How to find work — a way and a tool

People looking for their first job ask this question pretty often. I asked it a few years ago too.

How can I find work?

You have to look out for something meaningful for you, and something you are good at. You can be a freelancer, a volunteer, a hacker, an intern, a mentor, a coach, an entrepreneur, an employee, ... and there are many other forms of positive value commonly known as work.

In this article I will focus on the employment side of work, which is the most likely you are searching for.

First, you need to start with… work. There is a limited number of job opportunities, but there are infinite ways of finding and doing this thing known as work. As you are contributing to your own environment, your chances of landing a domain specific job increase.

Then, you need to prepare. Seriously. Before applying, you researched the regional and local markets, got actively involved in the relevant events in your area, read the websites of the companies that match your personal vision, wrote your resume and prepared your credentials, ... Yet one question remains.

To how many positions should apply?

Here is the answer I got from a very good friend:

Assume you have at least 50% odds of independently getting hired by the companies you are looking for. If you apply for 10 jobs, you will already have more than 99% chances of getting hired.

How does it work?

If you apply for one opening, you will get 50% chances to win, straight from the hypothesis. These are too few, you will need to ace it or try more.

If you apply for two openings, you will get one of the 4 equally likely outcomes: you fail at both jobs, you are offered one, you are offered the other, or you are offered both. Three out of four outcomes are positive, and your chances increase from 50% to 75%.

If you apply for three openings, you will get one of the 8 equally likely outcomes: one for succeeding at all three, three for succeeding at only two, three for succeeding at only one, and one for succeeding at none. In total, 87% chance to succeed.

If you apply for 10 openings, you will get one of the 1024 equally likely outcomes, among which a massive 1023 are positive. In this case, as in the others, the only negative outcome is if you fail at all of them. So in more than 99% cases you will land a job.

Following the same logic, with 20 applications you will have one chance in a million to fail, and with 30 you will go back home every billionth time.

What about lesser odds?

This sounds too good to be true, and that's true!

If your odds are indeed 50%, you are a fairly good candidate. Even so, 50% may be quite high to make worthy assumptions, even if you work in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. What will happen if you have, say, 10% odds instead? It turns out that you will still have a whopping 90% chance of success if you persevere, in this case by sending 22 applications.

This calculator can help you balance how many attempts you should make versus how confident you want to be. For example, the 10% experiment above has the following inputs:

• probability of success per trial: 0.1,
• number of trials: 22,
• number of successes: 1.

When you click Calculate, your chance of success is the probability that the number of successes is at least 1, in this case over 0.9. For odds smaller than 0.1, you will have to increase the number of trials and click Calculate until you get a high chance of success again.

Can I apply this formula for life in general?

Yes and no.

Your real chances will be hard to estimate, as they depend on your skills, personality, competition, and myriads of other factors in the job market, but for a truly inspiring candidate, 10% is fair to start with. The formula will however not compute out of the box for you.

Managing many hiring processes in parallel may take time or stamina. More importantly, the more openings you apply for, the lesser you will match!

The friend who answered my question is Paul Diac. He created an interest group in competitive programming for undergrads. Many group alumni have received offers from industry-leading companies, and some of them returned there full-time. Become a sponsor!