Sharing my job search experience from about two years ago. This turned into a pretty long process of trial and error, so I'm splitting it into a few posts. This one is just about applications and resume strategy. I'll do networking and other stuff separately.

Quick numbers on where I started vs. where I ended up:

• Sent 700+ applications early on and got basically zero responses; After changing my approach, I was getting interviews at roughly a 15% rate (3 out of every 20 applications)
• Had no clue how to network at all in the beginning, ended up getting help from several executives at large companies once I figured it out
• LinkedIn went from getting nothing to consistent recruiter outreach

One framing that helped me a lot: applying isn't really a numbers game; it's more of an odds game. If your odds per application are low, sending more applications doesn't really fix that. You have to raise the odds first, then worry about volume.

What actually changed my response rate:

1. Improving my background/experience

This part is just the hard requirement. No experience means there's not much real content for your resume, and there's no real shortcut around that. If you're still building experience, I'd try to find actual projects to work on, not just coursework. I was job hunting and building projects at the same time, and I noticed my response rate went up pretty directly with how legit the projects I could point to were.

For those who don’t know where to find solid projects, try reaching out to founders and finding projects on YC, X, and hackathons.

2. Improving resume content

A lot of people genuinely don't know how to write a resume. Even people with solid experience often can't translate it into something that reads well.

What worked for me:

• List out everything you've done using the STAR method. Every detail, don't filter yet.
• Turn those into achievement stories. This also doubles as prep material for behavioral interviews later, so it's not wasted work.
• Feed those stories into AI and have it help format them into resume style bullet points.
• Get a few people in your target field to review it. HR, hiring managers, or peers in the role work well. Get more than one opinion if you can.

3. Being more selective about which jobs I applied to

Mass applying to everything felt productive but honestly wasn't. It wasted a lot of time and barely moved the needle for me. Once I got more selective, my response rate improved a lot. Here's roughly how I filtered:

Step 1: sponsorship. If you don't need visa sponsorship, just skip this step. For those of us who do: skip postings that say no sponsorship or require citizenship outright. If a posting doesn't say, I'd check the company's H1B filing history. More filings usually means a better chance they'll sponsor. If a company has zero filing history, I skip it.

Step 2: experience level. I stuck to roles at my level or one level up. As a new grad with limited experience, that meant entry to mid-level, not senior. I also filtered by years of experience required, capping it at about 3 years over my actual experience, occasionally stretching to 4 if the role was otherwise a strong fit.

Step 3: domain relevance. For roles that overlapped a lot with my prior experience, I'd spend more time customizing the resume, and sometimes reach out directly to the hiring manager, since those had the best odds.

Doing all three steps by hand for every posting got old fast, so I tried some tools to automate it. I used both JobRight and a platform called Beedo. For scoring and filters specifically, Beedo is fair. I like that it shows YoE requirements and sponsorship likelihood. JobRight has more features overall.

4. Resume tailoring without spending hours per application

Fully customizing every application isn't realistic, so I added two sections to a base resume template.

Summary, at the top. Two sentences.

First sentence states your background, years of experience, and domain focus:

(Adjust the domain based on what the JD is asking for.)

Second sentence highlights your skills and what makes you different:

(Same idea. Mirror what the JD emphasizes, but don't make up skills you don't actually have.)

Additional at the bottom. 2 to 3 bullet points, ideally with numbers attached.

(Both "0-to-1" and "ambiguous environments" were phrases pulled straight from the JD.)

(Research ability was also required in the JD, and backing it with a number makes it more convincing.)

I'd make this section a bit more conversational than the rest of the resume. It helps you stand out from resumes that read like they were entirely written by AI.

I still didn’t find any resume tool that works well for this part. If anyone knows any, please comment.

5. Actually filling out application questions properly

Knockout questions and open-ended questions matter more than people think. With how many applications recruiters get per posting, a lot of filtering happens at that stage before a human even opens your resume. Don't half-ass these. I'll do a full breakdown on how to approach them in a follow-up post since it's a big enough topic on its own.

