We got 600+ applications for a PM role in a small start-up

What they don’t tell you about competition in the tech field

Thanks Greg for going to the LinkedIn office to capture this.

I left a pre-IPO gig recently to pursue education, much to the dismay of an amazing manager and an amazing team in a unicorn scale-up here in Europe.

While I did quit the tech rat race (that much is true), I’m still working here and there as a consultant and a designer for start-ups that would feed me and help me fund my new journey in Education.

I’m a start-up girlie at the end of the day; no glory, no cash, but I love the impact and the rush it brings.

Anyway, one of my main gigs is a pretty small start-up, and they were hiring for a PM (Project Manager) for a while. The role wasn’t advertised, but once LinkedIn picked it up, the number of applicants that came in shot up really quickly.

We had to close the job post within a week because we got a whooping 600+ applications, way more than we expected to process. For a very small start-up with under 50 employees, 600 applications within 7 days is massive amount. That’s nearly a hundred applicants in a day.

For context, start-ups are usually considered lucky to even see 50 applications for a role. So this goes to show the state of competitiveness in hiring within the tech space, where even start-ups are now desirable to the masses (they usually rank pretty low in the tech workplace popularity contest).

I wasn’t involved in this PM’s hiring (I am but a mere designer / design consultant), but this incident has led me to reflect on my experiences filling in for design recruitment and talent management the last few years.

And of course as with any industry, the hiring industry also has their own little secrets.

Some of these secrets I’ll be sharing might be outdated or even not be applicable because sh*t changes real fast around here and strategies work very differently from one person to another, even if we carry the same titles (because ultimately work experiences and total tenures are different).

Anyway, I’ve been on both sides of the coin. For new readers who don’t know me, I am a…