We came across an interesting blog yesterday over at Interns Over 40 which is a blog dedicated to helping skilled workers over the age of 40 find a new career.  The post we read with great interest and thought we would pass along was this one – 6 Lies We Tell Ourselves About Job Interviews which was a guest post from Michael Neece of www.interviewmastery.com.

I will let the post speak for itself about the six reasons, all which we agree with completely.  Its a very well written post and provides some great insights that essentially identify how talented people can become over confident about their abilities.  This is something that isn’t uncommon for the members of our community who are looking for reliability engineering jobs.

However, what really struck me in the post was this tidbit:

17-to-one is the ratio of job interviews to job offers during a recession. During a recession, the average applicant will interview for 17 different opportunities before he/she gets one job offer. When job openings are plentiful and candidates are in high demand, the ratio drops to 6-to-1, meaning it takes only 6 interviews to get an offer during the good times.

17 interviews to get a job in a recession versus 6 during normal times.  This statistic alone is disheartening, but it only tells part of the story.  If your a reliability engineer or PdM professional who has been looking for a job, think about how many jobs you’ve applied for before you even get to an interview!  Assume its a 5:1 ratio of applications/interview.  In good times that means you applied for 30 openings to find your job; in this economic climate that means you might have to apply for 85 jobs to get one!

That is a lot of time and effort expended to find a job, never mind the time it takes to prepare for each interview and the time allocated to the interview itself.  You can see how finding a job quickly becomes a job.