I’ve always found success leveraging past coworkers when finding work: basically if I know an old colleague who is now at a cool company I reach out to them for

I’ve always found success leveraging past coworkers when finding work: basically if I know an old colleague who is now at a cool company I reach out to them for a referral before applying such that I can get to the top of the list of candidates and often seek to talk to the hiring manager directly to see what they really need from this role, what pain points they’re looking to fix in the next few months.