The Job-Seeker’s Survey [27 Must-Know Statistics for 2024]

27 December
4 min read
Background Image

The job search landscape is constantly evolving, and in 2024, it's more important than ever to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and statistics. 

Whether you're a recent graduate just entering the job market or an experienced professional looking for new opportunities, knowing the latest job search trends can definitely play in your favor.

To get a good snapshot of what the job search process looks like today, we conducted a large-scale survey of Novorésumé users!

We surveyed over 5,579 job-seekers from different career levels and across different industries and extracted interesting insights about resumes, cover letters, general job search stats, and more!

Let’s dive right in. 

9 Resume & Cover Letter Statistics 

The resume & cover letter are stables of every job application.

In this section, we put together the most interesting and eye-opening resume and cover letter statistics:

  1. According to the survey, 60% of respondents have a 1-page long resume, about 30% have a 2-page long resume, and less than 10% of survey respondents have a resume that’s three pages long or more.
  2. The more senior a candidate, the longer the resume. Over 73% of senior professionals (8+ years of professional experience) had a resume that’s 2 pages or longer.
  3. As entry-level candidates don’t have a lot of content to fill their resumes with, 76% of them had a one-page resume.
  4. Almost 90% of respondents make their resumes on a computer, while around 9% use their smartphones. The remaining 1% of respondents said they use their tablets to create their resumes.
  5. When it comes to tailoring their resume for the job, around 33% of respondents said that they create different versions of their resume for different roles, 48% make only minor adjustments, and 19% submit the same resume everywhere.
  6. 30% of job-seekers stated that it takes them less than a day to complete their resume, while 40% took 1 to 3 days. As for the rest of the respondents, 12.3% took 3-7 days to finish working on their resumes, and the rest of the 17.7% took even longer than that.
  7. 47% of survey respondents only submit a cover letter if the job explicitly asks for it, 22% always submit one along with their resume, and the final 31% don’t use cover letters at all.
  8. It seems that seniority level doesn’t affect whether a candidate will submit a cover letter or not. 73% of senior professionals submit cover letters, just like 72% of mid-level and junior professionals.
  9. Now, how about tailoring the cover letter to each job? According to our survey, 35% of candidates make minor adjustments to their cover letter, but never completely tailor it to the job. 34% create completely different versions of their cover letters for each role they apply for, and the final 31% submit the same exact cover letter everywhere.

Conclusion 

The job market is constantly changing and evolving, and the job seeker’s journey is changing along. 

We hope that these statistics about some of the most important career trends and job-search elements were insightful and that they help you increase your chance of success in 2024.