It's Not a Numbers Game: Why Quality Beats Quantity in the Job Search
By Niko Silva
Getting a job straight out of college is hard — and it's getting harder. Only 30% of the Class of 2025 had found a full-time job by the end of the year. About 52% of recent graduates end up underemployed — in jobs that don't require a college degree — within a year of graduating, and nearly half of those who start underemployed are still stuck there a decade later. Among college students from low-income, first-generation backgrounds, the odds are even steeper.
Yes, some of this is systemic and requires structural solutions. But meaningful policy and economic change takes time. In the meantime, there are concrete steps that workforce nonprofits and career coaches can take to help the graduates they support. These steps start with recognizing that the job search itself isn't set up for students to succeed – and that it can be changed for the better.
Many students apply to jobs in a way that feels productive but doesn’t actually work. Luckily, evidence-based tweaks to the context surrounding their search can help students redirect efforts toward strategies that actually work. At ideas42, we’re exploring why students struggle with job search and what support they need. A couple of months ago, we shared our early findings on how the fear of failure keeps students from starting their job search early enough. Now I want to talk about what happens once they do start, how to help, and what we've learned.
Students Are Working Harder — But Not Smarter
When we ask students about their job search strategy, we tend to hear a similar reply. As one graduate told us:
"I want to say [I’ve applied to] around like the hundred to 200 mark because at some point I was just clicking apply on LinkedIn, click apply, click apply."
She's not alone: 32% of recent grads we surveyed had submitted over 100 applications. When you're anxious about landing a job, casting the widest net feels safest. The more you apply, the greater your chances of getting an offer, right?
Our data tells a different story: students who applied to 100+ jobs didn't get any more interviews than those who applied to just 10 or 20. The issue isn't effort — it's that students need to submit better applications, not more of them. Better means two things:
Tailoring each resume to the role
Leveraging referrals and connections
Good Applications Need Tailoring
Tailored resumes receive roughly twice as many callbacks as generic ones, and almost 20% of hiring managers say a generic, non-customized resume is an instant deal-breaker.
Yet only 9% of the students we surveyed said they always customize their resume, and over a third never do.
Why don't more students tailor? We're still investigating, but behavioral science offers some compelling hypotheses.
Past experience creates a default that no longer applies. Many students from first-generation backgrounds have experience with retail or food service, where applying broadly is the norm. That mental model carries into professional job searching, where quantity doesn’t produce the same results, and nobody flags the disconnect.
Platforms encourage volume over quality. Features like LinkedIn's one-click "Easy Apply" don't just make mass-applying easier — they signal to students that this is how job searching works, making 50 quick applications feel more productive than spending an hour tailoring one.
Setbacks don't come with useful feedback. When every rejection looks the same — a form email or silence — there's no signal telling students that their approach, not the market, needs to change.
There's a basic information gap. If nobody in your life has worked on the employer side of hiring, you may not know that most resumes are filtered by software before a person ever sees them. You can't tailor for a system you don't know exists.
Better Applications Include a Referral
As AI tools increasingly automate parts of the job search, including tailoring resumes to match keywords from job descriptions, there are certain strategies AI can’t fully replace. Even a strong, tailored application can fall short without human connection behind it.
For example, while referrals make up a minority of applications, they have a disproportionately higher success rate than applying through job boards. A referred candidate is roughly 11 times more likely to get hired than someone who applies cold, and widely used estimates suggest that up to 70% of open positions are filled through word-of-mouth and connections rather than public postings. Now more than ever, it’s strategies that leverage social capital and interaction that set candidates apart, and that will continue to do so in coming years.
But when we asked students if they reached out to their network as part of their job search? "Not really” was the most common response in our research. “I didn't really consider that, to be honest."
Here, too, we can look to what their environment is built to encourage:
"Networking" sounds intimidating. The word conjures corporate events, not everyday conversations. For students who haven't seen professional outreach modeled at home, there's no obvious script to follow.
Students undervalue connections they already have. Professors, classmates, and former coworkers all count — but students don't think of them as a "network." 92% of professors expect to be asked for career guidance, yet less than two-thirds of students ever visit office hours.
These aren't flaws in students' thinking — they're gaps in a job search and application process that wasn't designed with students from first-generation backgrounds in mind. And they're exactly the kind of gaps that small, well-designed changes to the process can close.
What We're Testing
At ideas42, we use behavioral science to design solutions grounded in how people actually behave — not how we wish they would. In partnership with Bottom Line, a nonprofit that supports students from first-generation, low-income backgrounds from college access through career launch, we're testing a set of interventions to find out what shifts how students approach their job search.
Resetting assumptions. We're showing students data that challenges their default mental model — that more applications equal more chances — and replaces it with evidence about what actually works. Our new rule of thumb: spend 20% of your week submitting five quality applications, not 50 mediocre ones. Spend the other 80% making human connections.
Changing the default on resumes. Instead of one resume, we're introducing the concept of a resume "bank" — a comprehensive document designed to be customized to each application. This frames tailoring as the expected behavior rather than bonus effort, and helps students surface valuable details they might otherwise leave off their resumes, like relevant coursework, volunteering, and extracurriculars.
Making outreach feel normal. We've dropped the word "networking" entirely. Instead, we try to focus on specific actions — sending a particular message to a particular person — and provide templates to make it easy. We work with Bottom Line's advisors to make this kind of outreach feel normal — asking a former manager for advice becomes what everyone does, not something reserved for people with pre-existing professional networks.
What's Next
The instinct to apply to as many jobs as possible is understandable. It feels like effort, and effort feels like progress. But when the data shows it isn't working, the most useful thing we can do — as student advisors, career service departments, and workforce nonprofits — is help students redirect that energy toward strategies that actually move the needle: fewer, stronger applications, and real human connections.
We're still learning what works — including what it takes to actually shift these mental models once they're in place. We're excited to see the results of our pilot tests and learn more about what actually helps students pivot from focusing on volume to focusing on strategy. Stay tuned!