Why "A" Level Effort on Your Applications is Getting You "F"s in Your Job Search

You've created an application for your dream job. The "t"s are all crossed, and the "i"s have been dotted, both literally and figuratively. "This one is going to be different," you think to yourself. "This is going to be the application that finally gets me an interview."

As you sit back and wait patiently, the rejection notices from previously applied jobs keep piling up. That is, of course, if they come at all. "What am I doing wrong?" you think to yourself. "I'm a great candidate, and I have lots of great experience. Why can't someone see that?"

Have you found yourself in this situation before? As an adviser, I see and hear this often from my clients. Serving thousands of students over my career, I've seen even the strongest candidates struggle to get to the interview stage. So why does this happen?

Top Jobs Get Top Competition

If a role is your dream job, then there are likely many candidates who have this role as their top choice. Competition for some positions can be in the thousands, and there can be any number of reasons why your application didn't make it to the top of the pile.

Looking at different articles, you can pull varying statistics on interview rates. Some articles will suggest that only the top 2% of applicants will get interviews, while others might be more definitive and say between four and six candidates will be interviewed for any given job. The truth is that it doesn't matter how many interviews there are. You can't control the number of interviews. You only control your effort on each application.

Working with many students, I encourage my clients to think of a job application like a test, but for these tests, the grading scheme isn't quite what they're used to.

Traditional Grading

I was not a straight "A" student, and truth be told, the amount of effort required to go from my borderline "B+" average to an "A-" average would have cost me a lot of the extra-curricular involvement that differentiated me as a candidate from my peers. I chose to be good at school, not perfect. The result was a solid education with a ton of life experience.

When it came time to write a test or do an assignment, I knew my target grade was 80-85%, and anything above that was gravy. I put in the necessary effort to secure my desired grade, and I focused on getting life experience, which turned out to be some of the most valuable parts of my university education.

This philosophy worked perfectly for me academically, but it set me up for failure in a job search. Here is the thing I didn't consider at the time. Everyone in the class could pass each test, but not everyone will have an opportunity to interview for a given role.

Job Application Grading

In a job application scenario, your goal is to get to the interview stage. For the analogy, we can say that you "pass" if you get to the interview. You can already see a slight difference because it's more of a pass/fail grading scheme, but here is the critical difference. A passing grade isn't set at 60%, or 80%, or even 90%. In reality, you have no idea what the passing grade will be when you submit your application. All you know is that there will be other applicants, and a limited number will get interviews. For every job, the needle moves on what constitutes a "passing grade" depending on the quality of other applicants in the pool.

Let's assume that a job will offer five interviews. For a role that receives 100 applications, this means only 5% of applicants will "pass," while everyone else "fails." You could conceivably put "A" level effort into your application and still "fail" because five candidates were even better than you.

Using this thinking, I ask my clients what they would do if they had a test coming up, and the professor told them that the top 5 grades would get 100% and everyone else would get 0%. How much effort would they put into studying for that test? The answer is, almost always, "more effort than I normally would."

In your job search, you must have the mentality that you need the best grade on every application. With that comes a different level of effort than most of my clients have associated with success for their entire lives. Not only that, but they have to do it consistently for every job application. For some, it is a challenging adjustment to make.

What Does "A+" Effort Look Like

Sure, you can show up on test day and take the test, just like you can submit your same old resume and cover letter for every job. However, what if before the test, there was an optional tutorial session, or there was a bank of sample questions you could try, or perhaps there was some supplementary reading you could do. Would you do any, or all, of these extra things to help improve your chances of getting the top grade? Remember, your goal is not to get a good grade; your goal is to be one of the top five grades every time.

"A+" effort in a job application is a combination of things, and each step in the process helps you create a stronger application:

1. Research is critical to understanding the role, the company, and the industry. This research will allow you to communicate your passion/understanding/expertise through your application in a meaningful way.
2. Thoroughly review the job description to make sure you understand precisely what the role is, and more importantly, how your experience can be framed to match the job posting requirements. It is critical to show the employer that you can do the job and that your application was created specifically for them.
3. Network, network, network! My preferred networking method is utilizing LinkedIn to find shared connections that can help me learn more, but it can be done in many different ways. The goal remains the same. Develop relationships with people within the organization to better understand the company/industry/job and get referrals so that the hiring manager will be familiar with your name when your application crosses their desk.
4. Create your application using all that you learned, and be meticulous about spelling, grammar, font choice, layout, and consistency. Your document should represent your best quality work. Remember, your application provides a sample of the quality the employer can expect from you on the job.

Will this require more effort? Absolutely! However, I also think you'll find applying to 10, 20, 30+ jobs without getting to an interview is not a great use of your time either. One "A+" effort level application will see more results, on average, than ten "B+" effort level applications. Take that mentality into your job search and focus on more job search activities like those listed above. In the end, you will be more successful in making yourself stand out relative to other candidates who aren't willing to work as hard as you.

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Jonathan Perry is a Career and Recruitment Specialist with Dalhousie University Management Career Services. He focuses on co-op and new graduate job search advising and developing relationships with employers looking to recruit top business talent from Dalhousie's undergraduate Bachelor of Commerce Co-op, Bachelor of Management, and the graduate level Corporate Residency MBA.