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Unfortunately, this won’t solve most of the problem with looking for a job - especially for remote jobs. If you are applying blindly to an ATS, you have alread

Unfortunately, this won’t solve most of the problem with looking for a job - especially for remote jobs. If you are applying blindly to an ATS, you have already lost. Every remote job literally gets hundreds of applications and if your skill is generic - ie “full stack developer” or even “I can do leetCode and got into BigTech” - it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.

pronouncedjerry 2y ago
So would the better approach be to target points of contact on LinkedIn and reach out?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  That by itself doesn’t solve the problem. If you reach out to me blindly and your skill set doesn’t stand out from every other candidate, if I reply at all, I’m just going to redirect you to HR unless I already know you. I don’t care if you said you were on the Amazon EC2 service team. I do care if you led a major feature on the EC2 service team and you can point to an YouTube video or a public blog post on AWS’s website explaining the feature. I was looking for a job in both 2023 and last year. Both times my plan B was ordinary C#, Node or Python enterprise CRUD jobs where the company wanted AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience on my resume (I’ve worked a lot longer) and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS’s consulting department (Professional Services). I blindly submitted my resume to ATS’s far and wide including LinkedIn. Probably around 100 resumes. I heard crickets. I never usually do this. But I didn’t have a job so why not? On the other hand in three weeks… I reached out to my network and that led to 2 full time offers and 1 short term contract. I did a targeted outreach to two companies that had a “nice to have” experience implementing a popular open source official “AWS Solution” in its niche. Not only did I have experience with it, I was the third highest contributor at the time. This led to two interviews and one offer. I accepted an offer within three weeks. Last year when I was looking, it was about the same. But this time, I responded to an internal recruiter that reached out to me from the company I work for now. I got an offer again within three weeks.
juneyi 2y ago
This is only true if you have that kind of attitude. As a bootcamp dev, with barely 3 yoe, I'm hitting around 10% response rate for recruiter screening (remote/hybrid positions). I put a boatload of hours honing and perfecting my resume + a few other strategies. I think there's always a way to stand out as long as they don't follow advice/opinions from anonymous forums like HN or reddit. Lots of bad noise out on the internet.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Well, I have spreadsheets of my job hunts since 2012 - 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2023 and 2024. The job I got in 2020 just fell in my lap. 2008 was the last time I had to randomly apply for jobs because I stayed at my second job for over 9 years and had no network. The only time I randomly applied for jobs was last year and the year before even though I had no expectations of it working. My response rate from using local external recruiters that I had built a relationship with (before 2020) has been 100%. I had three rejections between 2012-2020. Post 2022, my response rate through recruiters, my network and targeted outreach, has still been 100%. My success rate has been 5/7 for getting an offer - around 70%.
  - skulk 2y ago
    how does one build a relationship with a recruiter? I stopped talking to them after I got a job, should I be poking them randomly asking how their kids are doing?
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      This was between 1996-2018 when I was working locally in Atlanta. Back when I first started working, often the recruiter would want you to meet in the office and a few would meet you at the job site for the interview. As I moved up in my career, around 2014, they would actually meet me for lunch. In 2016, I started working with one of the same recruiters when I was in a hiring position to staff. By then, when new to company managers, directors, CxOs (small companies) were looking for their first couple of hires and spoke to recruiters they knew, I became top of mind. That was kind of my thing between 2012-2018. When people say that remote work hurts early career people, this is one of the issues. People who have been in the industry for awhile can still lean on a network we built when people were working in the office and in the same city. I have a few new people in my network since working remotely in 2020. But that wouldn’t even be the case if I hadn’t done a lot of business travel meeting coworkers between Covid lifting and late 2023.

pronouncedjerry 2y ago

So would the better approach be to target points of contact on LinkedIn and reach out?

scarface_74 2y ago
That by itself doesn’t solve the problem. If you reach out to me blindly and your skill set doesn’t stand out from every other candidate, if I reply at all, I’m just going to redirect you to HR unless I already know you. I don’t care if you said you were on the Amazon EC2 service team. I do care if you led a major feature on the EC2 service team and you can point to an YouTube video or a public blog post on AWS’s website explaining the feature. I was looking for a job in both 2023 and last year. Both times my plan B was ordinary C#, Node or Python enterprise CRUD jobs where the company wanted AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience on my resume (I’ve worked a lot longer) and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS’s consulting department (Professional Services). I blindly submitted my resume to ATS’s far and wide including LinkedIn. Probably around 100 resumes. I heard crickets. I never usually do this. But I didn’t have a job so why not? On the other hand in three weeks… I reached out to my network and that led to 2 full time offers and 1 short term contract. I did a targeted outreach to two companies that had a “nice to have” experience implementing a popular open source official “AWS Solution” in its niche. Not only did I have experience with it, I was the third highest contributor at the time. This led to two interviews and one offer. I accepted an offer within three weeks. Last year when I was looking, it was about the same. But this time, I responded to an internal recruiter that reached out to me from the company I work for now. I got an offer again within three weeks.

juneyi 2y ago

This is only true if you have that kind of attitude. As a bootcamp dev, with barely 3 yoe, I'm hitting around 10% response rate for recruiter screening (remote/hybrid positions). I put a boatload of hours honing and perfecting my resume + a few other strategies. I think there's always a way to stand out as long as they don't follow advice/opinions from anonymous forums like HN or reddit. Lots of bad noise out on the internet.

scarface_74 2y ago
Well, I have spreadsheets of my job hunts since 2012 - 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2023 and 2024. The job I got in 2020 just fell in my lap. 2008 was the last time I had to randomly apply for jobs because I stayed at my second job for over 9 years and had no network. The only time I randomly applied for jobs was last year and the year before even though I had no expectations of it working. My response rate from using local external recruiters that I had built a relationship with (before 2020) has been 100%. I had three rejections between 2012-2020. Post 2022, my response rate through recruiters, my network and targeted outreach, has still been 100%. My success rate has been 5/7 for getting an offer - around 70%.
- skulk 2y ago
  how does one build a relationship with a recruiter? I stopped talking to them after I got a job, should I be poking them randomly asking how their kids are doing?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    This was between 1996-2018 when I was working locally in Atlanta. Back when I first started working, often the recruiter would want you to meet in the office and a few would meet you at the job site for the interview. As I moved up in my career, around 2014, they would actually meet me for lunch. In 2016, I started working with one of the same recruiters when I was in a hiring position to staff. By then, when new to company managers, directors, CxOs (small companies) were looking for their first couple of hires and spoke to recruiters they knew, I became top of mind. That was kind of my thing between 2012-2018. When people say that remote work hurts early career people, this is one of the issues. People who have been in the industry for awhile can still lean on a network we built when people were working in the office and in the same city. I have a few new people in my network since working remotely in 2020. But that wouldn’t even be the case if I hadn’t done a lot of business travel meeting coworkers between Covid lifting and late 2023.