Why Getting Hired At Top Tech Firms Is 200 Times Harder Than Getting Into Harvard
On December 1, podcaster and venture capitalist Harry Stebbings dropped a viral claim on LinkedIn: landing a job at ElevenLabs, the high-growth AI voice startup valued at $6.6 billion, is 200 times harder than earning an acceptance letter to Harvard University.
Per Stebbings’ breakdown, just 0.018% of the 180,000 candidates who applied to the AI platform in the first half of the year received job offers. While that figure — extrapolated from a mid-year application spike — may have been intentional hyperbole, it still spread rapidly across professional social media. The official final numbers tell a similar story: out of tens of thousands of total applicants, only 132 candidates ultimately landed roles at ElevenLabs, a rate far lower than Harvard’s already competitive 3% to 4% undergraduate admission rate.
“On average, we continue to see more applicants apply every quarter,” says Victoria Weller, ElevenLabs’ Vice President of Operations. “I hope that the sheer volume of applicants actually motivates people — it’s inspiring to work somewhere that’s hard to get into. It’s just like Harvard: once you’re in, you know you’re surrounded by the best people in an energizing environment.”
High-demand companies across the tech sector are scaling up their recruitment teams to handle application volumes that often hit six figures. ElevenLabs, for example, has tripled the size of its recruitment team this year alone. Coinbase, which reports an overall 0.1% hiring rate, has added new AI tools to expand candidate outreach, flag top talent earlier in the process, and streamline hiring decisions.
The crypto exchange, which boasts a roughly $70 billion market cap and is expanding into a full-service financial superapp, has long been known for its rigorous hiring process: candidates who make it past initial screening complete six interview stages spread across 60 days. That grueling structure predates a 2025 application surge that pushed annual applications up 45% year-over-year, totaling hundreds of thousands of submissions.
“The size of your applicant pool doesn’t determine the quality of your hires — the rigor of your hiring system does,” says Greg Garrison, Coinbase’s Vice President of Talent. “Our core hiring process has stayed largely the same, but the systems that support it have just become more efficient and well-tuned.”
Today’s hyper-competitive landscape is shaped by two key shifts: job seekers face fewer open roles and stiffer competition, while one-click applications via LinkedIn and AI-generated application materials have made applying for jobs easier than ever. The result? A new job posting can draw hundreds, even thousands, of resumes within hours of going live.
While this flood of applications makes recruiters’ jobs far harder, it also benefits employers: extremely high demand paired with extremely low hiring rates signals prestige to the labor market, reinforcing the narrative that only the top 0.1% of talent make the cut.
Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom argues that most companies’ eye-popping application counts are driven largely by automated bot applications, not genuine candidates. “I know a Stanford undergraduate who wrote code to apply to every job posting on a major job board, and he told me all his friends use the tool too,” Bloom says. “The big problem here is that this actually crowds out serious applicants. Even if you’re one of the small share of candidates who applies manually, you still have very little chance of making it through initial screening.”
This flood of submissions means candidates face far more scrutiny, especially in the earliest hiring stages. In most cases today, candidates have to impress an algorithm before they ever talk to a human. With thousands of resumes flooding inboxes, ElevenLabs uses Ashby, a data-driven applicant tracking system, to sort through submissions and flag the strongest candidates.
“We have open text fields on our application portal that ask candidates why they want to work with us and what about our mission excites them,” Weller explains. “That lets us easily tell who just autofilled their details and clicked submit, versus who took the time to answer thoughtfully.” Generic, quick-fire applications almost never advance to the next round, meaning even with near-zero acceptance rates, nailing the basics — like answering all questions thoroughly, without relying on ChatGPT to draft responses — can make a major difference.
Beyond evaluating professional experience, companies are also putting extra focus on testing for cultural fit. “We ask specific questions that tie directly to our company values,” Weller says. “For example, we prioritize candidates with low egos, so we ask them to share feedback they’ve received recently — their answer tells us a lot about their personality.” That means the overconfident, brag-heavy LinkedIn profiles many job seekers craft don’t actually align with what most hiring managers are looking for.
ElevenLabs runs up to five total assessment rounds for candidates, while Coinbase asks candidates to complete four interviews in a single stage, paired with skills assessments and work trials before a potential offer is extended. It’s real-world experience and persistence that separate the top 0.1% of candidates from the top 1%, Garrison says.
“The best candidates tend to stand out on their own,” he says. “What separates them isn’t how polished their resume or interview answers are — it’s evidence of past success. Their track record speaks far louder than any resume.” Even with the most refined systems, though, the glut of applications means some truly talented candidates will slip through the cracks, and many others never get noticed by recruiters at all.
Bloom notes that publicizing near-zero hiring rates is often a deliberate marketing tactic for top companies. “Some companies love to flex on how hard it is to get a job with them. It’s just a big show of status — the same way colleges love having tons of applications so they can show off how low their acceptance rate is,” Bloom says. “Companies do the exact same thing.”
That dynamic makes professional networking more essential than ever, according to Mathew Schulz, founder of procurement newsletter Pennywurth. Schulz’s own viral LinkedIn post from earlier this year compared hiring rates at fintech Ramp — which hit a $32 billion valuation last November — to Harvard’s admission rate, noting that just 0.23% of engineer applicants landed offers.
“It’s becoming even harder to submit a resume and move through the hiring process on your own: a new vacancy gets hundreds of applicants within 24 hours of going live,” Schulz says. “That means having a mutual connection, reaching out directly to contacts at the company, and actively following up on LinkedIn is more important than ever.”
With more top talent to choose from, companies can afford to be far pickier than they were just a few years ago. Hiring managers are increasingly prioritizing candidates who can work successfully outside their narrow niche, Schulz says. “More companies are looking for ‘builders’ and ‘creators’ who can launch new things, have an entrepreneurial mindset, and bring a diverse set of high-level skills,” he says. “There’s a clear shift toward hiring generalists now, rather than hyper-specialized candidates.”
In practice, that means job seekers need to actively expand their skill sets, take targeted courses, and build experience with the new tools that top roles now demand. “It’s what everyone says: looking for a job is a full-time job right now,” Schulz notes.
Breaking into one of these top firms is undeniably a bigger challenge than it was in decades past. But once candidates finally get a seat across from a hiring manager, the core basics of hiring haven’t changed — no matter how tiny the acceptance rate.
“Good recruitment still comes down to answering three questions: What drives this person? What are they great at? Are they a good fit for our company?” Weller says. “That will always stay the same, no matter what the hiring process looks like.”
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