You should probably ask yourself why you're avoiding applying for these jobs you mentioned. Simple. I'm tired of spending an hour on a cover letter, tailoring

You should probably ask yourself why you're avoiding applying for these jobs you mentioned. Simple. I'm tired of spending an hour on a cover letter, tailoring my resume, looking up contacts at the company, etc. only for all my work to be piped directly to /dev/null. When I first lost my job, I sent out a bunch of resumes to places hiring for jobs I wanted to do. A .Net developer here, a Java developer there. I never heard back from anything I wanted. I gave up and applied for a job similar to my last one, and got an offer. They ended up not getting the contract, and I was left with the bill for calling their number across the country for the technical interview, and the bill for a scanner/printer (didn't have one then) that I needed to sign and send back the offer. I went through a series of phone interviews about a month ago for a junior QA position. After three weeks and three phone interviews with HR, a technical interviewer, and a manager, I got a message from noreply@company.com with a PFO form letter. I still send resumes to things, but I generally limit that to jobs explicitly marked "entry level" that rarely come in. If you know anyone hiring in Canada (I'm living 500km from "home" right now, so I don't much care where in Canada) for an entry level position, let me know. I'll work my ass off to get up to speed, I'll work long hours, whatever it takes.