As the title says, I have applied to over 450 positions. Most companies did not even send me a rejection. Ghost jobs are a thing, so are fake roles to get you to signup/join some rando job board.
I interviewed for a director of engineering role, and all interviews went well, but they ghosted me at the end.
I did several take homes and all were accepted, but companies dragged their feet on next steps.
I did reject a few kinds of roles: ones that used AI for interviewing me, ones that had me do a coding challenge as the first step, and jobs that had "no working hours" and expected you to be "on" 24/7.
Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?" and would say things like "don't use AI! we want your true self" or would go so far as to try to get you to agree to their AI interview policy. As If.
I eventually did get hired as a software architect. the company that hired me was very professional, respectful, forward thinking (i used windsurf during the interview) and did not play games with me. They had a 4-step interview process, and asked a lot of good questions. One of the best interview processes of my career.
My advice to other engineers on the job market:
1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless.
2) Always be willing to walk. Protect your time. Don't waste your time on lengthy job applications that take too long to complete. Some hiring managers will gladly waste your time. (one job application explicitly wanted you to spend 20 minutes filling out theirs)
3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2.
4) You can probably do a lot of different roles, "prompt engineer" is a real job title companies are hiring for, for example.
5) Work a couple of different job platforms. For example I used linkedin, dice, ziprecruiter, weworkremotely, and rubyonremote and a few others.
6) Use AI to generate your resume, but feed it all the context of your work history (don't misrepresent your skills)
7) Use AI to fill out asinine job application questions, but if they ask you thoughtful questions answer those yourself. I got the interview for director of engineering because i answered authentically to thoughtful questions.
8) Pace yourself. Spend a few hours a day at it then come back in a day or two and go again.
9) Work on a side project or learn a new lang/framework in parallel.
10) Interviewing is like dating, everyone is looking for something different, and some don't really know what they want. Not a you problem.
11) If they use workday for their job applications, bounce. It's the worst.
12) It takes time as roles become available. The job you end up getting might not open until 2 months from now. see #1.In my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
So the OP numbers game is a safer bet and one that everyone is playing right now. Not that I am playing this game but not everyone has the option to remain unemployed for this long.
That's a different thing to applying to 'public' jobs ads, which often have an AI discard most applications, then they just throw 50% in file 13, filter another 50% with stupid questions, and so on, and that's even if the job is real.
The same as for the freelancer sites; there's a high chance your applications won't even be read, so it's really not worth spending quality time on them.
If you have an "in" with somebody at the company you're applying to, then yes, that absolutely increases your chances of your resume at least being looked at by someone in the hiring chain. Barring that, though, cold calls are extremely unlikely to get you anywhere. As far as job applications go, AI-driven applicant tracking systems (ATSes) are what handle the majority of resume submissions now, and they absolutely does do not give a shit about thoughtful, artisanal resumes or job applications. More likely than not, it's a matter of what keywords an automated system seems in your resume that determines whether the company even bothers reaching out to you. And given that most companies are seeing 1-2 orders of magnitude more job applications now, it's incredibly unlikely a human is going to see your resume unless it passes the ATS filtering process.
Resume spray-and-pray is unlikely to get you good results, but that's not what the OP described. They used AI as a tool to automate parts of the resume preparation & submission process, & spent time on the parts they believed mattered.
As for pooh-poohing the 450 positions OP applied to, idk how many months they spent searching, but in terms of raw numbers that's pretty reasonable IMO. I submitted my resume to 150-175 companies over the course of 3 months before I found my job last year, and that was just before the tech job market started tanking harder -- those numbers seem low to me in today's market.
The point of the comments here is that things ARE different today.
I would never have imagined that "AI resume" would be a good idea, but ...
Looking at the posts on HN from the hiring side, total cheats are making it past the screening regularly. There's a lot of problems in the hiring process right now, and they aren't just from the economic downturn.
People who need jobs (or want different jobs) have to play the game with the current rules, not wait around for the rules to change (again).
This works for some folks, and not for others. Many of us have already exhausted our network, at which point it’s still spray and pray even if you are reaching out directly to folks.
