Andrei combines academic knowledge with over 10 years of practical experience to help job seekers navigate the challenges of resumes, interviews, and career growth. Through the Novorésumé Career Blog, he offers actionable advice to simplify and ace the job search process.
Updated on 01/14/2026
The job search landscape is constantly evolving, and in 2026, 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:
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.
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.
As entry-level candidates don’t have a lot of content to fill their resumes with, 76% of them had a one-page resume.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
18 Job-Search Trends & Statistics
How long do people spend looking for a job?
Or better yet, how long do different demographics stick with a job in any given company?
Below, we’ll cover those exact statistics and more.
We asked respondents what’s the longest they’ve ever stayed in a company. Around 6% of respondents said their longest was 8+ years, and 8% said 5 to 8 years.
24% of respondents said their longest employment was 2 to 5 years, 16% stayed for 1-2 years, and the remainder 46% stayed for a year or less.
But what about the shortest time our respondents have stayed in one company? 35% of them have stayed for less than six months, while 19% of respondents have stayed between 6 months to 1 year.
26% of respondents said they have no past work experience, 14% said the shortest they’ve stayed in one company was 1 to 2 years, and around 5% of them replied with 2 to 5 years.
Most respondents (41.5%) spend less than two hours per day looking and applying for jobs, while 40.3% spend 2 to 4 hours.
At the same time, approximately 12% spend 4 to 6 hours per day looking and applying for jobs and only 3% spend more than eight hours.
On days they’re looking for jobs, around 60% of respondents apply for 1 to 3 positions daily, whereas 25% of candidates apply for 3 to 6 positions daily.
Only 10% of candidates are extremely dedicated to their job search, applying for 6 to 10 positions, while only 2.3% of applicants apply for more than 15 positions daily.
The most popular platform to look for jobs is LinkedIn, with 75.4% of respondents saying that’s where they look for jobs.
Online job boards come a close second, with almost 67% of those surveyed using them to look for jobs. Finally, 64% of respondents use company websites to directly apply for jobs.
Out of all the candidates who use LinkedIn to apply for jobs, 57% apply for 1 to 3 positions, 27% apply for 3 to 6 positions, and 11% for 6 to 10 positions.
Regarding online job boards, out of all the candidates who use them to apply for jobs, 59% apply for 1 to 3 positions, 25% apply for 3 to 6 positions, and 11% for 6 to 10 positions.
The third most-used means to apply for jobs are company websites. There, 58% of candidates apply for 1 to 3 positions, 27% for 3 to 6 positions, and 10% for 6 to 10 positions. So, on average, more than half of candidates apply to 3 positions at most.
Alternatively, job-seekers look for jobs through referrals from friends and acquaintances (56.7%), job forums (23.9%), career events (23.3%), Facebook (18.9%), working with recruiters (17%), newspaper job listings (15.3%), attending networking events (13.6%), offline job ads (12.8%), and local classifieds (6.9%).
When looking for job openings, half of the survey’s respondents said they use their smartphone (50.2%), almost half of them use their computer (48.2%), and the remaining 1.6% of respondents use their tablet.
We also surveyed the job-seekers about what they value in potential employers.
60% of all respondents believed that diversity & inclusion is very important, 32% said it was important or slightly important, and only 8% said that it’s not important at all. 47% of respondents claimed that the option to work remotely is very important, 41% claimed it’s important or slightly important, and the final 12% said remote work is not important for them at all.
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 2025.
