The job posting isn't the whole application

There’s a moment in job hunting that I think deserves more attention.

You find a position that looks promising. The work fits your experience. The company sounds interesting. You’ve read the description, looked into the employer, and decided this one might actually be worth your time.

Then you click Apply.

And suddenly, you’re doing an entirely different kind of work.

Create an account. Upload your résumé. Enter the information that’s already on your résumé. Explain your experience. Answer a few questions. Maybe answer a few more. Figure out whether you’ve already written a decent response to something almost identical.

Somewhere along the way, the process stops being about whether you’re qualified for the job and becomes about how much patience you have left.

I’ve been through enough of these applications to wonder something:

Has anybody actually measured how much work we’re asking people to do just to be considered?

The part we don’t usually see

There are plenty of ways to search for jobs.

You can filter by title, location, salary, experience level, and remote work. You can compare employers, save interesting positions, and set up alerts.

We’ve gotten reasonably good at helping people find opportunities.

But finding the job is only the beginning.

The listing doesn’t necessarily tell you how many questions you’ll have to answer. It doesn’t tell you whether you’ll need to rewrite your employment history, provide detailed examples, or navigate another hiring system that operates differently from the last one.

And it certainly doesn’t tell you how much of that work you’ve already done somewhere else.

I’m not suggesting employers shouldn’t ask questions. Some information matters, and different positions reasonably require different things.

But there’s a difference between asking someone for useful information and repeatedly making them reconstruct information they’ve already provided.

That distinction is worth understanding.

So we’re starting to count.

Alongside building YourMove, I’ve started another project called Application Census.

The idea is to study what happens around the job application process, not just which positions happen to be available.

We’re collecting structured information from public job postings and, where the source makes them available, the questions and requirements associated with applying.

Which questions keep appearing? How much information do employers ask candidates to provide? How do requirements differ between hiring platforms? Are there meaningful differences between locations, industries, or types of work?

Those are the kinds of questions I want us to be able to answer.

And I want the answers to come from actual observations rather than everybody’s understandably irritated memories of their last terrible application.

That includes mine.

Why the questions matter

Think about your own work experience for a moment.

Maybe you’ve managed a difficult customer situation, trained someone new, repaired a broken system, organized a project, or found a better way to do something.

That experience happened once.

But depending on the jobs you’re applying for, you might be asked to explain it in five different ways.

“Tell us about a challenge you overcame.”

“Describe a time you solved a difficult problem.”

“Give an example of how you handled competing priorities.”

Those aren’t necessarily the same question. The context matters, and a good answer should be relevant to the position.

But the underlying experiences you’re drawing from don’t change every time you open another hiring website.

That’s part of what led me to build YourMove’s career evidence approach: help people keep a useful record of things they’ve actually done, so those experiences can be reused appropriately rather than reconstructed from memory every time.

Application Census approaches the problem from the other direction.

Instead of only asking what information a candidate can reuse, we’re trying to understand what the application systems are asking for in the first place.

The two projects should be able to inform each other.

This is research, not a claim that we’ve solved it.

We’re early.

Our initial collection includes thousands of public job-posting records, but coverage is uneven. Some hiring systems expose application-question information through public interfaces. Others provide only part of the picture.

A publicly visible question isn’t necessarily the entire application experience. And collecting thousands of records doesn’t automatically make a dataset representative of the job market.

Those details matter.

I’m interested in building something that can eventually tell us useful things about application requirements across platforms, employers, and locations.

I’m not particularly interested in making impressive-looking charts that say more than the data supports.

We’ll share collection progress, explain what we’re measuring, and publish findings when we have enough evidence to stand behind them.

The bigger reason I’m doing this

I’ve spent years in technical support, web operations, and software development.

One of the things that work teaches you is that you can’t improve a system very effectively if you don’t understand what it’s doing.

You can guess at the problem. You can build around the most obvious frustration. Sometimes you even get lucky.

But sooner or later, you have to look at the actual behavior.

That’s what Application Census is for.

I want to understand the structure of the systems people encounter when they’re looking for work. I want to know where the unnecessary repetition is, where requirements genuinely differ, and where better software might help without making decisions on behalf of applicants.

Some of what we learn will inform YourMove. Hopefully, some of it will also be useful to researchers, people building hiring technology, and anyone interested in making the experience better.

And if the evidence contradicts one of my assumptions, that’s useful too.

The goal isn’t to prove every hiring system is terrible.

It’s to understand what applying for a job actually asks of people.

Because finding the right opportunity is already difficult enough.

We should at least understand the work that comes after someone clicks Apply.

— Joshua