It’s also very different for remote folks vs. folks in the hubs.
If someone can do that then they should. But if someone needs advice or information on how to get hired they probably don't have access to the methods that get them the easy hires.
Fun fact for anyone approaching this from a systems thinking perspective: usernamed7's experience is the invisible hand of the market signalling that there are around 450 too many people applying for software positions. Some people are going to have to give up; there is no other way.
Of course, if you don't have a network, that's probably not a great place to be in absent credentials that make you stand out.
This is a much better approach and while others say that it doesn't work for them or it worked for them, well that is the point.
It is meant to give you an unfair advantage to anyone else applying to the same role who is applying straight through the jobs page which there are too many applicants.
This is why employers fast-track applicant referrals rather than go through the typical jobs page as the latter is their last resort ONLY IF there are no internal hires, referrals or existing employees that can fill the role.
If you can, getting a job through personal connections and networking has always yielded the best results for both parties in my experience. In 20 years, only my first graduate job didn’t come this way.
I also saw no mention of speaking to an actual recruiter/headhunter, which is the only way other than the aforementioned personal intros and networking that I/we have hired anyone with 15 years of experience that I can remember.
I’m not surprised it took 450 attempts.
When I was a university student, I accidentally established my own network just by getting involved in my department as a TA and undergrad researcher. My department would openly advertise those opportunities, and I was shocked at how few of my peers took them up on it. This involvement revealed opportunities that were really only disseminated within this TA/research community. While technically anyone could have applied to those internships and jobs, you'd be hard-pressed to even know about them if you weren't involved in this community to begin with. At that point, I "beat" the competition by playing somewhere where there's a lot less of it. It's not about being any "better" than the competition, but by strategically avoiding it.
This is how real networking looks like, and how someone (in my case, a lowly student) with little established experience and history can do it. The particulars can vary from one person and environment to another, but the trick is to start small and follow the unique opportunities presented to you.
But nobody in my network of ~100 is in either situation. They are either also jobless, or their company is not hiring or, what they are hiring for is not applicable to me (such as wrong role/country/TZ/stack).
What if you recently changed specialization, or moved city or even country? What if it's been a few years since you were in actual employment, you were working on startups, or had a career break or whatever. What if you have way more than 15 years experience. And so many other situations, which might result in your network being limited or not that good for finding the kind of work you want.
The point is, if you apply to advertised jobs, it's a numbers game.
An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.
As a hiring manager now, I hate, hate, hate the spray and pray applicants. Wastes a vast amount of my time weeding them out. And I'm probably rejecting actually good candidates now, as I just immediately reject anyone who doesn't seem to have thought even a little about the position they're applying for.
Spray and pray overwhelms the employers with low quality applicants, which leads to a lot of broad generalizations and generic qualifications being used to weed things down to something manageable.
For those who don’t want to put effort into applying, they should just be throwing their resume into a pool, imo.
I say this as someone who just posted his resume on a job site and waited until I got a call. It took about 8-12 months, but have been working at that job for almost 20 years now.
When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
This is very, very far from the reality we're currently in.
I mean yeah that just demonstrates poor judgement. The hitrate from interview is enough higher than from application that "spray-and-pray" should no longer apply, the whole point is to save effort for jobs that are worth taking seriously and bothering to interview you is a strong signal of that.
1. Minimum of a BCompSc or adjacent field (using a dedicated academic verification service)
2. Brief 30 minute phone screener
3. On-site interview
The jobs were actually fully remote positions, so we would rent out a shared workspace where we would conduct the interview itself. We found that this cut down on the chaff by about 90%.
Perhaps the future will be people of various talents and ability levels first applying to various resume pools, which job offerers then use as a first pass filter for high quality candidates. Then down the line these same candidates, if they do apply for a new job directly, might list "I belong to So-and-so Pool" as a line item to separate themselves from the pack even among job offerers who don't actually dip into that pool. Not entirely unlike working at FAANG today, to open up interesting new positions tomorrow.