Thanks Jack – your subtle criticism from 2023 has officially prompted me to revive this blog. :D

I don’t know anybody in real life who blogs regularly […] a friend of mine has a blog, but in my defense he’s only posted twice in the past 2 years.

Happy New Year! 🎉

With 2025 now over and graduation looming closer, I thought it would be nice to do a quick summary of my post-PhD job hunt so far.

Overall vibes

My job hunt started a bit slowly and I didn’t get into full “interviewing mode” until February. The main impetus for this was a FAANG interview which I unexpectedly got through our campus job board.

While the interview didn’t lead to an offer, going through a full virtual onsite interview was super helpful as it gave me an idea of what to expected. It also made a lot of the subsequent interviews feel easier or at least less intimidating. :D

After a summer where my progress stalled due to some family visiting me, I picked things back up around September and kicked things into full gear by October 2025. The last two months of the year involved a ton of applying and interviewing, all while organizing a workshop for EACL 2026 and finalizing a paper which I presented at IJCNLP-AACL 2025 right before Christmas.

Fortunately the work paid off and our paper was awarded the Best Paper Award of the entire conference. More on this in a future post!

By the numbers

As the image at the start of this post shows, I applied to a total of 150 jobs in 2025. The actual number is likely slightly higher because I forgot to track everything.

Out of the 150 applications, 76 ended up being ghosted which makes for a ghosting rate of 50%. In hindsight it would have been cool to track how many of these came from “Easy Apply” job postings on Linkedin. They were an easy way to build momentum at the beginning but I try to avoid those now since everyone and their dog seems to be hitting apply.

A total of 74 applications got a response, which gives me a reponse rate of 50%. That may seem awesome until you realize that number includes 59 rejections. So conditional on someone not ghosting me, that gives me a rejection rate of just under 80%.

Finally, the last row of the table shows a total of 15 interviews. So conditional on hearing back, there is about a 20% chance of the response being positive. As a function of overall applications, this gives me a 10% interview rate. (Note: I am using “interview” quite loosely and including everything from recruiter “vibe checks” to virtual onsite loops in the total.)

Reflections and takeaways

First takeaway based on the above numbers is that the market is brutal right now. It’s definitely a “numbers game” where the only way to stay afloat is to send more applications.

On the positive side, the 10:1 applications-to-interviews ratio can be helpful for orienting oneself psychologically. At least I find it helpful to tell myself “This is expected, this is normal.” when getting ghosted for the umpteenth time or waking up to yet another rejection email.

A related takeaway is understanding the importance of consistency and overall volume. Rather than intensity at any given moment, it’s the “area under the curve” that matters.

As an example, I set the following daily targets for myself:

• Applications: 3 applications/day
• LeetCode: 3 problems/day

While I definitely didn’t hit my targets every day, my overall feeling is that they definitely help orient my day as I have a concrete goal to aim at.

Going forward

This coming year, the main goal is obviously to graduate and find a job that lets me take the next step in my career. In addition to the job hunt, I will also be defending my PhD dissertation this spring, most likely sometime between March and April.

If anyone is looking for an award-winning NLP/AI researcher with extensive expertise in multilingual and low-resource scenarios, benchmark construction and statistical evaluation, please get in touch!