55 Applications, 47% Ghosting – IT PM/PO/Delivery Job Search with 6 Years of Experience
Hi everyone,
I thought I’d share the numbers and takeaways from my 2026 IT PM/PO/Delivery job search, in case it’s useful for others as well. (Hungary, Budapest + remote)
(TL;DR: I was looking for a job with 6 years of IT PM/PO/Delivery experience, advanced English, and a PMP certification, with a salary expectation of gross HUF 1.5–2.0M/month. Over roughly 3 months, 55 applications resulted in 1 offer, while almost every second company ghosted me. The biggest lesson for me was that current job title, application channel, and role-fit matter much more than I expected.)
A bit about me: I have around 6 years of experience in IT project/product/delivery roles. My current official title is Product Owner, but in practice I have also been responsible for a lot of PM and delivery-related activities. I speak English at an advanced/business level, I have a PMP certification, and I was mainly looking for PO / PM / Delivery Manager type roles.
My salary expectation was roughly between gross HUF 1.5–2.0M/month, depending on the role. I mainly applied for Budapest-based hybrid and remote IT positions. (approximately EUR 4.2–5.6k or USD 4.9–6.5k/month)
I didn’t really filter by industry. In my view, after a certain level of experience in PM/PO/Delivery roles, it is not necessarily the most important factor whether you come from the exact same industry. This will now be my third industry switch.
For the applications, I used one main CV throughout, so I did not tailor it separately for every single position. At this volume, that would have been impossible, and several HR people also mentioned that because of AI, almost every CV looks more or less perfect now. I also had a separate anonymized project portfolio PDF, where I summarized my previous projects to make my experience more visible.
The numbers over roughly 3 months:
- 55 applications
- 26 ghosted / no meaningful response
- 18 rejections
- 6 screening interviews
- 3 first-round interviews
- 1 second-round interview
- 1 offer
For me, this meant around a 47% ghost rate, a 20% screening/interview-or-better rate, and a 1.8% offer rate. It felt pretty depressing.
In the end, I managed to land a remote role at a non-Hungarian company at roughly the middle of my salary expectation range. I’m intentionally not sharing the exact position because I don’t want it to be easily identifiable.
My main takeaways:
LinkedIn Easy Apply / cold LinkedIn applications performed very poorly for me. Out of 20 applications of this type, 0 reached screening, and 17 were ghosted, which means an approximately 85% ghost rate. It is quick to apply, but for me it was mostly just a volume game.
Direct company / career site applications performed much better. Out of 27 such applications, 7 reached at least screening, which is around a 26% conversion rate. The ghost rate here was about 30%, so significantly lower than on LinkedIn.
Direct recruiter / LinkedIn outreach worked the best, although the sample size is small: 3 out of 3 led to at least a screening or first-round interview. I would not draw a huge conclusion from this, but the quality of the funnel felt completely different.
There was also a big difference by role type. For generic Project Manager roles, only 4 out of 36 applications moved forward, around 11%. For Delivery / Agile roles, it was 4 out of 11, around 36%. For Product / PO roles, it was 3 out of 6, around 50%. For me, this suggested that role-fit matters much more than the position being broadly “PM-related.”
The Product Owner title mattered surprisingly much. Even though my CV clearly stated that I also handled PM/delivery-type responsibilities, I often had to explain this separately. It felt like at the HR entry point, your current official job title carries a lot of weight.
Remote roles had a higher ghost rate: 8 ghosted out of 13 applications, around 62%. For hybrid roles, it was 18 out of 42, around 43%. I did not feel that remote roles were impossible, just noisier and more competitive. In total, 13 of the 55 applications were for remote roles.
The PMP was a positive where people recognized it. I don’t think it was the deciding factor, but it felt like a trust signal. The separate project portfolio PDF, on the other hand, did not seem to visibly matter to almost anyone. My impression is that the CV, title, keywords, and well-told interview stories matter more.
The gross HUF 1.5–2.0M/month range did not seem unrealistic with 6 years of IT PM/PO/Delivery experience, advanced English, and a PMP certification, but it was highly role-dependent. In the end, I landed a remote role at a non-Hungarian company at roughly the middle of my salary expectation range.
And maybe the most important point: job searching is very much a numbers game. It took 55 applications to get 1 offer, even with experience, English, PMP, and a relevant IT background. So if someone is getting ghosted a lot, it does not necessarily mean something is wrong with them. The market is just that rough right now. Hang in there!
(Limitations: this is one person’s individual sample, not representative market research. The Excel summary and this post were partly created with AI assistance, but the data and experiences are real. Happy to answer questions if there are any!)