The Students Who Are Winning Right Now Are Not Applying to More Jobs.

Happy Friday!

Ford here.

Last week I shared some alarming headlines. The entry-level job market is the worst in 37 years. Internship competition has nearly doubled. 52% of graduates are underemployed within one year of getting their degree.

If you read those numbers and thought "Just send more applications if you want to get an internship" I want to spend this entire issue pushing back on that instinct. Because the data, and the students I talk to, point in exactly the opposite direction.

The students getting results right now are not out-applying everyone else. They are out-thinking them.

Why volume is the wrong response to a hard market

Here is the logic trap that is swallowing an entire generation of job seekers.

The market is competitive. The solution to a competitive market is to do more. So send more applications. Apply to more jobs. Cast a wider net.

The problem is that everyone is doing this simultaneously. Which is exactly how you get 273 applications per tech internship posting on Handshake. Which is exactly how you get the doom loop I wrote about two weeks ago, where employers can no longer see real candidates through the noise, start automating their screening, and the real candidates get caught in the filter alongside everyone else.

Volume is not a competitive advantage when everyone has volume. It is a race to the bottom where the only winner is the algorithm doing the screening.

I have talked to thousands of students over the past year. The ones who are struggling most are almost always the ones playing the volume game. I have heard stories of students submitting 200, 300, 400, 500 applications and getting nothing back. One student I spoke with had sent 4,000 applications in a single year and had one internship to show for it. These are not lazy students. They are students who received bad advice and followed it faithfully.

What the students who are winning are actually doing

Across all my conversations with students, a different pattern emerges in the ones who are getting traction. It is not a secret. It is not a hack. But it is specific, and most students are not doing it.

They apply fast. One student described his approach plainly: he checks for new postings every single day and applies immediately to anything that opened recently. Not last week. Not last month. That day. Another student told me the most important thing he learned is that timing is everything. He applied to a job at 7pm and had a response from a hiring manager by 10pm the same night. That is not luck. That is what happens when your application is one of the first ten instead of one of the first five hundred.

The research supports this. Applications submitted within the first 24 to 48 hours of a job being posted have a dramatically higher response rate. Roles fill fast. Recruiters stop reviewing once they have enough strong candidates. Every day a posting ages, your odds drop.

They are selective about where they apply. One student I spoke with who was heading to Boeing full-time described being deliberate about fit. He knew where he was genuinely competitive and he focused his energy there. He contrasted this with friends who just spam applied to anything available. His outcome was different from theirs.

Another student described the same shift in thinking: "Applying online tends to be a numbers game of you're just gonna mass online and see what sticks. But it doesn't really work if you're also trying to be selective with the companies you want to work for."

The students who are getting interviews are not just sending more applications. They are sending better ones to the right places.

They tailor. Not a different resume for every application, but a meaningfully different resume for the roles they are actually serious about. One student described a master resume with everything he had ever done, then cutting it down to the three or four experiences most relevant to each specific role. This is not complicated. Most students are not doing it.

They do outreach. Five to ten people per company they are serious about. Not asking for a job. Asking for information. Coffee chats, LinkedIn messages, finding former interns and asking what the process was like. The students who have someone on the inside, even a weak connection, advance at a dramatically higher rate than cold applicants.

They prep for the specific interview, not the generic one. When they get an interview, they know their own stories. They have practiced them. They have researched the company well enough to connect their experience to what that company actually does. Generic interview prep does not work. Personal interview prep does.

The data behind the 10% number

I shared this briefly in the last issue and I want to be more specific about it now.

The industry average interview rate on platforms like LinkedIn and Handshake is around 1%. Apply to 100 jobs, get roughly 1 interview. That tracks with what most students describe when they are playing the volume game.

The students using Runway, our platform we recently launched built around this exact thesis, see an average interview rate of 10%. Apply to 10 targeted, well-matched roles and get roughly 1 interview rather than needing 100 applications to get there.

That is not a product feature. That is what happens when students apply to roles where they genuinely fit, apply early while the posting is fresh, and use their application to demonstrate real alignment rather than just sending a generic resume into the void.

The gap between 1% and 10% is not magic. It is the difference between treating job searching as a volume problem and treating it as a targeting problem.

Why this matters more now than it did five years ago

In a normal market, the volume strategy at least gets you some exposure. You send 200 applications, you get 2 interviews, eventually something clicks. The math is brutal but it works eventually.

In this market, the volume strategy is actively hurting you in ways it was not before.

First, employers are overwhelmed. When a recruiter has 5,000 applications for one role, they are not reading them all. They are using filters, and the filters are getting more aggressive. Generic applications get caught in the filter. Specific, well-matched, early-submitted applications move through.

Second, the roles that entry-level applicants used to flood, finance, tech, consulting, are the exact sectors that have been cutting jobs most aggressively. Finance and information services have shed an average of 9,000 jobs per month since 2023. The pool is genuinely smaller. You cannot out-apply a smaller pool. You have to be more competitive for the roles that exist.

Third, the scarring effect is real. Burning Glass found that 73% of graduates who started underemployed were still underemployed a decade later. The first job matters enormously. A strategy that gets you any job, which is what volume maximizes for, is not the right strategy for a market where landing in the wrong place at the start has decade-long consequences.

The honest summary

The job market is genuinely hard right now. I am not going to pretend otherwise. The headlines I cited last week are real and the data behind them is real.

But hard markets do not reward more effort doing the wrong thing. They reward doing the right thing well.

Apply fast. Apply to roles where you are genuinely competitive. Tailor your materials. Do outreach. Prep personally for every interview you get.

The students who are doing this are getting interviews in one of the hardest markets in a generation. The students who are spraying applications and hoping are getting silence, no matter how many they send.

The market is not the same for everyone. Your approach determines which experience you have.

Hit reply and tell me: which part of this is hardest for students to actually execute consistently?

Keep progressing,

Ford Coleman 
Founder & CEO, Runway

P.S. If you know a student who is stuck in the volume trap right now, forward this to them. It might be the reframe they need.