Introduction
Mondays and Tuesdays are probably the most hated days in corporate life, you’re back to work, and ready to fight those corporate duels. Counter intuitive as it may sound, are the best days to apply for a new job. It is not weekends, but rather these two days when the search activity increases. By Friday, there’s a steep drop-off. And on the weekend, when people presumably have more time for job searching because they’re off work, hardly anybody applies. Still, it’s striking how few people apply on Saturdays and Sundays, which would seem to be a great time to search.
“Job seeker activity varies dramatically by day of the week,” said the September issue of DHI Hiring Indicators, which is published by DHI, a New York based job-data firm, in association with Steven Davis, a professor of international business and economics at the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business. The analysis was based on 60 million applications to nearly 7 million job vacancies posted to online DHI platforms since January 2012.[1]
Similarly, a recent survey from Smart Recruiters, a hiring platform used by General Mills, AOL, and NAPA Auto Parts, among others, examined data gathered from more than 270,000 jobs in the U.S. and Canada that reveals the best times to apply for a job and get hired are Mondays and Tuesdays
Recruitment insights
Turns out that Tuesday scores big on three fronts:
- Most jobs are posted on Tuesdays (followed closely by Monday and Wednesday)
- Most people apply for jobs on Tuesdays (18.41% beating out Monday and Wednesday)
- Most hires are made on Tuesdays and Thursdays (21.39% vs. 20% on Thursday)
Most popular day to get hired
Most popular day when people apply
As the graphs above show, the week is front loaded with job postings and applications submitted, with more than 54 percent of applications being submitted and nearly 58 percent of jobs being posted Monday – Wednesday. Tuesday is where most of the action happens.
Most popular day to get hired
Tuesday also happens to be the most popular day to make a hiring decision. Again, the graph above illustrates the beginning of the week when most of the hiring happens, with a significant dip over the weekend when most businesses are closed.
Rationale
Candidates apply for jobs when they feel they will have a greater chance of getting noticed and getting in on the first wave of interviews.
This is likely because Monday/Tuesday resumes are on top of the pile when hiring managers start their work week and so get read first. The fact that the candidate didn’t wait that extra day can also indicate that they are more motivated and enthusiastic about the job.
They know that they’ll have more competition, but it still pays to jump on a promising ad as soon as you see it, since almost 60% of applicants submit applications within the first week of a job being posted. Reason is that it increased your chances of being interviewed first
A new study by Bright.com, a job search site, finds that applicants were most likely to advance in the hiring process—as in, to be called in for an interview—if they sent in their resume on a Monday, as opposed to any other day.
Monday applications are more likely to be perused while the week is still fresh. But as the days go on, resumes can pile up and simply collect dust on a recruiter’s desk.
Why get interviewed first?
A study conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Business and The Wharton School focused on MBA admission interviews. The findings showed that people conducting admission interviews tended to compare and rate candidates who interviewed later in the day to the candidates they’d spoken with earlier, rather than scoring an interview based on the entire pool of applicants. If the person conducting the interview had interviewed particularly good candidates in the morning and had already given out top scores, by the time the last candidate interviewed they were less likely to receive the same high score. So going by this logic, it is always good to get interviewed first
Summing Up
Whether you’re a recruiter looking for quality candidates, or a job seeker searching for the perfect fit, keeping these stats in mind will help you make the most out of your search and lower the possibility of missing out on great opportunities.
Probably this could be used as an insight to help you plan when to post more jobs on your career site. It’s best to dangle more jobs on days when more people are looking.
Candidates also should take the weekend to update their resumes, get references lined up and watch the job boards for new postings during the beginning of the week, specifically on Tuesdays.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-12/monday-is-the-most-popular-day-of-the-week-to-apply-for-jobs