What I Got Wrong About Sending More

For five years I told people the answer was send more.

Mentoring calls, DMs, dinners. Whenever a friend said the search wasn't working, I'd give some version of "your numbers aren't high enough yet."

It's a numbers game. That's what my dad told me when I was looking for my first job out of school, and it's what most of us heard from somebody we trusted. He was right at the time. I was right when I passed it forward in 2016. By the time I was still saying it in 2023, neither of us were.

I was wrong about it for the entire stretch and didn't know I was wrong.

I hadn't job searched myself since 2016. Everything since came through a warm intro or a cold pitch to a specific person. I was handing people a script from a market that doesn't exist anymore, in the voice of someone who's still in the market that does.

This is the long version of that.

The Math Most People Won't Run

Last week I posted about a senior PM who'd applied to 80 roles in the first quarter of this year. Four phone screens. Two near-misses. We did the math on her hours: about sixty hours over twelve weeks, which works out to five hours a week on the channel that produced four conversations.

Five hours a week of focused effort from a senior product manager.

Most senior people I talk to haven't done this calculation on their own search. They've been measuring activity, not outcome, because activity is countable and outcome takes courage to look at.

She'd taught herself not to look at the outcome because the outcome was demoralizing. Activity, on the other hand, was always available.

When you write down the actual conversion rate from a channel, you can usually decide what to do about it in twenty minutes.

What "Send More" Was Actually Saying

The advice to send more applications was correct in 2016. Maybe earlier. The market had a 15% interview rate, Easy Apply was new, and applications were still mostly human-to-human transactions. If you weren't getting interviews, the problem might genuinely have been volume.

That changed around 2022.

Auto-apply bots like LazyApply showed up. Every job posting started getting 250 applications in the first 48 hours. The interview rate dropped to about 3%. The ATS layer rejected most of what came in without human review.

The advice didn't update. The people giving it kept saying send more, because that's what they remembered working. Career coaches who hadn't searched in 2019. Executives who hadn't opened LinkedIn Jobs since before the pandemic. PMs with 800,000 followers whose last four jobs all came through warm intros.

I was one of them.

The Trade I Made

The honest version of why I gave that advice for five years:

Giving the real answer takes 45 minutes of thinking about a specific person. Their background. Which ten companies would recognize them. Who at those companies might. Whether those people are reachable. What message could open a door.

Send more takes 10 seconds.

I picked the 10 seconds. Every time. For five years.

The Actual Answer

The thing that's worked, for me and for almost everyone I know who's landed a senior role in the last two years, is two channels running in parallel.

Channel one is volume, but volume with a small ceiling. Twenty applications a quarter, not eighty. Roles where you're already 80% there and the 10% gap is one you could close in an interview.

Channel two is the harder one. Pick ten companies. Find three people at each who'd recognize you from past work, mutual networks, or shared interests. Write to them about something you noticed in their work, with no ask attached. Show up in their replies. Comment on their posts. Reach out again in two weeks with a different observation. Build presence before you build an ask.

It feels terrible while you're doing it. Every day you didn't hit submit on something is a day your brain tells you was wasted. It wasn't wasted. It was the only part that was going to work.

The senior people I know who've landed in the last two years all have a version of this story. The exact ratio between channels varies. The shape is the same.

The First Move

If you're spending five hours a week on volume and getting one or two conversations a month from it, your time is one input you can't refund. Reallocate one of those hours, the very next week, to channel two. See what comes back.

The first move isn't fewer applications. It's knowing the number you're actually running, and starting one new conversation a week with someone who'd vouch for you in a meeting you don't know is happening.

That's the answer I should have been giving. I wasn't, for years.

The numbers game my dad taught me was the right answer in his market. It hasn't been the right answer in years. This is the long-form correction.