Firstly, get someone to review your resume. You should update your resume at least once a month. At two years of experience should yield good listings for resum

Firstly, get someone to review your resume. You should update your resume at least once a month. At two years of experience should yield good listings for resume. You can often find "resume-review" channels in Slack/Chatrooms associated with programming meetup groups. At 2 years, you likely have a pretty bad/small professional network. If you want to leverage your network, reach out to people you worked with in university. Reach out to staff and faculty of the program that you had a good relationship with. I found that the system administrator had the most and most interesting connections. Usually I see new engineers not applying to enough companies. Set a quota of applications to unique companies per week. I found 25 was good, but you may have a different tolerance. "I applied to google 20 times this week" DOES NOT COUNT as 20 applications, it counts as 1. Spend the first half of the week applying to positions that are interesting, and the second half catching up to your quota with whatever you are qualified for. Remember that being "qualified" does not require 100% skills coverage. At the beginning of your career (and a university degree), you likely only need shallow exposure to ~ 50-75% of the listed skills / technologies. The longer you are in industry, the less overlap is required to land a job. (at 8 years I talked my way onto a job by starting my cover letter with 'I don't have any current overlap, but this is what I know and why I think what your doing is cool') When you apply in this manner, it can be much harder to find enough companies to apply to. If you are not geographically bound, I strongly suggest watching conference talks that cover technology you are interested in. For every interesting speaker, record who employs them. Check them and similar companies to increase your search area. Be aware, but less concerned about NDAs. As long as you don't share code, you are unlikely to violate them. Also if they couldn't afford to pay you then they likely cannot hire lawyer. Practice white-boarding with people at meetups. Come with problems, and be ready to talk your way through solutions. I have never used leetcode to asses a candidate, and don't see it as helpful. Light-Green github is a much stronger indicator of a good employee than any puzzle competition. Pick an interesting side project. If you have the resources to volunteer for a non-profit this can help keep you out of a sea without guidance/requirements. A good side project can help you control an interview. Add a section to your resume for side projects. You don't need to treat side projects as a full time commitments. These should be time-boxed to a certain number of hours a week. Finally, always to postmortems. As long as you receive a first phone screen, the application qualifies for a postmortem. You should be changing your strategy, resume, cover-letter, and preparedness after every interview.