If your New Year’s resolution is to land a job, you’re up against daunting odds. When you apply to the average white-collar job right now, as I recently reported, you have a 0.4% chance of actually landing it.
So what’s a smart job seeker actually to do in this apocalyptic market? The most foundational step in every search today, I’ve come to believe, is deciding on an overarching strategy that will determine everything else you do. Given the extraordinary volume of applications that are clogging up the market, do you adapt by applying to as many jobs as humanly possible? Or do you go the opposite way and focus all your energy on a very small number of your dream jobs? It’s a choice every job seeker confronts sooner or later: Do you optimize for volume or precision?
I hesitate to give advice in a market where even the perfect approach won’t guarantee success. Even if you’re struggling — pretty much everyone who’s looking right now is — it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through this dilemma over the last two years, talking to dozens of experts and job seekers. Here’s where I’ve landed.
Step 1: Start with precision
Assuming I’m catching you at the beginning of your job search, start with the precision approach. To make this work, you have to do the one thing everyone hates: network. Tell everyone you know you’re looking. Call up old colleagues; comb through your alumni network; mention your search to friends of friends. Ask them if they know if their companies are hiring, what they think about working there, and if they know anyone else who’s hiring.
Eventually, you’ll run out of people to apologetically bug. So the next step is to reach out to those you don’t know, by looking up the people who have the jobs you want at the companies you want to work for. A lot of these people will ignore you, and I get that cold-messaging strangers feels cringey. But if you don’t know anyone inside your dream companies, it’s absolutely worth a try (for a sample of such a message, read my job-searching guide from a year ago).
This isn’t the market to switch industries, let alone entire occupations, and it’s not the moment to chase a big promotion.
If this sounds exhausting, it is. You can’t do this kind of networking with hundreds of companies, so you’ll need to pick your targets. And when you do, make sure you’re picking the kind of roles and companies you’re exceptionally qualified for. Don’t overshoot: This isn’t the market to switch industries, let alone entire occupations, and it’s not the moment to chase a big promotion. You should be able to check pretty much every box in the job description.
Why is this networking important? First, you might find out about job openings before they’re publicly posted — which will give you a chance to stand out before hundreds of other candidates storm in. Even more crucial, having this network gives you a community of people you can turn to for a referral when you see open jobs at their companies. With a referral, you’ll be much more likely to get through to the initial screening, and from there, you’ll also be much more likely to survive through multiple rounds of interviews. In the third quarter of 2025, candidates with a referral had an average 4.4% chance of landing every job they applied for, according to the hiring software provider Greenhouse. It’s far from a guarantee, but that’s 10 times better than if you cold-apply.
There are other reasons the precision approach is superior. First, by networking, you learn a lot about the companies you’re applying to, which will help you know whether you’d actually enjoy the job (or at least tolerate it). By applying to fewer jobs, you’ll also have more time to customize each résumé and cover letter to them. Yes, there are AI tools that help you do this quickly, but they only get you so far. You’ll need to spend some time choosing the exact accomplishments in your career you’ll want to highlight, based on the specifics of the role. Even better is if you learn something useful about the role from your networking, so you can distinguish yourself further by showing that you have what the hiring manager is actually looking for.
By picking your targets, you’ll hopefully improve your chances of getting an interview. That means you’ll be seeing fewer rejections in your inbox every morning, and that’s no small thing. It sucks to know that 300, or 500, or 1,000 different hiring managers have passed on you. The bigger the number, the harder it gets not to wonder what all those rejections say about you. By being choosier, you can make the process a little more emotionally bearable.
Step 2: Incorporate volume
Because of all these benefits of networking, some experts will go as far as to tell you to never cold-apply to a job. I’m not such an absolutist. After all, you only know so many people — and only so many strangers will reply to your LinkedIn messages. So once you’ve done all the networking you possibly can, it’s worth casting a wider net and applying to places where you don’t have any connections. This hybrid approach is one that Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who’s the leading expert on matching markets, also recommends. “I don’t know how productive it is,” he says. “But it’s also not very costly.” If it only takes a few clicks, what’s a few more applications?
Candidates with a referral have a 10 times better shot at landing a job than if they cold-apply.
