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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The point of the comments here is that things ARE different today.
I would never have imagined that "AI resume" would be a good idea, but ...
Looking at the posts on HN from the hiring side, total cheats are making it past the screening regularly. There's a lot of problems in the hiring process right now, and they aren't just from the economic downturn.
People who need jobs (or want different jobs) have to play the game with the current rules, not wait around for the rules to change (again).
I'm unconvinced that reaching out to people you know and know your work--especially if they have hiring authority--isn't a pretty good strategy. In fact, with the arms race of flooding the application process and then the company tossing most of it in the trash essentially at random, I wonder if it isn't the better strategy.
Of course, if you don't have a network, that's probably not a great place to be in absent credentials that make you stand out.
This is delulu. Yes, if you know people who are hiring, or companies where people you know who work, great. By all means do that. Referrals are a strong mechanism IF you can leverage it.
But nobody in my network of ~100 is in either situation. They are either also jobless, or their company is not hiring or, what they are hiring for is not applicable to me (such as wrong role/country/TZ/stack).
At some point, if you've exhausted your network and sending out a flood of generic application letters/resumes isn't getting you anywhere, you probably should consider shifting your focus in some way. That might mean going to events, writing, considering different types of roles, etc. Obviously some markets have more potential targets than others.
If you have 15 years experience as the OP does and you’re trying to get a job by replying to “public” postings on the internet, you’re probably making your life harder than it needs to be and missing out on the best opportunities.
If you can, getting a job through personal connections and networking has always yielded the best results for both parties in my experience. In 20 years, only my first graduate job didn’t come this way.
I also saw no mention of speaking to an actual recruiter/headhunter, which is the only way other than the aforementioned personal intros and networking that I/we have hired anyone with 15 years of experience that I can remember.
I concur. All my roles have either come from my network or working with recruiters.
As a hiring manager now, I hate, hate, hate the spray and pray applicants. Wastes a vast amount of my time weeding them out. And I'm probably rejecting actually good candidates now, as I just immediately reject anyone who doesn't seem to have thought even a little about the position they're applying for.
You seem to be saying 15 years experience means you should have a network that will be good for jobs, so why bother applying to ads?
What if you recently changed specialization, or moved city or even country? What if it's been a few years since you were in actual employment, you were working on startups, or had a career break or whatever. What if you have way more than 15 years experience. And so many other situations, which might result in your network being limited or not that good for finding the kind of work you want.
The point is, if you apply to advertised jobs, it's a numbers game.
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.
> 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.
One of my friends mentioned how on the hiring side it's not much better.
Here'a a recent case for a remote software engineering role for a US based company:
A position is posted publicly, in 2 days it gets 300 applicants. Out of those 300, 9 are selected for interviews. Of the 9, only 2 showed up for the interview. Both candidates weren't close to a good fit (skills didn't match resume, etc.).
It opened my eyes on the process. Imagine an engineering manager getting handed a few hundred resumes and now they need to hand select ones that move onto the next phase. This takes a huge amount of time and it also indicates if your resume isn't strong, you will probably get passed over in a few seconds.
With that said, he told me most of the applications were AI spam.
One of my job postings, I got over 100 applications. Most people weren't even tangentially related. They were spraying and praying. Worse yet, I had to screen everything by hand. A rather tedious job and made worse by Taleo. And as much I understand why people don't want AI screening and my company strictly prohibits it - by the end I was begging for one.
Finally, not even one application was matching the job profile and many had used AI to misrepresent their skill.
My company has a policy that once a position has to be opened, I need to fill it within 6 months. So, fed up I had to work with HR to message people on Linkedin.
This has basically dissuaded me using the spray and pray or AI generated resumes, if and when I start my job hunt.
To be clear: I was only applying to jobs that were a fit for my resume, and my AI generated resume was 100% truthful about my skills, background and experiences.
I would not encourage applying to jobs that are entirely unrelated, nor lying on ones resume.
Honestly these numbers don’t seem to change. I’ve had 200 resumes in 2002 posted on a Canadian government jobs board (for private sector) and the resulting resumes were like 2 good ones. Then about ten years ago a job posting on Stack Overflow attracted 450 applicants in a few days. Most were spam.
The only difference is that spam these days is custom tailored using AI. And it makes weeding out bad resumes more difficult. But absolute numbers remain about the same I’d say.
In the Czech Republic, the post-2008 crisis dragged for quite a long time, and the job market around 2012 was so bad that when we put out an ad for a secretary, we got over 300 applicants.
I don't think we answered every single of them, we were a small company (15 people at that time), and even our wish for basic courtesy was constrained by real lack of time and people. That is also why we needed a secretary...
I can't even imagine the same situation in 2025, with AI. Would that be 3000 applicants?
