- Tech CEO and LinkedIn figure Michael Yan has a hack for job seekers that he claims landed him job offers at huge corporations like Microsoft and Meta. Commenters shared their disbelief and optimism over the trick—but it might be a novel strategy as Gen Z vies for gigs in a competitive job market.
Getting hired in 2025’s job market has become a game of strategy—maneuvering “ghost” jobs, AI filters, and fierce competition. For many, it’s become a numbers game, with candidates sending out hundreds of applications. But there might be a secret weapon in everyone’s arsenal.
That’s because one tech CEO has said he’s got a winning formula for landing job offers from major companies. His secret? Applying to jobs within the hour they go live.
In a LinkedInpost shared to his over 150,000 platform followers, Michael Yan, the CEO and founder of AI assistant company Simplify said that he used to spend two to three hours every day refreshing job boards for newly posted gigs. It was time-consuming and cumbersome—something had to give.
“I knew that applying for jobs quickly would increase my chances of landing an interview, but it was SO inefficient looking through hundreds of jobs to find the most recently posted ones,” Yan wrote.
Yan has since discovered a feature on LinkedIn that enables job seekers to filter openings that have gone live within the last hour—and he claims to have landed job offers at Meta and Google because he got the jump, applying to their gigs within hours of them being posted.
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Job seekers don’t have to be tech whizzes to try out the hack. Yan wrote that the process is pretty easy, it only takes three simple steps.
- Put your desired job in LinkedIn’s job search function, and change the “Date posted” filter to “Past 24 hours.” Hit “Show results.”
- In the webpage URL, there should be the number “86400” in the middle of the link. Change that number to “3600.” Hit enter.
- Browse the new jobs that have been posted within the past hour.
Yan went on to explain why the number in the URL needs to change; the number “86400” in the link represents the number of seconds it’s been since a posting has gone up, amounting to 24 hours. By altering it to “3600”—the number of seconds in an hour—they can narrow the scope even further. He added that that number can be changed to anything to create a bespoke job posting time frame.
This trick seems so simple that some commenters were skeptical if it really works wonders—but Yan’s inbox of offer letters seems to prove so. In the comment section of an earlier LinkedIn post, he shared screenshots of alleged internship offer letters from Microsoft and Facebook, now Meta. Fortune reached out to Google, Microsoft, and Meta for confirmation of the offers.
Rather than seeing the job search as a game of numbers, job hunters may be better off looking at it as a game of speed. Many highly talented candidates are vying for the same role—so whoever gets their foot in the door first may have a higher chance of being noticed.
New hack could offer hope to Gen Z
Yan’s job advice quickly circulated the platform, his LinkedIn post garnering nearly 8,850 reactions and hundreds of comments. Job seekers weighed in with their own feelings on the trick—from disbelief to optimism.
“Thanks for sharing this. This can be a good game changer for me to land my dream job,” one LinkedIn user commented under the post. Another user said he used the hack around eight years ago and found it “works like a charm.”
But in reality, landing a job by making little tweaks to LinkedIn job searches may seem like a pipe dream, as job seekers are sending out hundreds of applications for months to no avail. It’s difficult for people—especially young, Gen Z workers—to land a gig these days. The situation is even more depressing for entry-level roles, which are evaporating into thin air.
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The next cohort of workers are already feeling the pressure—57% of the class of 2025 reported feeling pessimistic about starting their careers, according to a 2024 report from Handshake. Students of the class of 2025 have already sent out 24% more job applications than seniors did the previous year.
The war for work is on, and Gen Z is thinking outside the box with hacks like Yan’s to gain a competitive edge. After six months of failed efforts to land a gig, one young job-seeker named Basant Shenouda told Fortune she tracked what conferences recruiters were going to, and volunteered at them to have a chance to hand out her résumés. She ended up landing an internship at LinkedIn. Another Gen Z candidate, Ayala Ossowski, wore her university’s baseball cap at her pizza joint job, and pitched her experience when customers asked about it. She wound up securing a gig at Cisco.
“Eventually someone took a chance on me because they appreciated my tenacity, grit, and willingness to ask for what I so desperately wanted,” Ossowski told Fortune. “I got the job, and my last shift at the shop was the very next week.”