Sebastian Snijder, a recruiter, has a good formula for this. You should still put in the extra effort when you’re applying to the jobs that are the best fit, he says: Think networking, tailoring your resume, etc. Because the market is so bad right now, it’s also worth buying a little extra insurance by creating a generic resume and using that to mass-apply to other jobs that are a slightly worse fit. “It’s ok right now to take a job,” he says, “even if it’s not your dream job.”
If you decide to cold-apply, here are a few tips. First, sign up for job alerts at the companies you want to work for, and apply to job openings as soon as you see them. I know a lot of people who see a job posting — and then hem and haw for a week before they actually pull the trigger. Don’t do this! With application volumes this high, recruiters often take down job openings after a few days — and even if they don’t, chances are they’ll stop reviewing résumés after the first hundred or so that have rolled in. If you see a posting that’s already gotten 1,000 applicants, don’t bother. You’re not going to get it.
Second, find a way to show the company you’re interested. You could follow the company on LinkedIn; recruiters often filter for candidates who do this. You could also use the job-searching equivalent of “the rose” — a way to tell a company you really want to work there, the way dating apps give you a chance to tell someone you really like them. On LinkedIn, you can mark three applications a month as a “Top Choice,” which requires you to pay for a premium subscription. On Greenhouse, you can choose one job a month as a “Dream Job,” and you can do this for free (this only works with companies that use its hiring software, and you need to make an account on Greenhouse’s website for candidates).
Again, don’t expect much from the jobs you apply to with the volume approach. But as long as you keep your expectations low, I still think it’s worth a shot. According to Greenhouse, more than half of hires are still cold applicants — simply because cold applications make up 95% of all submissions — even though each individual cold applicant has a far lower chance of making it through than someone with a connection.
Step 3: Tinker with the mix
The best of the hybrid approaches I heard about was from a job seeker I’ll call James, who lost his consulting job last year. Initially, he was taking a volume approach, applying to eight to 10 jobs a day. But after the first month, he started focusing on fewer applications — about three to five a day — and found that he was getting more callbacks. He put most of his energy into a handful of big-name companies he really wanted to work for, and he had friends at most of those companies who offered to refer him. Some even invited him to their offices so he could get a feel for what it’d be like to work there. With those dream companies, he kept applying over and over again.
That’s not to say that he didn’t send cold applications: He sent out plenty. Importantly, though, he gave himself a few guardrails when he was taking the volume approach. He didn’t bother applying to roles he didn’t have direct experience doing, even if he knew he had the soft skills to learn the job. And he only applied to positions that had been posted within the last day or two.
Rather than seeing the precision and volume approaches as binary choices, it’s more helpful to think of them as opposite ends of a spectrum. If you mark total precision as a 1 and total volume as a 5, where you fall on that spectrum depends on a few factors. One is experience. The farther along you are in your career and the more specialized your skillset, the smaller your universe of appropriate jobs — which means there aren’t that many to mass-apply to in the first place. That means you should lean more toward precision: a 2 on the scale. If you just graduated from college, you have less experience to distinguish yourself from everyone else, and you can still take your career in all kinds of directions. You also probably don’t have that many professional contacts yet. So it makes more sense to opt a little more for volume: a 4 on the scale.
Another factor is how long you can afford to hold out for the right role to come along. The more time you have, the more you should lean toward the precision approach. You don’t want to hold out for so long that your skills end up going stale, but if you can afford the potentially longer wait, it’s generally worth going all in on the jobs you really want (a 1.5 on the scale). If you’re maximizing for the shortest possible search, go for a fully hybrid approach (a 3). If you land one of the random roles you mass-applied to, take it for now and start looking again when the market improves.
In the end, that wasn’t a compromise James had to make. After submitting 400 applications over the course of five months, he was offered a job at one of his dream employers, a large bank, around the 10th try at the company. Part of that was luck: He happened to have friends at many of the companies he wanted to work for, including the bank. But the rest was being thoughtful about his game plan and executing on it. He invested most of his energy in the places where he had strong connections, and he applied elsewhere, too, to hedge his bets.
“I wouldn’t say I was perfect,” he says. “But my strategy was to keep iterating.”
Happy New Year, everyone. And godspeed.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
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