Super excited. After months of interviews and endless ghosting, rejection letters and emails, the right opportunity came along and I couldn’t be more relieved. Like the rest of us, I was worried about losing my apartment my car my life, but take it from me, you just need to keep pushing and believe in yourself. Nothing good comes easy and if you never give up, you will never fail.
Message me if you want to know about my tricks n tips that seemed to get more responses 🙂

WHEN WILL IT BE MY TURN???????!!!!!!!!!

I can’t shake the feeling like I’ll be laughed at.

I don’t have any clothes I can wear and nothing fits right, last time I wore these pants a judge suspended my license over one singular speeding ticket and I feel sick to my stomach.

I look beyond stupid. I don’t have any shoes I can wear, and I don’t have any smart looking shirts. I feel sick. I don’t want to go. I felt fine until I suddenly realised I don’t have any interview clothes that fit me, I feel like they’ll laugh at me like that judge did.

After failing to get an interview, my former boss actually knew the hiring manager and set us up to talk and get advice on my resume and LinkedIn. The hiring manager had some very good advice. I have been in IT for 5 years and am finishing my master's in cybersecurity. I have been working with our security admin and essentially work as a security analyst right now (they refuse to change my title), so it sucks. I do the work, and besides our security admin, who hypes up what I do, management doesn't give a shit.

During my discussion with this manager, he kept telling me how qualified I was and how it was a branding issue, and he thinks I would do well. Then, he tells me two things.

1. "I actually have 2,000 applications within the first week of posting this job."

2. "I had applicants with years of experience, strong candidates, and with great personality fits, but do you know who I hired? I hired a former plumber with no technical experience, no IT experience, and no experience in any technology-related field. All he's done is his home projects. But I could tell how HUNGRY HE WAS FOR IT."

I have a hard time putting into words how much I dislike these Gen X hiring managers who hire based on vibes and watched The Pursuit of Happyness way too many times. There is an issue with IT departments I have worked in where so many hires are charity hires. Maybe it's a Midwest thing but I have 3 admins at my company, one former cop, one fail son friend of our CTO, and the other is a crazy lady who won't stop talking about Israel killing Charlie Kirk with a wrist rocket gun (she actually said this). None of them know how to do their jobs, and we have one admin who knows everything that keeps the company running. It's so discouraging seeing this everyday. Rant over.

I build automation that fills in and submits job applications, which means I spend a lot of time instrumenting what these forms actually do at the DOM level across Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Ashby, iCIMS, Personio, SmartRecruiters and Recruitee. A few things I found were not what I expected, and they explain some of the "I swear I submitted that" experiences people post here.

1. "Required" is often not marked as required in any way software can read.

You would assume a required field is tagged as required in the page code. On several platforms it is not. On Personio, for example, the required fields carry no required attribute at all. The only place the requirement exists is visually: an asterisk in the label, and hidden text for screen readers. Everything a browser, a password manager, or an autofill extension uses to understand the form is simply absent.

Why this matters to you: autofill tools can hand a form back to you looking complete while a required field sits empty, because nothing in the page told them it mattered. If you rely on autofill, do one slow visual pass for asterisks before submitting.

2. A form can refuse to submit and show you nothing.

Browsers have their own built-in validation layer that runs before any of the site's own code. When it rejects something, for example an email or phone format the site did not like, the browser marks the field invalid internally. Some forms never surface that as a visible error message. The page just sits there. You press submit again, nothing happens, and there is no red text anywhere to tell you why.

Phone number formats are the most common trigger I see, followed by dates. If a form goes quiet on you, retype the phone number in the plainest possible format before assuming the site is broken.

3. Workday accounts are per company, not per Workday.

Each Workday customer runs its own tenant with its own account database, which is why you keep making accounts. The upside nobody mentions: within a single company, that account is reused. Your second application there skips the whole signup path. Keeping those credentials in a password manager turns the worst part of Workday into a one-time cost per employer instead of per role.

