I Applied to 1,000 Finance Jobs to Test the Labor Market

I applied to 1000 finance jobs, to see how easy or not so easy, this job market really is. Most companies are trying to hire right now, so the hypothesis is I would be able to get plenty of interview requests or job offers. I needed a resume that was good, but not amazing. Just something that would be acceptable to most hiring managers in finance, and would allow us to get a solid idea on what the job market looks like. To make things easy, I used my own resume as a template, then made some small adjustments to make it more general. Next we needed a name for me. I went with something that could be male or female, and could be a white or black person. . I also wanted to test the market for a college student vs someone with a bit of experience. So we made 2 versions of the same resume. In one, Dakota is just about to graduate and is looking for his or her first full time job, and in the other Dakota has 3 years of experience as a junior analyst. Finally, I needed a phone number and email address. Got a couple weird looks buying a burner phone from Walmart, but we got it done.

There were a couple of interesting trends that I noticed and kept track of while filling out all of these job applications. First, I was a bit surprised by how often the job application listed the salary for the position I was applying to. In my opinion, it makes perfect sense to show the salary of a position when you are trying to get applicants to apply to it. Doing so will eliminate a lot of headache after the interview process if someone had different expectations on the pay going into it. But I just didn't expect to see it as often as I did. Of the 1,000 jobs I applied to, 571 of them showed me what the expected salary would be for the position, which I thought was pretty cool. Next, there were far fewer jobs than I expected, offering to let candidates work from home either partially or all of the time. I know in what is now May of 2022 that the pandemic has mostly subsided, but I still expected to see more flexibility from employers given how common working from home has been for the last 2 years. Just 259 of the 1,000 jobs offered a work from home arrangement. Maybe working from home is just more of a tech industry thing, whereas more business in the finance field is done face to face.



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AJ

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