Reading your advice, I think that explains why it took 450 applications. Nobody liked spray and pray, AI generated resumes.
In my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
If you do that, you'll quickly find that there is less than 10 companies (globally by considering remote) where you are the "perfect" match and you can also get in touch with a real person and get their attention. I've been doing that for quite sometime now and although you get interested leads, my experience has been that things end up falling through anyway as I estimate half weren't as well capitalized as they thought they were.
So the OP numbers game is a safer bet and one that everyone is playing right now. Not that I am playing this game but not everyone has the option to remain unemployed for this long.
Also, you may not be a good culture fit for what they're asking for, so if you need a job _right now_, it's hardly workable.
I think you're describing getting jobs via networking.
That's a different thing to applying to 'public' jobs ads, which often have an AI discard most applications, then they just throw 50% in file 13, filter another 50% with stupid questions, and so on, and that's even if the job is real.
The same as for the freelancer sites; there's a high chance your applications won't even be read, so it's really not worth spending quality time on them.
Your assumptions are objectively incorrect. That's the old way of applying to jobs and, while it may still work, it didn't work for me or anyone else I've talked to that has looked for a tech job in the last year.
If you have an "in" with somebody at the company you're applying to, then yes, that absolutely increases your chances of your resume at least being looked at by someone in the hiring chain. Barring that, though, cold calls are extremely unlikely to get you anywhere. As far as job applications go, AI-driven applicant tracking systems (ATSes) are what handle the majority of resume submissions now, and they absolutely does do not give a shit about thoughtful, artisanal resumes or job applications. More likely than not, it's a matter of what keywords an automated system seems in your resume that determines whether the company even bothers reaching out to you. And given that most companies are seeing 1-2 orders of magnitude more job applications now, it's incredibly unlikely a human is going to see your resume unless it passes the ATS filtering process.
Resume spray-and-pray is unlikely to get you good results, but that's not what the OP described. They used AI as a tool to automate parts of the resume preparation & submission process, & spent time on the parts they believed mattered.
As for pooh-poohing the 450 positions OP applied to, idk how many months they spent searching, but in terms of raw numbers that's pretty reasonable IMO. I submitted my resume to 150-175 companies over the course of 3 months before I found my job last year, and that was just before the tech job market started tanking harder -- those numbers seem low to me in today's market.
> Resume spray-and-pray is unlikely to get you good results, but that's not what the OP described.
Gotta disagree with you there, given the post says:
> My advice to other engineers on the job market:
> 1) Spray and pray.
I got one the old fashioned way in about six months and less than 50 applications. This was a few weeks ago.
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> In my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
This works for some folks, and not for others. Many of us have already exhausted our network, at which point it’s still spray and pray even if you are reaching out directly to folks.
It’s also very different for remote folks vs. folks in the hubs.
I suspect that is poor advice in general, because if everyone did it it wouldn't work. The ideal way of getting a job is to use personal networks, but as advice it has similar problems - one reason it works so well is because it is a very strong signal that the applicant has resources that a random strong applicant doesn't have.
If someone can do that then they should. But if someone needs advice or information on how to get hired they probably don't have access to the methods that get them the easy hires.
Fun fact for anyone approaching this from a systems thinking perspective: usernamed7's experience is the invisible hand of the market signalling that there are around 450 too many people applying for software positions. Some people are going to have to give up; there is no other way.
>one reason it works so well is because it is a very strong signal that the applicant has resources that a random strong applicant doesn't have.
When I was a university student, I accidentally established my own network just by getting involved in my department as a TA and undergrad researcher. My department would openly advertise those opportunities, and I was shocked at how few of my peers took them up on it. This involvement revealed opportunities that were really only disseminated within this TA/research community. While technically anyone could have applied to those internships and jobs, you'd be hard-pressed to even know about them if you weren't involved in this community to begin with. At that point, I "beat" the competition by playing somewhere where there's a lot less of it. It's not about being any "better" than the competition, but by strategically avoiding it.
This is how real networking looks like, and how someone (in my case, a lowly student) with little established experience and history can do it. The particulars can vary from one person and environment to another, but the trick is to start small and follow the unique opportunities presented to you.
From a systems thinking perspective there can be virtuous cycles or vicious cycles that self-reinforce. It could be that there are 449 ghost jobs being posted for every one real job. There are alternative explanations possible to why it took 450 applications to land one position. I disagree with your conclusion.
> In my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
This is a much better approach and while others say that it doesn't work for them or it worked for them, well that is the point.
It is meant to give you an unfair advantage to anyone else applying to the same role who is applying straight through the jobs page which there are too many applicants.
This is why employers fast-track applicant referrals rather than go through the typical jobs page as the latter is their last resort ONLY IF there are no internal hires, referrals or existing employees that can fill the role.
I like spray and pray, personally, at least on a theoretical level. I've never had to do it myself. But applying to hundreds or thousands of places with more or less the same (honest) resume and letting the employer filter you out seems way more economically efficient than eating the linearly scaling cost of customizing for each position heavily. There's likely all kinds of hidden information the employer has that you don't even after reviewing the position as written, and this puts the Hayekian ball in their court.
An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.
In this model, job seekers should simply post their resume and let the employers find it.
Spray and pray overwhelms the employers with low quality applicants, which leads to a lot of broad generalizations and generic qualifications being used to weed things down to something manageable.
For those who don’t want to put effort into applying, they should just be throwing their resume into a pool, imo.
I say this as someone who just posted his resume on a job site and waited until I got a call. It took about 8-12 months, but have been working at that job for almost 20 years now.
When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
You seem to be under the assumption that every job posting is going to result in at least one person being hired.
This is very, very far from the reality we're currently in.
> When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
I mean yeah that just demonstrates poor judgement. The hitrate from interview is enough higher than from application that "spray-and-pray" should no longer apply, the whole point is to save effort for jobs that are worth taking seriously and bothering to interview you is a strong signal of that.
> and maybe reached out to people or met current employees
Networking has always been the best way to get another job. Sadly, like most success in this world, it usually comes down to "who you know".
If someone had phrased it years ago to me like "if you just send a banal two sentence message to these random people in LinkedIn once a week you will avoid losing all your savings and worrying about going homeless in X weeks", I probably would have networked more. Network is exhausted now and that seems to be the end of my rope in this industry.
At the last company I worked for in the U.S., I was part of the hiring process and as a result of a combination of rampant cheating and AI spam - we had to completely revise our procedures and settled on the following rules:
1. Minimum of a BCompSc or adjacent field (using a dedicated academic verification service)
2. Brief 30 minute phone screener
3. On-site interview
The jobs were actually fully remote positions, so we would rent out a shared workspace where we would conduct the interview itself. We found that this cut down on the chaff by about 90%.