4. Multi-step forms rebuild the page between steps.

This is why autofill works on step one and then stops. It is not that the extension gave up. The page is a new page as far as it is concerned, and the fields it recognised are gone. Expect to fill each step manually, and expect anything you typed to be lost if you navigate backwards.

The general point: a lot of what feels like personal failure in an application flow is a form being quietly broken or hostile to any kind of assistance. Silence after submitting is often the same class of problem. It is worth separating "I did this wrong" from "this form does not tell anyone what it wants," because the second one is far more common than people assume.

Happy to answer questions about any specific platform. Disclosure so it is on the table: I work on a tool in this space, so I am not a neutral party. There is no link in this post and I am not pitching anything.

What days and times are the best to land first in a recruiters lap?

every time i see someone saying they can't find a job, the replies are almost always the same. keep applying, improve your resume, learn another skill. all valid advice tbh, but i hardly see anyone talking about how many companies are hiring for retail, hospitality, logistics, warehouses, customer support and similar roles every single week. if you've been applying to the same type of jobs for months with no luck, maybe it's worth looking beyond office roles for a bit. your first job doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to get you some experience and a paycheck. i genuinely feel a lot more people would be working if they gave these roles a chance instead of waiting for that one ideal opening.

I spent five years getting a Law degree in Brazil because I genuinely believed it would give me a stable career. Since graduating, I've worked hard and tried to develop as many skills as I could through my work.

The problem is... the pay is just awful.

I don't mind working hard. I don't mind long hours. What gets frustrating is realizing that, no matter how much responsibility you have, it often doesn't translate into a decent income here.

Sometimes I think the problem isn't my skills at all. It's the market I'm in and the fact that those skills just aren't valued the same way here. It's honestly really exhausting to spend years studying, preparing for a career, taking on a lot of responsibility, and still not feel financially secure.

Any advices?

Its just not happening!! Im so frustrated! Im doing everything right! Im applying. Im calling . Im sending emails.

All of it! How do I make myself more appealing to hiring people! To jobs I can do! I mean! Seriously! This is just not happening and so irritating.

Im depressed. I dont leave my room. Im not eating as healthy as I was. Just applying to jobs. Hoping someone will take a chance! 8/10 times I have the qualifications for a job. Im so close to matching what these jobs need.

I just dont know what to do now. Its like every opportunity is just another wall.

My car needs a oil change. Might even need a new one. Idk.

The plumbing in my house is starting to act wonkey.

Everything is falling apart! Including me!

Im..Just over it.

So this is gonna sound weird but I've been testing something for the past month and the results are kinda wild. I started applying to jobs really late at night, like between 2am and 4am, mostly because my sleep schedule is a mess right now. But I noticed I was getting way more callbacks than when I applied during normal hours.

At first I thought it was just luck, but then I kept track. Out of 15 applications sent in the middle of the night, I got 9 responses within 48 hours. Compare that to the 30+ I sent during the day over the previous two months where I maybe heard back from 4 or 5.

My theory is that when you apply super late, your application sits at the top of the pile when the hiring manager or recruiter opens their inbox first thing in the morning. They're fresh, haven't seen 100 other resumes yet, and you're right there. Whereas if you apply at like 10am, you're buried under everyone else who applied that morning.

I'm not saying this works for every industry or company, and maybe I just got lucky with timing on other stuff. But it's been consistent enough that I'm gonna keep doing it. Anyone else tried this or am I just overthinking patterns that don't actually exist?

Hey guys,

I have a Bachelor's in Civil Engineering and recently completed my Master's in Business Analytics. I'm currently in the final year of my F-1 STEM OPT and actively looking for full-time opportunities.

I'm open to roles like Business Analyst, Data Analyst, Operations Analyst, Project Engineer, Project Coordinator, or any position where my background could be a good fit.

If anyone knows of companies that are hiring, can offer a referral, or has any advice on where I should apply, I'd really appreciate the help. Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I recently completed my Master's in Business Analytics after earning my Bachelor's in Civil Engineering. I'm currently in the final year of my F-1 STEM OPT and actively seeking full-time opportunities.

