Quantity vs. Quality

When I worked as a career coach, I had one major disagreement with the other coaches. 😬

They believed that job-hunting was a numbers game. They'd set really aggressive targets for their students, like sending 50 applications a week. They thought of job-hunting as a lottery, and the goal was to buy as many tickets as possible. In the time it takes to write a detailed, personalized cover letter, you could instead submit 5 more generic applications, and get 5 more chances to win. Don't waste time trying to come up with better lotto numbers!

The thing is, though, it's not actually a lottery. Candidates aren't selected at random. There's a human on the other side of that application process.

When I worked at Unsplash, I was that human who was receiving the inbound applications, and I was shocked at how low-effort 99% of the applications were.

Writing a good cover letter takes, say, 20 to 30 minutes. If you need to submit 50 applications a week, well, you can't really spend that much time on each one. But in my mind, if it takes me half an hour to do something that will put me in the top 1% of applicants, I think that's time well spent. Especially since it's the very first thing that the prospective employer sees!

If you have a stacked résumé full of relevant job experience, you probably don't need to “wow” anyone with a personalized cover letter. But if you're at the very start of your career, you need every edge you can get. A good cover letter can be the diference between never hearing back, and making it to the next step in the funnel.

There's a broader philosophical idea here, around quantity vs. quality. The approach suggested by most career coaches is to focus exclusively on quantity, to not spend more than a few minutes on any single job application. The opposite approach would be to only submit a few applications a week, but to make them really strong.

In my own career, I took a more balanced approach. For companies I wasn't particularly interested in, I'd submit low-effort job applications. It was a good opportunity to get some practice with the whole job-hunting process, with lower stakes.

For companies I really wanted to work for, though, I'd put a lot more work into my applications.

For example, many years ago, I wanted to get a job at Spotify. And so, I spent a weekend building a toy app using their API. It allowed users to discover related artists, by mapping it out in an endless node graph:

This was before I had any sort of online reputation, and only a short work history at small local companies. I believe this project led to me getting called back for an interview.

I like this approach because I think it can help early-career developers get a better job than they'd be able to get otherwise. Let's face it, the companies that do respond to a low-effort application submitted by an early-career developer probably aren't the best opportunities out there!

The downsides of this approach (info)

When I've spoken to other career coaches about why they don't encourage their students to spend more time on their applications, the most compelling reason I've heard is that it can be discouraging.

Imagine spending a whole weekend building a custom app for a company you're really excited about, you submit an application, and you get a generic rejection letter, or you never hear back. This can be very dispiriting.

Now, I don't think this sort of thing is a total loss — you can use that project in your portfolio, discussed in the next lesson — but I do acknowledge that it's a terrible feeling. That said, it's also no picnic to receive dozens and dozens of rejection letters.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, you should take all of this advice with a grain of salt. This is just my perspective, and you should balance it against other perspectives, and do what feels right to you.