Labor Shortage? I Applied For 1000 Jobs To Find Out

i decided to apply for a thousand jobs because i keep hearing that the job market is broken well let's find out how bad it really is where have all the workers gone labor is scarce right now so i think i'm gonna apply for these jobs using fictional names now in the 2005 book freakonomics they talked about applying for jobs using the same resumes with different names at the top and in their words a white sounding name and a black sounding name so i pulled the names tanner and demetrius from their list and those are going to be the names i used to apply for the jobs i'll be applying with the same exact resumes just changing the names at the top now since it's been so long since i've done my own resume i'm gonna buy a template from etsy okay so the main issue i'm having with this is that almost every template i'm seeing has some sort of objective statement or profile section so i may just have to get one and delete that i'm no resume expert but i've always thought those sections were kind of pointless and and silly so it says here your objective is to become a master at taxidermy so you applied for an accounting job you do know there's a big difference between taxidermy and taxes right oh yeah no just skip that i was literally just too lazy to put in the title of this job so in my opinion the best case scenario is it gives no information being that i'm going to be applying for a thousand jobs i want to do as little customization as possible okay so i ended up buying and filling out a couple resumes here and i must say i think we got a couple winners now i'll be the first to admit filling out resumes was a bit more challenging than i expected that said i've filled these out based on the way i would like to see them as a potential employer so i've got these two different resumes and i think i'm going to do a total of two different versions of each one one where the candidate is expecting to graduate from college in the next few months and another where our candidate never went to college and just has a high school diploma so when all is said and done we're going to have four resumes each resume is going to have a college and a high school version and we're going to swap out the names demetrius and tanner on each one as far as work experience goes i'm going to have one version with the well-known retailer the other is going to be a well-known and well-respected restaurant chain now to keep track of all the responses i set up a new email address and a new phone number for each resume for each of our candidates it took a lot of work but we're ready to apply for jobs so this application is asking for a joke how about i don't really know how to say this to you but worcestershire okay here's one do you speak spanish i'll say yes and in parentheses c which if you didn't know is spanish for sure so the way that i'm actually applying for all these jobs is one of two methods first i took a list of the s p 500 companies so 500 of the largest companies in the u.s and i just go to their career site and you look for entry level jobs the next way is i'm going to career websites like indeed career builder and i'm searching for entry level jobs on there i find companies in positions through there and then go directly to their websites in my own experience when i've received applications it always meant a lot more if they went directly to our website as opposed to a job board and with this click here i believe that is job application 1000. that took quite a bit longer than i expected the worst part of the process is you upload a resume and then not having to refill all the information in but when the system attempts to upload your information into the fields but does it incorrectly and then you have to go back and delete all that information and then re-add it again the second worst is assessment test instead of taking two or three minutes to apply for a job you do an assessment test and you're talking 15 sometimes 20 minutes to apply for a job the first few were like a little bit fun but after two or three they were just brutal now one thing that was surprising in this whole process is you know the old meme of entry-level job but requires three to five years experience well i didn't track it for all 1000 jobs but i did take a sample of 50 of the jobs that i applied for of those 50 21 of the jobs specifically said either in the job title or in the job description that they were an entry-level position of those 21 only two specifically said that they required experience another six said something about experience preferred the rest of those 21 didn't say anything about experience required experience preferred and some even advertised that no experience was required so i think the meme is kind of true to an extent but gets a bit exaggerated more than reality though i did hear about a company one time asking for 10 years of experience in a programming language that had only been around for seven years i don't know if that's true or not but it's pretty funny ladies and gentlemen boys and girls it is time for the results i did decide to put on a suit and tie in honor of all the job interviews i didn't go on our initial goal was to apply for a thousand jobs after a double count and a recount we ended up applying for a thousand and three always say it's better to be a little bit long probably nobody's surprised not all jobs out there are valid and currently open in fact i called one pizza company about a job that had been out there for six months here's what they said [Music] i was looking online and i saw that you guys have an opening for a pizza maker is that job still open no we're actually only hiring drivers now okay i saw it have been out there for six months and so that one's not available just drivers because of this i try to limit my job search to jobs that have been posted recently and really tried to find jobs that were offering 15 an hour or higher with that said 62 of the jobs applied for had some sort of wage the average wage being 17.36 and i came up with this number by taking the low end of the range so if a job was listing fifteen to seventeen dollars per hour i would take the fifteen dollar per hour number and use that in the calculation for jobs that listed an annual salary i calculated the comparable hourly wage now that said across the one thousand and job applications we received a total of 259 interview requests we also got 47 flat out rejections in addition to all of that we got 87 calls where they didn't leave a message and i wasn't sure where the call came from if we assumed all of those calls were to set up an interview that would push our return rate to 35 percent i decided to throw those out though because even on the first day that we had the numbers set up i was already receiving spam calls so net net that leaves us with around 650 jobs with no response now i'm sure some of those are like the pizza job and no longer valid but obviously we're going on about 10 days now if you haven't called us back yet you're probably not that thirsty for employees i'm married now but back in my dating days if a girl hadn't called back in 10 days now when you compare resume a versus resume b resume b did quite a bit better in fact of the applications where i used resume a regardless of college high school or whose name was on top of it resume a received a response rate of 22 percent you compare that to resume b and it got a response rate of around 30 i'm not sure if it was the content the layout i'm not sure what the difference was i tried to make them really comparable so i was a little surprised at the difference college versus high school was also pretty interesting again same resumes just change the education section and keep in mind that i only applied for jobs that i thought we were qualified for so if a job required a college degree i would apply for it with the college resume but i would skip those with the high school resume when it comes to response rate on applications where i use the resume where we were just about to graduate from college got a response rate around 22.4 percent now the high school resume received a response rate of about 35 percent and the first reaction may be as well does it actually hurt you to have a college degree in the labor market i think there's a couple reasons for why those two may be pretty different for one with the college resume i was applying for a little bit higher quality jobs a lot of these jobs required a bachelor's degree and so they're probably a little bit more competitive but i think what might have been even more impactful than that though was with the college resume we were expected to graduate in about three months whereas the high school resume we had already graduated that means that employers that couldn't wait an additional three months might have skipped over the college application so now when it comes to using demetrius vs tanner again same resumes on everything else we just swapped out the names in total tanner got a response rate around 25 percent and demetrius had a response rate of about 26 statistically i think they were basically the same and when you look at high school versus college the two were basically the same there as well demetrius got a just a little bit better response rate than tanner now if i really wanted to test out this name theory i would probably do very similar resumes and send them all into the same company the main purpose of this exercise was to get a sense of what the general labor market is like so i intentionally tried to avoid using multiple resumes to apply for the same job as the same company i was concerned that multiple resumes may tip off an employer and they might throw out our applications altogether and thus throwing off or skewing our stats that said there were eight jobs where i sent in a resume for both people and i didn't receive a response back on any of the eight so i think my takeaway here is that the entry level job market seems to be pretty strong at least at the time of this video getting an interview request back on a third of the application sent in it's pretty good i think how many of those would have turned into actual jobs and we'll never know if you enjoyed this video youtube thinks you're gonna like this one next that's it for today i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Logical Finance

Views: 2,366,383

Keywords: finance, investing, psychology, behavior, logical finance

Id: UA7Kyktuk38

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022