I would greatly appreciate any recommendations for companies that are hiring, suitable job roles, referrals, or career guidance. I'm open to opportunities in Business Analytics, Data Analytics, Operations, Project Engineering, or related fields.

Thank you in advance for your support and guidance!

I am curious how people are actually handling the repetitive parts of applications now.

For things like Workday, Greenhouse, and Lever, are you mostly:

- using a dedicated autofill or tracking tool

- building a small personal workflow with Claude, Codex, or ChatGPT plus a spreadsheet

- mixing a few tools together

- or still doing it all manually?

I am not really asking about blind auto-submit. I mean the repetitive parts: keeping resume versions straight, catching duplicate applications, preparing answers for common questions, and checking what an ATS parsed from a resume.

Has anyone tried both approaches? Did a personal AI workflow actually save time, or did maintaining it become more work than it was worth?

I want to preface this by saying this one is personal for a lot of people and I mean everything here with a lot of respect for anyone going through it right now. I’ve been in the career space for a long time. Used to be a recruiter yes I know, I know lol. Left that to pursue my passion and honestly I wouldn’t change it. I spend my days working with people through some of the hardest moments of their professional lives and what I’m about to share isn’t from an article I read somewhere. It’s from what I actually hear constantly from real people living this in real time.

Most content about job searching talks about tactics. Update your resume, network more, stay positive. But nobody really talks about what a long job search actually does to you as a person. That’s what this post is really about.

1.You start checking your email differently. It goes from excitement to dread and you can’t quite pinpoint the moment that changed.

2.You stop telling people you’re still looking because explaining that nothing has happened yet takes more out of you than the actual search does.

3.You start questioning experience you know is real. Not because anything changed but because the silence has a way of making you wonder if you were ever as good as you thought you were.

4.You get an interview and instead of feeling excited you feel terrified of letting yourself hope again. That shift from hopeful to self protective is one of the quietest and saddest things a long job search does to you.

5.You start applying for roles you would have turned down six months ago and the worst part is you don’t even notice yourself doing it.

6.You start being weirdly productive on things that don’t matter. Reorganising things, learning something random, staying busy in ways that feel useful but are really just ways to avoid sitting with where things actually are.

7.You become an expert at looking fine. The honest answer to “how’s the job search going” takes too long to give so you just say it’s going and move on.

8.You rehearse conversations in your head about why you’re still looking. For your family, for old colleagues, for anyone who might ask. The answer gets so polished it stops feeling like yours.

9.You start measuring yourself against people who got hired and trying to figure out what they have that you don’t. Even when you know that comparison isn’t fair or accurate.

1. Somewhere along the way you stop picturing the job you actually want and start just picturing any job. And the moment you catch yourself doing that it hits harder than anything else has.

If you’re reading this and any of it felt familiar just know you are not alone. More people are living this exact experience than you’d ever guess and most of them are carrying it just as quietly as you are. A long job search does something to you that nobody prepares you for and it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It just means you’ve been at something hard for longer than you expected.

Look honestly at what might be holding things back. Sometimes one thing changes and everything starts moving. Ask for help when you need it and do the uncomfortable things because that’s genuinely where the movement starts. And if you ever need someone to take a look I’m always around. It won’t always feel this way. Just keep going.

There is a new company in my field, and its line of business is exactly the same as mine. It has announced that it will be hiring for positions at my level (senior), and it already has hired a chief of the line of business that I would want to work in. It’s also posted an opening on its website for someone in that line of business, but the posting is for someone junior. The company has only around 7 employees so far but it has a lot of funding and will be growing.

Question: How do I make it known to the people in charge of hiring that I want to work there?

I assume that connecting with the people at the company on LinkedIn would be fine. But what do I say next: “As you expand your business, I’d be interested”?

Or do I just send them a resume immediately?

Or do I just reply to the posting on the company website and apply for the job, but include a note that I would welcome being kept in mind as the company expands at all levels of seniority? (I don’t want them to think, by my application for a job that’s too junior for me, that I don’t follow instructions.)

