Category: Productivity

The Science of the Job Search (Part 7: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

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You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.
You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.

You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.

We were curious about how many job requirements are actually required, so we analyzed job postings and resumes for 6,000+ applications across 118 industries from our database of users. We found that while matching requirements is important, you don’t necessarily need to match all of them.

  • Your chances of getting an interview start to go up once you meet about 40% of job requirements.
  • You’re not any more likely to get an interview matching 90% of job requirements compared to matching just 50%.
  • For women, these numbers are about 10% lower i.e. women’s interview chances go up once they meet 30% of job requirements, and matching 40% of job requirements is as good as matching 90% for women.

You only need 50% of job requirements

You’re just as likely to get an interview matching 50% of requirements as matching 90%. We saw a clear upward trend in interview rates based on matching requirements, but with an upper bound. When users applied to jobs where they matched 40 – 50% of job requirements, they were 85% more likely to get an interview than when they matched less, and applying to jobs where they matched 50 – 60% of requirements made them an extra 192% more likely to get an interview over the 40 – 50% matches.

But after that point, you’re in diminishing returns. Applying to jobs where they matched 60% or more of job requirements didn’t provide any additional boost in interview rate.

Job Search Tip #1: Apply for jobs once you match 50% of job requirements.

For women, the % of requirements required is lower

You may have seen stories before about how women in particular don’t apply for jobs unless they’re 100% qualified. We wondered if they were on to something – maybe there’s gender discrimination at play and hiring managers look for women to meet more of the requirements. Turns out, our findings apply just as much to women as to men, and actually, for women, the chances of getting an interview start increasing as soon as you meet 30% of requirements.

Women get interviews at higher rates with fewer matched requirements – if only they applied to those jobs in the first place.
Women get interviews at higher rates with fewer matched requirements – if only they applied to those jobs in the first place.

Continued: The Science of the Job Search, Part VII: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements”

How to invoice your customers for free using GNUcash

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(Estimated 3 minute read)

Note: If you don’t need everything integrated into one system, or the guarantee that it will always remain free, and just need an easier means of creating free invoices, at least one other good alternative exists. The one using at present for this is WaveApps, which continues to work well for us.

To my knowledge, GNUcash is perhaps the only true free alternative to Quickbooks to date, for those who require a comprehensive bookkeeping system.

Despite this fact (at least as of the time of writing), GNUcash has not included time-tracking/integration, and has lacked any direct way to import Quickbooks-formatted files, so be advised that making the switch will likely present some challenges. For time tracking, I use a simple spreadsheet, but there are many free time-tracking tools you can use, including Harvest, which integrates with Asana.

It features a strong ledger system, but unfortunately can be even more user-unfriendly than Quickbooks and more difficult to set up, with very clumsy and limited invoicing, sadly with no way to save settings from app & very clunky tools to tweak layout options.

That said, it’s free, so let’s cut to the chase!

To set up invoices, you’ll need to first set up a customer at Business → Customer → New Customer. You can leave Customer Number blank or use a name, but you’ll want to use the full customer/client name under the Company Name field, as this will appear on the invoices. The Name field, however, can be left blank.

When your customer(s) are set up properly, next go to Business → Customer → New Invoice (Note: After creating your first one, you can also then click the ‘Duplicate Invoice’, to save yourself some time in the future.)

Fill out the invoice details and click the OK button, which brings up the following:

When you have finished entering all the items, you can Save & ‘Post’ and then ‘Print’ the invoice.

To make invoices look less hideous, you’ll then need to choose and customize a Stylesheet. Click here for more on customizing invoices…

Note: Use “Extra Notes”, not Description for customer note.

To find an existing invoice, use the Business → Customer → Find Invoice menu, but before you can edit a posted invoice, you will need to Unpost it.

Click here for more detail from the official GNUcash website…

Or here for a video tutorial on the same topic…

Asana Vs. Zoho for Free, Basic Task & Project Management

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One of the increasingly important challenges we all face these days is sifting through all the myriad of technological distractions in our daily lives in order to help us focus only on that which truly matters.

For those of us less naturally gifted at prioritizing, having good tools can be essential. For this reason, we’re working on a series of posts to help people sort through the overwhelming options out there.

Below is a very specific comparison from a few years back we wanted to share again for anyone looking for this very niche topic (if not, feel free to skip this one, as we’ll be releasing more generalized info soon). Cheers!

(Estimated 4 minute read)

Previously, we had written a brief article on how I use Asana to combat distraction. Asana is a newer tool than Zoho that has been undergoing fairly rapid development, but I’d like to briefly touch on some of what it gets right and wrong vs. Zoho.

Assigning multiple people to a task:

I get that Asana deliberately limits this functionality, and has recently made it possible to duplicate your task to emulate this feature, but this can quickly get really messy and create more confusion! Zoho hasn’t over-thought this and makes it easy to tag exactly who you need on a given task.

The ability to see multiple task lists at a glance:

Even if you’re using a task manager purely for personal use, who among us these days is not juggling several separate projects, each with its own prioritized tasks at once? Asana finally added a way to easily see and manage these separate lists at a glance, making it much easier to get an overview of all that’s on your plate on a given day. This can now be done by setting up a new project board, rather than a traditional list.

While it may not be immediately obvious how to do this in Zoho, there is a great feature for this, the Kanban View, which allows you to easily drag to reorder and move tasks from one project to another.

A nice premium account feature Zoho has, which Asana still lacks: Dependencies, milestones & timelines!

Asana seems to feel that a simple calendar view is sufficient for gauging a project’s full timetable, and that hard-to-find and navigate sub-tasks are somehow sufficient tools for dealing with longer-term projects with milestone/deadlines. For me, it is not, and I require a way of getting an overview glance of this. Zoho seems to be one of the only collaborative tools out there that supports Gantt-style charts, and does it well. To me, this is an essential feature that Asana needs to adopt ASAP.

User Interface Comparisons

Yes, I know this screen capture is now outdated, but the basic UI hasn’t really changed much.

One of the things that initially appealed to me about Asana was its simple, modern UI. While I generally don’t mind Asana’s interface, most of the people on my team do. They find it very cluttered and overwhelming, and I can certainly see their point. A single, endless task list at a time can really feel claustrophobic and daunting.

While Zoho is far from perfect in this regard, its host of various layouts means that you will probably find a view that works for you, and if the people I work with are any indication, your collaborators may likely find it cleaner and easier than Asana.

For all of Asana’s modern back-end, it still takes longer than I would like to fire up and can be sluggish and unresponsive at times, requiring unnecessary full app refreshes. Zoho seems more old-school, but frankly just performs well with very little latency.

At the end of the day, only you can choose which solution is better for you, but if Asana is simply not meeting your project management needs, you might suggest giving Zoho a try.

Full disclosure: We have absolutely no affiliation with either Asana or Zoho and would like to see both products continue to improve and look forward to continuing to evaluate both as they evolve!

Did we overlook something? Disagree with us? Drop us a line and let us know. Thanks!

3 Tips on Using Asana to Manage Your Tasks to Combat Distraction

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Unless you perhaps register somewhere on the autism spectrum and/or every moment of your life is being painstakingly managed for you, you are probably struggling more than ever to juggle a seemingly endless barrage of things you want and need to do on any given day. And multiply that by at least a few times if you happen to fall anywhere on the ADhD continuum!

While no tool can offer a perfect solution for keeping organized, I have tried quite a few over the years and the best I’ve found for me to-date is Asana — which is 100% free, if you happen to be working alone or in a fairly small team!

Despite having been recently designed, though, navigating Asana can still be a bit unintuitive for the unfamiliar, so I decided to share a few techniques I use, in hopes that you’ll find some utility in them!

Only assign high-priority tasks to individuals, assign everything else by Project
I highly recommend assigning everything that’s not an immediately pressing task by Project and tags, and not assigning a task to a person (including yourself), unless it’s something that needs to be acted on within the next few days. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an endless, overwhelming list of to-dos that will sabotage that crucial sense of progress, accomplishment and clarity that is so essential to the process of organizing and getting things done. This allows you keep your project management separate from your task management, going back & forth between the Project and Team Member views.

Only use ‘Headings’ for milestone-markers, within Projects, not as task-containers!
As you may know, ending the name of a given task with a colon turns it into a ‘heading’, but when you drag to reorder these, they move independently of any tasks that fall under these ‘headings’, which brings me to my last tip:

Keep every complex task organized with its own sub-tasks, but only go one level deep
If you weren’t aware, you can (and should!) ‘nest’ tasks within other tasks in Asana to group smaller tasks within overarching objectives. I recommend doing it this way because, unlike Headings (see above), it is easy to grab and rearrange them by their ‘parent’ task in any task list. The reason I suggest only ‘nesting’ them only one level deep is because navigating any deeper than one level through Asana can be a bit of a nightmare, and it’s almost impossible not to lose sub-tasks if they are nested any more than one-level in!
NOTE: In order to effectively use this method, it is also essential to keep the task description empty for any ‘parent’ tasks (objectives), because Asana lists sub-tasks below this, and adding descriptions more than a line or two long will push the sub-tasks down out of view!

I hope you found these techniques to be beneficial — Please drop me a message and/or leave a comment either way! Cheers.