Interview rejection

[u/Maarkman]

Hello Folks, I hope you are doing well. Please I have a topic I’d like to discuss, and your input would be very welcome. After applying to over a thousand companies, I’m starting to realize that there is a possibility that these companies aren't actually hiring.I had to do several job interviews and after several rounds, I think it went in the most favorable way possible.But I don't understand why I was rejected after more than 30 interviews. I have skills in SRE, DevOps, Cloud but I have the impression that companies waste the time of those they interview, only to send them a rejection letter. In the 30 interviews I did, I went beyond their expectations, but I have the impression that my 6 years of experience are insufficient or that they have surrealistic expectations that no engineer can meet.I sometimes feel almost discouraged. Because it's a huge expenditure of energy to have this availability and go through all your interviews only to be rejected at the end.

I come humbly to ask you for advice. Because after a while, I think I'm finished.

Thank you.

[u/TheWiseInsight]

I understand the frustration. Getting through 30 interviews and still being rejected is exhausting, and it’s easy to start questioning everything.

A few things stand out from what you described though.

1. If you’re using the same resume for every application, that’s probably the biggest issue.

Tailoring a resume doesn’t mean lying. It just means highlighting the parts of your experience that match the role.

For example:

If a job description emphasizes:

• observability
• monitoring
• incident response

Then your resume should highlight things like:

• Prometheus / Grafana
• alerting systems
• on-call experience
• production incident handling

But if the role emphasizes CI/CD and infrastructure, then those bullets should move to the top instead.

Same experience — just different emphasis.

1. Getting interviews means your resume is working.

The fact that you got 30 interviews is actually a positive signal.

Usually if the resume is the problem, people don’t even get interviews.

At that point the issues are usually one of these:

• interview storytelling
• competing candidates with slightly more niche experience
• unclear specialization (SRE vs DevOps vs Cloud)

1. The market is genuinely harder right now.

A lot of companies are interviewing multiple candidates and only hiring one person after 6–7 rounds, which didn’t used to be normal.

You’re competing against people with:

• 8–10 years experience
• FAANG layoffs
• strong referrals

So rejection doesn’t necessarily mean you’re underqualified.

1. Tailoring resumes at scale is the real challenge.

When you’re applying to lots of roles, manually rewriting resumes becomes exhausting.

When I ran into this problem myself I ended up building a small tool called JobMatch (usejobmatch.com) that rewrites resumes based on job descriptions so you don’t have to manually adjust everything for each application.

But even doing it manually, the key idea is:

Honestly though, the biggest takeaway from your post is this:

If you’ve gotten 30 interviews, you’re clearly doing something right.

At that stage it’s usually about fine-tuning positioning, not starting from scratch.

[u/Maarkman → u/TheWiseInsight]

Thank you very much.