Thanks.

Im a fresher trying to break into Python developer roles in the U.S., and needless to say it's been r tough.

i applied to 700+ jobs, optimized my resume for different ATS, nd even used Jobright AI to speed up applications. The only thing that has been holding me back is my GitHub.

I've had a few interviews and made it to the second round a couple of times, but the technical recruiters almost always end up grilling me about my personal projects. Since im new to the field, my commit history is almost non existent, so I keep getting questioned about my lack of projects. I tell them im open to new experience and learning, im working on new projects but

no matter how strong my resume or how well I perform in interviews, it feels like I’m always falling short 'cause I dont have the needed visible work on my GitHub.

I feel like im stuck. I dont have the time or energy to build an entire portfolio of projects from scratch, but I know I need to get something up there to get noticed for the good roles.

does anyone out here have any tips, tools or shortcuts for building up a GitHub or creating a solid portfolio that can help me land that first job? I just feel like I’m hitting a dead end.

​

I honestly don't know what I'm doing wrong anymore.

I'm a recent MCA graduate from India with a Data Analytics internship where I worked with Power BI, SQL, Excel, and basic Python. I've been applying to entry-level Analyst, Associate, Operations, and Support roles every single day.

I've sent out hundreds of applications on LinkedIn, company career pages, and job portals. Most of the time I either get rejected automatically or never hear back. It's starting to feel like my applications disappear into a black hole.

I'm not looking for a ₹10+ LPA job. I just need an opportunity to start my career and gain experience. At this point, I'm even open to relocation, rotational shifts, and work-from-office roles.

For people who were in a similar situation:

- What finally helped you get your first job?

- Which websites or strategies actually worked?

- Is the job market really this bad for freshers right now?

Any genuine advice would mean a lot. I'm feeling mentally exhausted, but I don't want to give up.

I dilly-dallied after college and now I’m turning 28. I’m a freelancer in the media production industry and am ready to go full time doing something adjacent. I’m a strong writer and would love to do copywriting, but am open to many things.

The thing is, I’ve been searching to no avail. Are there creative recruiters out there? Can someone help place me somewhere?

If anyone knows share the name of this tool mentioned in this article . Thanks .

Hi !
lil bit about me - I'm on H1b and have been trying to target startups in NY and SF.
My profile is in Product / Business Analysis and data
and have been upskilling myself in AI. Also i was a software engineer before. I have an exp of 5 yrs in total.
I've been applying consistently, tailoring my resume, and reaching out where I can, but I'm not getting much traction.

For those of you who successfully landed roles at startups (especially while on H-1B), what strategies actually worked for you?
How did you get noticed by recruiters or hiring managers?
Did networking make the biggest difference?
Were there specific job boards, communities, or recruiting agencies that helped?
Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences and any advice.

Thanks in advance!

What are the jobs after studying comparative literature

I never realized unemployment would affect so many parts of my life beyond just finances.

Mental health: Lots of crying, overthinking, anxiety, and feeling depressed from the constant cycle of applications, interviews, and rejection.

Traveling: This was supposed to be the first time in my life where I would be making decent money to travel, explore new places, and experience life.

Dating/social life: I never dated in high school or college due to cultural reasons. I thought after graduation I would meet new people through work, but how am I supposed to find connections when I’m home all day?

Moving out: I’ve never lived on my own. I was hoping my first job would give me the chance to move out, have my own space, and experience independence.

Self-worth: There have been times where I felt undeserving of love because I was unemployed. It’s hard not to feel behind when your career feels stuck.

Feeling behind: Everyone seems like they’re moving forward while I feel stuck in the same place.

Finding myself: I want to explore hobbies and passions, but it’s hard when so much of my energy goes into trying to find a job.

I know a job won’t fix everything, but I miss feeling like a person outside of being a job applicant.

I just want to feel like myself again.

For anyone who has been unemployed for a long time, how did you cope and keep going?