I know the job market is terrible at the moment and publishing is hard to get into at the best of times, but I wish people understood that the publishing industry really isn't big enough to have giant corporations in the same way that other industries do

PRH has 2k employees across the whole of the UK & Ireland. In comparison, BBC has over 3k just in Manchester, Deloitte has 16k in the UK and Barclays has 48k in the UK

So yeah, I work for a big publisher - and even we don’t have a hiring firm or AI that tracks keywords or algorithms, etc

It’s a live human being reading all your applications. There’s no ‘trick’ to it, we just read them. My team was half-furloughed just like everyone else’s so pls be patient, we’re dealing with an unprecedented no of apps

If you’re rejected from an entry-level publishing job, it really doesn’t mean that you’re not good enough or that you wouldn’t be great at the job. There are fewer jobs per year (and that’s in a pre-C year) than there are no of apps we get for a single entry-level position

I did a rough estimation of word count once and on a weekly basis, I read the wc equivalent of about 8-10 novels a week. (Again, this was pre-C, haven’t calculated since.) And that’s just pure reading, that’s not anything else involved in recruitment

Two weeks is an unrealistic amount of time to hear back in

I know there’s loads of advice telling you to do this, but if you send chasing emails about your applications after two weeks, the time spent reading and replying to them takes away from the time spent on reading applications

('It only takes a minute to read and reply!' I know, but pls remember you’re not the only one doing it. I can usually tell when it’s been two weeks since an advert closed bc I will get up to a hundred emails about applications)

Good recruitment takes a long time. If it’s a job with hundreds or thousands of applications, the quickest and easiest thing to do is pick someone who already has the most experience or go for a recommendation from a trusted friend. This is what we’re trying to move AWAY from.

Plus, bear in mind that you don’t just read applications once. Eg: if you start with 600, you read them all and then you have a stack of 150. You then read the stack of 150 again and it goes down to 80, and so on

Each iteration becomes harder and takes longer because, truth is, everyone in my stack of 150 is already a good application

And tbh I’m lucky – my entire job is recruitment. This is rare in publishing. Most other publishers don’t have dedicated recruiters, they might have HR people who also do recruitment and some places don’t have HR at all