When Is the Best Time To Apply For A Newly Posted Job?

Hey everybody. It's Brian from a life after layoff. And today I want to share with you some commonly asked questions regarding your job application. So if you want to hear from a recruiter's perspective, make sure you stick around. But before we get too far into it, if you're interested in more videos just like this one directly from a career coach, corporate recruiter, an HR professional, and a hiring manager, make sure you hit that subscribe button. You might also want to hit that notification bell just to ensure that you don't miss any future posts also can be found on Tik TOK and on LinkedIn. So if you want to see more of my pretty face, make sure you follow me on those platforms as well. And the link will be somewhere in the bio of this video. So I recently started this series of videos answering your employment questions and I got a handful regarding job applications and some of them are pretty good. So I'm going to dive into these three questions, try to clarify what happens in your application process from a recruitment perspective from behind the scenes. So let's demystify some of those recruitment questions and jump right into it. So GC asks this question, the job postings on LinkedIn show the number of applicants that have already applied to a position. Does where your application land in the digital stack of applicants matter? So in other words, if a job has over 200 applicants, is it even worth applying to? And she says, I always assume that it matters since LinkedIn calls this out, but I'd love your take. So here's how it works from, from the backend. So when we post the job, it'll go out to LinkedIn and it'll go, typically we pro our ATS system will propagate it out to a whole bunch of websites all at once. So you'll see it go off to a bunch of sites. You'll typically see a very similar type of format and usually it's driven by the ATS system itself. So generally speaking, recruiters are not actively going onto LinkedIn and creating job posts. And I should say in a lot of cases, some cases we will specifically put one there, but in a lot of cases we won't. If you have a job post that's on LinkedIn, and I don't know if this is specifically for the easy apply function, which is usually an integration into our ATS system where it allows people to click one button and basically we get the job application and it's all done through LinkedIn. It's really easy. But how LinkedIn counts that job applicants number is kind of misleading. So they click, they count any click into that job posting. So if you go and you click on the job posting and you complete an application, it's going to show up as one applicant, but you can even try this experiment yourself. If you click on the job posting, you click another, would you click the apply button? Then you hit the back button to go back out of the job posting and you refresh your screen. You should see it go up by one, even if you don't apply. So really that counter is just the total number of applicant or total number of people that have clicked on that job post. It absolutely does not reflect the numbers that reach the ATS system. If you see a high click count on a job posting through LinkedIn, it's really pretty misleading and I would not use that as a litmus test for how popular a job is. Now I guess on some level, if I get a bunch of people that are clicking on the job posting, that means that there's a lot of people at least reading the job posting and in theory people probably are applying to it as well. However, I wouldn't use that as the main reason why, Oh, if I, if I see 200 people that apply, that shouldn't apply for the job. So I wanted to cover that about LinkedIn and GC's question really relates also closely to hardcore snowman who asks the question of when is the best time to apply for a posted position? Is there a benefit to applying right away? Is there a time where it would be too late to apply? In other words, the role has been posted for 30 days. Where does it even matter? And if you look at the original question through LinkedIn is, is does it matter where your application lands in the digital stack of applicants? So like what order? So let's tie the answer in to bow and we'll kind of answer both of these questions at the same time with the same answer. Generally speaking, when we post a new job, you're going to see most of the applications come in in the first 24 to 48 hours and gradually it'll tape taper down over time until the post kind of matures and eventually we'll just trickle in maybe one or two a day near the end of the job posting. So most of our job applications come in the first week for sure, but in specifically even the first part of the first week that we, that we post the job. The reason being that we see the most people in the beginning is, is those people who are applying early in are the active job seekers. There are people who are out there every single day refreshing job ads and setting up alerts and applying to basically anything that's remotely, they're remotely interested in. So it doesn't necessarily mean that those candidates are a good fit for our jobs. And I talk a lot about in like my resume rocket fuel course and in a lot of my videos about the importance of customizing your, your resumes for the jobs. These are typically people that are not customizing their resume. They're just shotgunning it out. And the chance of us finding a good solid candidate that will make it through a process is usually pretty slim. It doesn't mean we never find a candidate through inbounds, but I don't generally rely on, especially for a hard to fill position. I'm not relying on my inbound candidates because we just don't have a high success rate. I almost always have to source in addition to get the right candidates in. So it's always a pleasure when I find a candidate that's inbound that has a perfectly honed resume that really matches the job that we're trying to fill so that I can sell the candidate easily and get them into the interviewing process and all that stuff. If we engage in a candidate early in and we start interviewing, usually in the first week we're interviewing or we're going through our active prescreens with candidates and then they go into the more extended processes. If we happen to narrow in a narrow