A postdoc asks—

I was looking at jobs on LinkedIn and I was really excited to apply for a synthetic biology role that seemed like a pretty perfect fit, but I saw that the posting is already 3 days old (and over 600 people have already applied). Is there any point in still sending in an application?

If you feel like you’re a good fit, you should definitely apply! It is incredibly unlikely that the hiring team is only going to review a fixed number of applications (and the number of applications LinkedIn is showing you is generally just an indicator of how many times the link has been clicked on, not the number of bona fide applications that have made it to the company). Additionally, it is super unlikely that the hiring team had any plans to review applications in the first few days the posting is up. Rolling application review is very rare, and most organizations will be explicit in their posting if that is what they plan to do.

-David Blancha, Assistant Director, Career Development Team for Researchers