I am sorry to say, the job market right now is worse than at any time previously in living memory. It is a shit show and everyone knows it. In my opinion you s

I am sorry to say, the job market right now is worse than at any time previously in living memory. It is a shit show and everyone knows it. In my opinion you should tailor your resume to the job minimizing irrelevant experience that is clutter. Also do not bother applying to positions that you can't verify actually exist, and spend extra effort on positions you can properly verify. The number of unenforced fraudulent/fake job postings today is moronic, and requires some knowledge of Open Source Intelligence practices absent use of internal connections through the career grapevine. The last study/report on this showed for every actual position, there exists something like 7-10 fake ones. Its third-party interference acting to sabotage labor relations. This is why conversion rates for callbacks and resumes have been non-existent. Some of the major red flags I look out for as indicators of credibility might look like this, each are weighted differently (some with less, some with more importance): The mailing addresses listed in the Secretary of State filing paperwork/lookup is a PMB or UPS Store address or mailing service for the agent of service. History of failure to file required SOS informational returns on time based on expiration date which is public information. No physical/public office locations. Failure in correspondence to follow CAN-SPAM FTC guideline requirements. Inconsistent information required by law to be on their website (for business). This includes absence of functional contact us information or means for sales inquiries, DNS contact information that is out of date and other historic DNS information that shows a trend of inconsistency or deceptive behavior. Metadata analysis of resources indicate they are hosted outside the region the job is posted for a non-global company. Inconsistent google maps and streetview presence. Arbitrary requirements to agree to pernicious or ambiguous legal agreements as a pre-condition before application submission. Any business that does this will be out of business in a short period of time, as they will be unable to replace talent, and will be unable to perceive any feedback signals related to the filter they created. Sustainable businesses do not pigeonhole their talent ingress. Companies who rotate the same job postings every few months (make a note and build a list, most platforms don't remove paying customers even if they are fraudulent; PatternedAI being one notable example on LinkedIn). Postings that fail to disclose up front that the advertised position is being advertised by a headhunter, or intermediary, or source of the posting. Any deceptive behavior is a major red flag. In addition to formalizing this type of vetting process, you can automate many of these types of lookups as a fixed time cost and assign a credibility score. Statistical/Bayes analysis of posting words may sometimes inform somewhat on GPT-generated related posts which are more likely to indicate fraud by volume for the most common word distributions. These positions should receive only the minimal attention/effort if any; time is your constraint/loss function. Additionally, it is almost a necessity to set up an email, web server, and domain where application contact information provided as part of your CV is tailored to a unique mailbox and other fixed resources that differ for each application, on a server you control and that you have access to the access logs. This will allow you to link bad actors with their associated resources similar to how spamhaus does their work to reduce spam, and identify malicious ip blocks, and it can be used to monitor engagement, and other aspects that you would ordinarily not have available. Some knowledge of automated monitoring and alerting is necessary for this. Sustainable businesses have a semi-static or slow changing web presence. You can mine additional ideas for this by examining discussions and whitepapers from the industry working group for M3AAWG.org. Reputation scores, and deviance from good practice are commonly used as mitigations. Sending a physical letter of introduction and CV to contacts can be a useful way of reaching out, and standing out as well. I've heard some data brokers offer subscription services that include contact info and org charts. Unfortunately, absent actual legal enforcement (which isn't happening at all), many anti-spam practices are the next best thing to limit and suppress these fake job postings. It is really too bad there isn't a platform that will do this for you. All existing platforms monetize to the job seekers expense heaping costs in favor of the employer (to suppress wages through interference).