livelihood on, you decide to look around and toss in some more applications. Then some more. And then a lot more. And then a couple more after that.
And if you’re an average person, then by the end of your search, you’ve applied to 294 jobs. But maybe you like to be a cut above, or you like round numbers, so let’s say you went for 300.
You read that right. According to career guidance firm Pathrise, it now takes an average of 294 job applications to land a position. That’s a 0.3% acceptance rate, which is 10 times more competitive than Harvard. Compared to Baylor — which just reported an all-time low 38% acceptance rate — it’s over 100 times harder.
This creates a few problems. The first is that it takes exponentially more work for young professionals to crack into the job market. Even if all 294 of those applications could be auto-filled and submitted within minutes, there’s still the process of finding the job, seeing if it matches your resume and uploading your materials. And then you do that almost 300 times.
But there’s a bigger problem: Getting a job requires work, as it should. However, this hyper-competitive market has caused job searchers to value quantity over quality. That first job you applied to might have been the perfect one, and the next few might have been, too. But then, after a dozen or so applications, you begin to branch out to jobs that maybe don’t fit you as perfectly. By the time you reach triple digits, you might be applying at companies you’ve never heard of, in cities you’d never live in and with an income you could earn at Starbucks. And because those companies also received 118 applications, they might not even notice you.
This is getting really bleak — let’s throw in some positive data to lighten the mood. In 2022, Baylor reported its highest job placement rate ever, at 92%. As long as you’re in the right industry, you’re pretty safe.
But did all 4,000 of those graduates apply to 300 different positions? Actually, no. It probably wasn’t even close to that.
According to CNBC, as many as 70% of all jobs are not publicly posted on any job sites, and nearly 80% of jobs are filled through personal or professional connections. Most of the time, it’s unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on who you are — not what you know, it’s who you know.
That leaves you with two choices. On one side, you could spend your weekends doom scrolling LinkedIn and Handshake. On the other side, you can build up a network. Now, this is easier for some than others. You may come from humble beginnings, but the kid next to you might be the son or daughter of a CEO.
The reality is that for most people, finding a job will be a mix of both. Don’t rely just on your parents’ friends, but understand that there’s a better way to find a job than applying for hundreds. It’s easier than ever to apply for a job, but it’s also easier than ever to connect with people at those jobs. Send emails to people, schedule phone calls and go to career fairs. We are unfortunately at a time where simply applying for a job doesn’t indicate enough interest to be considered.
That leads back to the underlying question: has LinkedIn done more good or bad for the job market? The answer is overall probably more good than bad. Getting a job might not be any easier, but at least there’s a way to know about it.
But what LinkedIn does well is show the disparity in opportunity between connected and unconnected individuals. I don’t think we’ll ever see Baron Trump or Rory Gates spamming applications.
