Strategy
How many jobs should you apply to a day?
· 2 min read
The standard advice is a number — ten a day, fifty a week — and it is the wrong shape of answer, because applications are not interchangeable. What you actually want is the largest number of interviews per hour of your time, and that is a different optimisation.
The arithmetic nobody does
Suppose a portal application takes you five minutes and gets a reply one time in fifty. Suppose a researched email to a named person takes you twenty-five minutes and gets a reply one time in eight. In an hour you can send twelve of the first, or two of the second.
- Twelve portal applications: about a quarter of a reply.
- Two researched emails: about a quarter of a reply.
Roughly a wash — which is why the volume advice survives. But the second column has something the first does not: the twenty-five minutes is mostly fixed cost that tooling can cut, while the five minutes is mostly the portal's form, which nothing can cut. Halve the research time and the second approach wins outright. Double your volume of portal applications and you have simply spent another hour.
A realistic daily shape
- Fifteen minutes: search. One pass across every board you use, filtered to the last three to seven days. Anything older is usually already decided.
- Five to eight roles shortlisted. Read the posting properly. Discard the ones where the responsibilities do not match what your resume can evidence — that is not pessimism, it is refusing to spend an hour on a no.
- Three to five direct applications. Named person where you can find one, shared hiring inbox where you cannot, portal as well if the posting insists on it.
- Ten minutes: follow-ups. Anything sent seven to ten days ago and gone quiet. This is the highest-value ten minutes of the day and the first thing everyone drops.
That is about ninety minutes and three to five real applications. It will feel like less work than twenty portal submissions. It is not, and the reply rate will tell you so within a fortnight.
When volume is the right answer
There are two honest cases. First, if you are early in a search and do not yet know which roles respond to you, a wider spread is genuinely information-gathering — send more, track carefully, then narrow. Second, if you need a job urgently, a lower reply rate across far more applications is a rational trade against time. Just make it deliberately, rather than because sending more felt like the only available lever.
Either way, the number that matters is the one you can only get by writing it down. Replyrate searches eight boards in one pass and keeps the pipeline, so the fifteen minutes at the top of the day is mostly gone and the reply rate at the end of the month is real.
Stop losing applications to a careers portal
Replyrate searches eight job boards at once, finds the HR contact behind a role, writes the email from your resume, and asks a few days later whether anyone replied. Search without an account; the free plan covers a handful of contact lookups and AI drafts every week.