down on a couple of maybe two or three candidates and we start moving them through the interview process and the job, for whatever reason, we have run into a difficulty, maybe somebody rejects an offer or maybe they get deep into an interview process. And for whatever reason, the team decides that they're not a fit after all, we may go back and start at zero again and basically go back to the drawing board. So then we'll go back to the applications and start seeing a lot of times people who applied two, three weeks ago may not still be active candidates for us. So we might start at the most recent job applications at that point and work our way backward because they're fresher candidates, so to speak. So when you see a job that's posted, it is in general, I would say better to put to, to apply for the job as early into the job posting as you can. But there might also be some value of somebody that applies at the tail end of it. If we don't fill that position, especially if you're seeing a job that's posted more than once, or maybe we just aren't finding the right candidate. What that's saying is the position is really difficult to fill. Maybe the hiring manager is particularly picky about a job. And if you can present yourself as a good quality fit for that role, you might have a pretty high chance of getting a phone call. So we want to try to be as early as we can, but don't let a job posting that has gone on for a long period of time scare you off because there, there might actually be a high chance of you getting a, a, um, a phone call, especially if the recruitment team runs into any kind of issue throughout the recruitment process. It is a D there is a degree of luck associated with this and I'm not going to lie. So the person who applied day two may not get seen, but the person who applied day five does because just how the applications fall. So I would say it doesn't matter. Yes, it does in a way, but not really. It's still a degree of luck, just how the process times out. So hopefully that answers that question. So the final question that I want to answer in relation to job postings is from Dressler. So Dressler says, is it better to apply for jobs direct through a company website or through a job posting board such as LinkedIn, cleared jobs, et cetera? Maybe it doesn't matter. I'm assuming the former, uh, please let me know. So here's, so here's the answer to the question. As I mentioned before, when a new job is posted, typically it's done through the ATS system and it is propagated out to a bunch of different job boards. If it's set up properly, all those job boards should feed back to the ATS system directly and then there'll be just the sourced field that gets filled in when you put it in. So in theory it shouldn't really matter where you apply. It all goes back to an ATS system and if you notice when you apply to the job and it redirects you to our ATS system, that's probably a better sign that you're directly in the ATS system. I would probably prefer my application be directly in the corporate ATS system through a corporate website because I know for sure it's going to be seen versus it being on some obscure website that maybe is not that popular. I'm not saying that clear jobs isn't, obviously LinkedIn is a very popular one, but there might be some very niche job boards out there and if the integration for the ATS system with the job board is not successful or not complete, there might be buckets of candidates sitting in places that we might not see. So if you're going to be applying for a job and you know that the company has the job open, it might be worth going over to the company directly and just applying there just to be safe. But in general, it shouldn't really matter, but if you just want to be certain, it's probably better just to go and apply directly on the corporate website. So hopefully that clarifies some of the job application questions that you might have. As always, customizing your resume is going to be the most important and most impactful thing that you can do in your job hunting process. But if you're not having much luck with your job applications, that's actually something that I specialize in. I do have a website called alifeafterlayoff.com and you can check it out. It's full of tips and tricks, all from an insider's perspective. I also have a training course called Resume Rocket Fuel, which teaches you how to write and customize your resume so that you get the best chance of getting noticed for that first round interview. It helps you get through the ATS system, kind of navigate all that stuff and really how to use your resume as a strategic document versus a spray and pray. So if you're struggling on how to use your resume, how to write a resume, highly encourage you to check that one out. Once you get into the interviewing process, of course it's up to you to sell yourself throughout the rest of the interviewing process. And that's where the ultimate job seeker bootcamp comes in. Essentially it's training on how to interview properly, how to get through each step of that interview process, ultimately with the end goal of landing you that dream offer and how to negotiate that the best terms for you. If you want to bypass the recruiter altogether, if you don't want to go through these inbound, that's where unlocking LinkedIn comes in because it actually teaches you how to bypass people like me altogether and get right to the hiring manager, right into the interviewing process, kind of unlock some of those hidden opportunities that are out there. So I highly encourage you to check that one out too. It's actually really powerful for your job search. If you are somebody that is struggling, if you have any other questions that you want me to answer, you can leave them in a comment below. I may answer your question in a future video. If you found value in this content and you like what I'm doing, if you could hit that thumbs up button, sure would appreciate it. Typically takes me two to three days to produce these videos and only takes you literally a half a second to hit that like button and it really does help me continue to do what I'm doing and get my message out to a broader audience. So I really do appreciate the support. That's one way that you can help out. Happy job hunting and we will see you on the next one.