How Many People Apply to a LinkedIn Job? 35 Posts Counted

The short answer: on 3 November 2026 we counted the candidates on 35 LinkedIn job posts in Kuwait, from 22 employers. The typical post had 315 candidates. More than half had passed 300, and the posts were still getting about 24 new candidates a day.

Here is what we found, what it means for the people who read the CVs, and exactly how we counted.

The numbers

The middle half of the posts had between 144 and 446 candidates. The largest, an AI engineer role, had more than 1,350.

Easy Apply gets more candidates

LinkedIn shows two kinds of number. On Easy Apply posts it counts applicants: people who sent their profile or CV through LinkedIn. On posts that send people to the employer’s own site it counts the people who clicked apply, and not all of them finish the application there.

• 14 Easy Apply posts: a median of 395 applicants.
• 21 posts that apply on the employer’s site: a median of 182 clicks on Apply.

A one-click application brings in more people, and more CVs for someone to read.

Who applies

LinkedIn also shows the seniority of the people who applied. Across the tech and data posts, 45% were entry level and 37% senior. On the other posts it was the other way round: 47% senior and 27% entry level.

So a typical tech post in our count had well over a hundred early-career candidates, and early-career CVs often look alike on paper: a degree, a course or two, a project, a list of tools.

What this means for the people reading the CVs

With 315 candidates on one post, the CV decides who gets a call. And the CV doesn’t always tell you who to call: a listed skill can turn out thin ten minutes into the conversation, and a plain CV can hide someone who really knows the job. That is truer still when many of the CVs come from people early in their careers.

Calling everyone isn’t realistic either. A 20-minute first call with each of 315 candidates is about 105 hours, before any scheduling. So most teams call a handful and hire from those, and the strongest candidate may be one nobody spoke to.

The fix most teams reach for is to make the first round the same for everyone who meets the basics, and shorter. We wrote up how to screen candidates without phone calls, step by step.

How Talkume helps with the first round

With Talkume for companies you send one link per job. Sara, our AI interviewer, gives every candidate a 5-minute interview by voice or video call, with questions from your job description and their CV, technical ones included. You review a report for each candidate and jump straight to the answers that matter. Your team still makes every decision.

Every new company account starts with 3 free interviews.

How we counted

• On 3 November 2026 we ran six LinkedIn job searches for tech and data roles: data analyst, data engineer, data scientist, BI developer, software engineer and backend developer. All the results were in Kuwait.
• We opened every post that came up and wrote down the numbers it showed that day: the candidates, the new candidates in the past day, and the seniority mix. 35 posts from 22 employers had numbers; one post showed none and is left out.
• The searches also brought up roles outside tech and data, such as marketing, planning and HR. We kept them and show them separately.
• The posts were of different ages, some a few days old and some a few weeks, so the totals aren’t for a fixed period. The seniority mix is LinkedIn’s own label for each applicant.
• We don’t name any employer. This is one day in one country: a snapshot, not a survey.

Questions people ask