The standard technique is to attend insight days and be very enthusiastic in an unusual way so that the bankers there remember you
LinkedIn is sadly the obvious choice. If you have the patience to do deep research into the teams you want to join and who works in them, you’ll hopefully find enough people willing to connect to you. Then you message them and see if they respond (9 times out of 10 its a no), and if they agree, it’s much better to meet in person where available.
So I’ve applied to 80+ jobs where based on the job description I was an excellent fit, and out of those, only received 1 screening call so far…My career coach, peers, ex-collagues, all confirmed my CV is excellent, ran it past various ATS checkers and it’s all passing with flying colours…But still, absolutely shocking response rate.
Similar to what peeps here are saying, everyone I’ve spoken to about how to improve my chances said, they will mostly only consider people who have been recommended to the hiring manager directly…
I can see someone recommending going for industry events and events hosted by employers in order to network - does anyone know of any that would be useful for Tech within Financial Services (for experienced professionals, rather than recent graduates)? Most of the conferences or full day events I looked at were in the range of £1000, not something that’s feasible when looking for a job!
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Another thing that I know to be true from having been on the hiring side of this equation is that many, many candidates lie extensively. So not only are you individually up against the ATS, but you’re up against a playing field containing lots of falsified and fabricated resumes. This unfortunately works well for bumping such candidates up the ATS scoring system for outreach, and hides better, honest candidates. Couple this with the fact that most recruiters do not actually read the resume or talk about it at all when they speak to the candidate the first time, and you end up with a lot of garbage coming through to the first touch with actual hiring teams. Which makes the people in those teams even more skeptical about the possible value of candidates who don’t check all the boxes. It’s a vicious cycle and isn’t a good experience for anyone.
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I think that hiring teams and interviewers should accept the fact that
- The pool of candidates will only ever increase, especially for very sought after jobs.
- Selecting candidates is difficult* and cannot be simply automatised away
*Many people underestimate this, essentially trusting their own intuition or using blunt filters such as schools, previous companies etc, in fact only reinforcing their own bias. But the result is that they only hire people similar to them (not that I believe in meritocracy more than I believe in the tooth fairy).
Let’s admit that many job requirements for relatively junior positions are frankly ridiculous. Companies want a wide range of skills and experience which people cannot gain if they are not hired first. And when they are hired, their potential is often wasted since they are pigeon-holed in mind-numbing tasks where there’s zero professional development, so that they have nothing to sell if they decide or are forced to find another job.
During an internal Q&A during a monthly meeting in the global quant team in a British bank, someone anonymously asked why the bank was at the same time laying off employees and hiring for new positions, and the answer was “we need to reorganise our talent pool and hire for the skills that we need”. In other words, internal training wasn’t even considered. As long as there are thousands of applicants ready to fight for a role of course. The other side of the coin is that you have to do more work to screen them.
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What if we are optimizing for a straight to trash pipeline?
If you see news of employment falling in your area and yet the job boards and what not are as lively as ever, it’s ghost market full of ghost postings.
I personally have seen certain companies keep posting jobs perennially and have applied for a few that suits me, just to see what happens. Guess what, no response beyond what computers can manage automatically.
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That’s a shocking hit rate (Mine is similarly bad.)
Out of interest, what was the job you got the screening call for? Was it one where you thought you were a better fit than some of the other jobs you applied for, or did it catch you by surprise?
Replying from my other account as I was not able to update the email address / name on my original one.
I’m only applying for jobs where I am 90-100% fit according to the criteria listed, so the role in this company wasn’t any better match than any of the others. However, it is a much smaller company so perhaps they actually look at CVs, and the hiring manager told me what made him look at my CV was the fact that we worked for the same company around the same time previously.
This still remains the only callback I got from 100+ applications (not counting the callback where I know the hiring manager personally, which to me seems like the only way forward right now).