This is in follow-up to a related LinkedIn post with some additional observations too long to fit LI limitations.
Back in September when I announced on LinkedIn a successful conclusion to my long job search, I promised some numbers. Here they are with a few insights. If you're out of work, think you might someday be out of work, or be a recruiter, this may be of interest. While we all know the job market is tough, my context includes never having been out of work before in my entire adult life. Over a pretty long career, whenever I've wanted to change jobs for any reason, one was available to jump into - until now.
1,085 is the number of jobs I applied to from January 2024 - September 2025
44.5% of those received no reply at all, positive or negative. But 55.5% did get some kind of response.
6.2% of the time, that response was positive - a recruiter saying, "Hey, I liked your resume and would like to talk."
8 days is the median response time for those positive responses. If you're a recruiter and you're not getting back to your top candidates within that length of time, you are very likely to lose opportunities to other companies that are able to move more quickly.
65% of the time, if I got a contact from a recruiter, I would get to at least the first interview, usually with the hiring manager.
1% of all job applications was the number final round interviews I got to. For approximately 100 applications submitted, with one of those companies I could get through at least two, and sometimes as many as seven rounds of interviews until they said we'll be making our final decision very shortly and making someone an offer - and then didn't get it - until finally I did get the right one.
39 was the number of first round interviews I got; not recruiter screens, those are not "interviews". 11 was the number of final round interviews.
January thru May were the best months for finding postings I felt were relevant to me in both 2024 and 2025.
July was the best month across both 2024 and 2025 for getting back positive responses, whether the applications had been submitted in July or earlier.
The worsening job market - I did hear more beginning in the middle of 2025 about layoffs and increasing challenges people were having finding work. It wasn't a vague feeling or speculation. From January '25 into June, I was finding many more relevant job postings to apply to than I had in 2024. This might have to do with my criteria having shifted over time as I adjusted my horizons with a growing sense of desperation. But what is directly comparable and non-speculative is the fact total relevant job posting declined YoY in July and August of 2025, even with my lowered expectations. Whereas August had been my very best month in 2024, both for finding jobs to apply to and for getting back positive response, August was my worst month in 2025. Something had clearly shifted with the market in late June.
Ageism? - 57 years is how old I was when starting this exercise. While ageism is obviously a hot topic on LI, I was not able to conclude one way or another whether it applied to me. I feel like the calls I got or didn't get had more to do with having the required years of experience and the salary range I mentioned as my target. To set further context, 20+ years of experience in cybersecurity with about 14 of those directly applicable to most of the jobs I targeted may have helped. For all of you thinking that you're a victim of ageism, I have to wonder whether your response rate for landing interviews was as good as what I'm citing here? If not, maybe your targeting of positions you're actually suited for needs adjustment, maybe your resume isn't telling the compelling story you think it is. I think my job experience and skills are good, but what matter most for this exercise is not whether I have more or less than you, it's that we line up that experience accurately with some employer's need and then tell a compelling story about why we're the right fit for that job. I did have a feeling a few times that age might've been a factor in not getting some job, but it could also have been they thought they could get someone else cheaper.
Staffing Companies - These numbers don't include any contract or temp-to-hire roles. There were an additional 102 of those. With a very few exceptions, staffing companies really won't respond to you at all, ever, unless you can identify the specific recuiter in charge of hiring for the role you want and reach out to them directly or maybe if you've had some prior contact with somebody. My total response rate for all positions posted by any staffing company, including where I found the recruiter and convinced them they really wanted to talk to me or I had a previous contact from them, was only 7.8%. The conclusion for me was that looking at staffing companies is an absolute waste of time. With some exceptions, almost all of these are trying to fill the exact same job slots and have no real way of helping you get the inside line to the employer hiring team. Yes, I know there are some rare ones that do and this will depend on the level of position you're targeting. But for the average job seeker, this is not where you want to spend any amount of time.
Using LinkedIn - What's the value of LinkedIn Premium for job seekers or searching on LI versus anyplace else? I did sign up for Premium early in my job search and really thought it should help. In the end, I don't believe it helped in the slightest bit. But things might have gone differently had I been able to find the right contact. That InMail feature allowing you to message random non-contacts was the thing I found the most useful and used it to try reaching out to people I thought may be able to help get my foot in the door someplace. LI job search recommendations were, for me, absolutely useless. At least that was my seat-of-pants feeling, since I didn't track stats for when I sent in an app to a position as to how it may have been listed. Was it a position LI showed I should have a better match for skills than other applicants? I don't know, but I do know I didn't get any of those jobs. And while LI Premium touts the benefit of marking Easy Apply positions as one of your top choices, I found I got approximately zero (0, null, goose egg) responses back from any of those Easy Applies. Beyond the ability to send InMail messages, most of the other features of LI Premium give you a feeling that you're more informed and finding what you need to get that job, IMO it's mostly fluff.
Full price for LI Premium is currently $39.99/month. For that you get mostly pretty stale job posting showing up in your search, larded with a lot of promoted positions. Of course LI has probably the greatest number of high quality job posting anywhere. But just try to find the ones relevant to you. I continually found that a very specific search asking for postings in the last 24 hours not only turned up tons of jobs that had been posted weeks ago, promoted positions I had looked at three times already, and things I had even applied to weeks ago that were being reposted. But worse, that one really awesome job that should have shown up, actually popped up in my search 5 days later after the recruiter already had hundreds of applications in their inbox. So, my final hard number for this post is $2.99/month, which is what I rate as the actual value LI Premium delivers for a job seeker.
Where Should I look Instead? - I have no financial interest or stake in any of these job sites. Best job search site I found is hiring.cafe - yes, that's its address. Indeed had some occasionally interesting posts that I hadn't found on LI. Dice was mostly useless. Monster was worse than useless.
Best of luck to you if you're looking for work in this worst in a lifetime job market, and best of luck to us all in 2026 in this world that we're in.
Peace, Love, and Healthy Snacks
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