Conversation starter: How landing an interview changes with experience

Key Findings:

In previous research on how workers land interviews and job offers, we showed that most interviews and offers stem from cold online applications and how that share has fallen since 2023. In this research, we explore how landing an interview changes over the course of a career. We find that recruiter outreach is more common for seasoned workers than early-career workers, but that online applications are the dominant source of interviews across all experience cohorts.

In this piece, we are focused on how the share of job interviews initiated in different ways varies based on employee experience. Other major factors are driving changes in these time series, but we don’t discuss those trends directly. Hiring rates rose steadily in the 2010s, and experienced a post-pandemic boom during the great resignation after falling into a “frozen” labor market with little hiring and little firing. Large language models entered the scene and made it easier for prospective employees to flood the zone with high-quality application packets.

Experience matters, but less than you might think

Workers enter the labor market without experience or a professional network. As they build both over the course of their career, they can leverage both their experience and their networks into getting a new role. This changes the strategies available to job seekers as they progress in their career. Larger and deeper networks translate to more and higher quality referrals, and experience in a field means recruiters may approach them when they’re looking to meet a specific need at their organization.

We use Glassdoor interviews to trace how candidates landed interviews, cut by job tenure. In the plot below, the lighter line represents the most junior employees and the darker lines the most senior.

Across all experience bands, the broad trend holds: online applications continued their march between 2015 and 2023 to become the most common source of job interviews for workers with all levels of experience. Between 2023 and 2025, that dominance took a few steps back. We can see that those steps back were larger for the most senior employees, dropping from 70.5% to 61.1% – a 9.4 percentage point drop. The drop for the most junior employees was only slightly smaller at 8.0 percentage points, and after the drop junior employees are 12% more likely (7.2 percentage points) to have landed their job interview with an online application.

Senior employees are less reliant on cold applications, but that change doesn’t fundamentally alter the strategy of landing an interview. At all levels of experience, a strong majority of interviews start with an online application.

Recruiters still chase experience, while referrals have lost their edge for senior employees

The next-most common methods of landing an interview are recruiter outreach and referrals. This section examines how those trends vary by experience level and over time.

Our prior research found that recruiter outreach had filled much of the gap left by online applications’ declining share of interviews. Here, we can see that is true at all levels of experience. Recruiter outreach also comes with experience. The most seasoned employees are 35% more likely (5.5 percentage points) to state that their interviews began with an online application. 

It does not take much experience to appeal to recruiters, however. Similar proportions of candidates with 5-10 or 11-20 years of experience had recruiters reach out to them. This suggests that recruiters find more candidates for positions requiring even just a few years of experience. It isn’t just senior executives that get headhunted.

Referrals tell us a different story: they have become a slightly less prominent source of interviews over the past decade, and in 2025 accounted for a similar proportion of interviews across all experience levels. The following chart shows the proportion of interviews that started with a referral.

This chart demonstrates that from 2015 to 2023, referrals were a more common source of interviews for seasoned employees, typically ranging from 2-3 percentage points more likely. Since 2023, the edge that experience gave in landing a job through a referral dissipated. It remains the third-most common way to land an interview at all experience levels.

Conclusion

Workers land interviews somewhat differently depending on how much experience they have, but Glassdoor interview data indicates that those differences are not large enough to drive fundamentally different strategies for landing an interview. Online applications land the majority share of new interviews at all experience levels, followed by recruiter outreach and employee referrals. Job seekers from the most junior to the most seasoned should: