What's a good number of firms to apply for a VS to? I currently have 16 but seeing people apply to 70 is worrying me... I'm determined to get a VS this year and willing to put the work in so how many would people suggest?
The question as to the ideal number of applications is a rather controversial one, and I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to it. Some top recruiters and top applicants advise to be 100% focused on producing the highest possible quality of applications and to therefore only choose around 6-8 firms. Others argue that applications are more of a number's game, where luck is a very significant factor, and that you should therefore aim for applying to as many firms as possible - sometimes in excess of 50 or 60.
I have know candidates who have been successful with both approaches, and I think there is some truth to both perspectives. On the one hand, as we well know, the VS application process is extremely competitive, so there is not much of a point in submitting an application which does not have high quality written answers - it will have virtually no chance of being progressed. I have known people who were initially writing applications very quickly, and got rejected 20 or 30 times consecutively, and upon changing their strategy to a quality-focused one, they progressed with half of the firms they subsequently applied to. On the other hand, it seems to me it is undeniable that luck is also a very significant factor, and that you should therefore aim to maximize your chances by submitting a higher number of applications. In my own experience, some of the applications I had spent most time and effort on, and which I thought had some of my best writing, ended up being rejected at first stage. At the same time, some of the applications which I knew had some room for improvement ended up being progressed and eventually secured me TC offers. In my opinion, this could not be accounted by anything other than the role of luck - if anything, the firms that ended up progressing me tended to be the firms which I would have expected to be more selective than the ones which rejected me. As such, I don't think you can ever write to a high enough standard that you eliminate the luck factor. Graduate recruitment teams review dozens and sometimes hundreds of application per day, they have to reject the vast majority, and there is no objective metric to assess your application on. Some recruiters might place more emphasis on grades, some on your work experience, some on how convincing your motivations are and the quality of your written answers, some on WG/SJT scores, some on your university and degree, some on your extracurriculars and prizes, and so on. When comparing two strong applications that score well in all these categories, there is an unavoidable element of subjectivity in the recruiter's choice as to what criteria to prioritize. Since you don't know beforehand what a particular recruiter's attitude will be on the day they review your application, there is a strong argument to be made to apply to as may firms as possible to maximize your chances of having your application assessed by a recruiter who places more emphasis on the criteria you score best in. From my personal experience, the very best of candidates (who do very well in all the aforementioned categories) only end up with a VS offer for every 1/3-1/4 applications.
What is my concrete advice? I think the best strategy is to aim to send as many high quality applications as possible. That is, you should never submit an application just for the sake of a theoretical chance of progressing if you have not spent a sufficient amount of time researching the firm, and then writing and reviewing the application. At the same time, you should not spend 50 hours of work on every application to ensure you get to that absolute 100% level of quality your are capable of. I think sending 20 applications with 95% level of writing quality is better than sending 4 applications at 100%. Thus, I think you should focus on starting to write high quality applications, and then try to write as many as you can. You might find that at the beginning it takes you longer to write great answers, but as you go through the application process and you improve your research and drafting skills, your pace might significantly improve. Initially, it took me around 2-3 weeks to have a great application, but by January I could write an application at the same level of quality in 1-2 days. You will have to assess your own pace to estimate how many applications you can aim to submit. However, I think submitting 20-30 high quality applications should be achievable for most dedicated candidates, and I have also seen some especially driven people ending up with 40-50 good applications in a single cycle.
