How much time does a job search take? I measured a month of mine

Mostly wasted, it turns out. In one month my searches for product manager roles found 6,133 job ads. Two thirds were never for me, a third had to be read to the end to find that out, and only 88 were a real fit. Reading them by hand would have taken about 136 hours, or an hour and a half of reading for every job worth applying to.

If your job search is taking forever, this is probably why. I'm looking for my next role as a product manager, and I run that search through Sherpa, the AI job search assistant I'm building. I set up my searches the way anyone would, with one job title, Stockholm in any work mode, and remote roles across the EU. Sherpa reads every ad those searches return and rates it from 0 to 100 against my resume. After a month I counted what came back.

Two thirds were never for me

A job title is a keyword, and a keyword finds everything that mentions it. My search for product manager found product owners, project managers, engineers who work with product, heads of product and associate roles, jobs in cities I hadn't picked, and more than a thousand ads written in languages I don't speak. You can dismiss most of these from the card, but you still have to look at every card, and there were 204 of them a day.

A third looked right, until the end

The expensive ads are the ones that pass the card. They have the right title, the right city and an English description. The only way to know whether one is for you is to read it, and the deal breaker is rarely at the top.

When an ad required a language I don't speak, it usually said so two thirds of the way down the page.

The same goes for the line that says the remote role is remote within one country, or that the team is in the office four days a week. You read about the mission, the team and the perks before the requirements tell you whether you can apply at all.

Data: the ads in my search that required a language my resume does not list; where the requirement's sentence could be found in the text, its position was measured as a share of the ad's length (median 66%, in the second half 83% of the time).

Where 6,133 ads went

1. 6,133Ads my searches foundone month, one job title
2. 2,095Looked right, and needed a full readabout three minutes each34%
3. 297Worth a look after readingpassed Sherpa's rating4.8%
4. 88A real fitrated 80 or higher1.4%

Data: every ad my searches on Sherpa found between 27 August and 26 September 2026, and each one's rating.

Why a job search takes so long

I didn't read these ads myself, so the hours are an estimate, and a generous one. I allowed ten seconds to judge a card, fifteen to open and close an ad in a language you don't read, and a full read at the average adult reading speed.

That's 32 hours a week, close to a full-time job, before you write a single application. Almost all of it goes to ads that were never going to be yours, and every real fit costs an hour and a half of reading to find.

People ask how many jobs they should apply to a day, or a week. The better question is how many ads they have to go through to find one worth applying to. In my search, it was about seventy for every real fit.

Data: reading speed 238 words a minute (Brysbaert, 2019, a review of 190 studies of silent reading); the median ad in my search was about 775 words.

If you search by hand

• Write your deal breakers down first: titles you won't take, levels, work modes and languages. Then check each card against that list.
• Search the ad before you read it for the names of languages, "on-site", "hybrid" and "days a week".
• Read the requirements first. That's where the deal breakers are.

In SherpaA few jobs worth a look, instead of 204 ads a day