Ask HN: What job search strategies work for you?

Reaching out to everyone you have worked above, under, and beside is the best strategy (assuming you are not the kind of person people don't ever want to work with again).

To put it another way, with ten years experience a hiring professional might reasonably wonder why you are cold applying rather than working through a professional network. Or at least networking into the company org-chart before applying. [1]

And because any public job listing is going to be fire hosed with applications by people scraping, the hiring professional's job entails saying "no" on more than 99% of applications.

Therefore finding reasons to say "no" is mostly what they are going to do for very practical reasons. You might be a diamond in the rough, but being in the rough is almost certainly a good enough reason to not move your application forward in a saturated channel of applications.

Good luck.

[1]: If you identify someone within, reaching out and asking for an "informational interview" is a way of opening a conversation. An informational interview is where you can find out what a company is looking for in candidates. You need to be fly fishing, not chumming.

Adding on. Networking works. Niche job boards can work. Mass market job boards are a pretty bad experience for employer and employee; if you're in a pile of 100 applications, chances are good the decision manager is out of attention when they look at yours. You need something to get yours looked at; when you're new to the job market, that can be a cool side project; when you've been around for 10 years, it really should be your contact that put you in.

Contact everyone you've worked (or studied) with before that you'd at least consider working with again, and say something like "Hey Jabbs, I enjoyed working with you at [name of place], I'm looking for a new opportunity, are you/is your employer hiring or have you heard of any opportunities that might be a good fit for me? Thanks etc"

Looking for work is a slog, but send out at least ten of those a day, until you run out of people you can remember; and hopefully you'll get something moving.

Going forward, try to make sure to keep a list of people and contact information you work with that you'd like to work with again, on personal equipment/accounts, so that you can network more easily in the future.

As a hiring manager, I’d say rule #1 is “apply for the job” regardless of what else you do. If someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn for an informational interview or whatever and they’re not in my ATS, I don’t take the call. I cannot apply for you or move you through the process without an application.

Like I said, hiring managers are incentivized to say “no” but as I did not say clearly, informational interviews are a networking strategy, not a backdoor to job interviews.

They are a way of meeting someone on the inside.

ATS?

Applicant Tracking System

Hey, I wanted to thank you for this advice! A recruiter from my dream company reached out to me on LinkedIn yesterday about an opportunity. Before responding, I remembered this specific comment and took the following steps:

   1.  Applied for the job within 30 minutes of the recruiter reaching out.
   2.  Replied to the recruiter, requesting a quick phone call the next day.

This approach worked beautifully! I just got off the call, and it looks like I’ll likely be doing a technical interview early next week