Maybe in 2030, everyone will have several AI agents constantly looking for their dream job. One job listing will receive 3 million applications. Companies will start requiring payment to submit a job application to show you're serious and not a spammer. Any hiring manager hoping to get reached out to by an actual human applicant via a job listing will be hopeless, and any individual applicant hoping to reach a human hiring manager will also be hopeless
I don't know in the Czech Republic but in the US for many years now, most of the job applications are garbage: complete mismatch between experience and position applied to, lists of keywords that are clearly BS, unreadable presentations... This is not new. But no, most of them have always been very easy to dismiss. It takes time but mostly because of the quantity. Not much time per resume. It was just one of these thankless tasks that needed to be gotten through. (And HR - for good or bad - did much of that.)
Perhaps the problem is that we all root for a non-standard application to be a great find. And that yes, sometimes they are! Probably looking for these in job posting applications is not worth it anymore.
There is attaining employment and then there is attaining employment that doesn’t suck and those are very different beasts.
If you are competing with child like people for a low quality position targeting child like people it’s going to suck. Yes, there are many positions like that but I found it’s so much better to wait for positions that don’t suck.
Before my current job I was unemployed for 6 months, so there was a lot of pressure to land any job. The reality is that some jobs require far less time and energy to attain than others and that cost is completely irrespective to the quality of work. As a result it’s so much better to be patient and target a desirable job than just any job.
Moving forward I look at the tech stack qualifications of job postings and if I see a bunch of tools and frameworks listed, as opposed to expectations and responsibilities, I just discard that opening. It signals the employer wants a candidate to be a disposable tool monkey instead of a problem solver with ownership of responsibilities.
I don’t know in what world you live (or in what world I do live for that matter). I used to apply to one or two jobs in the past when I was looking for something new. I prepared each interview in advance for a couple of weeks. Nowadays it’s harder… but I apply to 3 or 4 job ads, not 450! It’s harder because obviously it takes two or 3 times what it used to take me. I have around 12 years of experience in a few different tech stacks, I read tech books regularly, I don’t have a good professional network, I do find jobs via linkedin, I’m based in western europe, and I have a masters degree in comp sci (but no one ever has asked me to show my degree).
In my cv I care a lot about the details: the typeface, margins, grammar (I use llms since i’m not a native speaker), bullet point order, succinctness, etc. Perhaps that counts for something. Then if I get an interview, that’s like already 50% of the job done. Im an easy guy imho. I have failed mainly systems design interviews, so that’s where I put some work nowadays.
Your CV and cover letter probably does a lot of the work at least in DACH.
The stories I hear from friends in HR, at varying company sizes, is the stuff of fiction. Apparently most people apply with utter trash, its no surprise they get filtered out if they can't even be bothered to present themselves properly.
At least at smaller companies, if you have something that actually looks like you tried, you immediately stand out. (After HR waded through all the bad ones)
We are also not talking about typos or gaps in the CV here, but things like: including everything expected in a CV, writing something even vaguely resembling a formal letter, or even, addressing the right company in it (bonus points if they are a direct competitor).
3 months ago. Again, I do deep research for every company I apply for (e.g., search for employees in linkedin, check glassdoor reviews, check for potential code tasks in github, read the company/employee blogs, etc.). The research could take me several days up to a max. of one week (because more is just too much info too). I tailor (to a degree) the cv for the job (I try that at least I do have experience with 50% of what they ask, but let's say they ask for Python and I have mainly Ruby experience, well, I dedicate a week or so to brush up on Python and then I swap Ruby for Python on my cv. This doesn't work with every tech stack, of course, but works for the mainstream ones).
Another "trick" (common sense from my point of view) is to schedule if possible the first interview in the middle of the week. Typically I would schedule for a Wednesday/Thursday so that the second interview can land on the next Monday or Tuesday, that gives me at least 4-5 days to prepare for it. I try to avoid first interviews on Mondays because then it's more difficult to schedule something for the following week. I also notice that interviews with engineers scheduled in the afternoon (between 2 and 4pm) are rather "softer" than those in the mornings (I don't know why, perhaps everyone is just a bit sleepy after lunch perhaps?). I wear a white t-shirt to avoid any kind of subconscious prejudices on the side of the interviewers (you never know what kind of people are on the other side of the screen).
And many more "tricks". I know that the core of the matter is to pass the challenges, but I do care about every single detail. I write down exactly how I'm gonna introduce myself, I prepare in advance potential questions like "tell me a project you've worked recently" to the point that I feel super confident talking about them. I don't leave anything to chance, but of course I may fuck it up sometimes (and I did 4 months ago in the systems design interview).
In any case, I could easily submit my cv dozens of times, but I find that preparing exhaustively for a couple of weeks for 1 or 2 jobs works best for me (based on previous experience. I have worked for around 5 companies so far in my entire career).
Traditional engineering companies in DACH area often ask to see your master's degree as they treat SW engineering like the other credentialed engineering professions(mechanical, etc) that sometimes carry liability.
Your spray and pray technique is flooding HR departments with AI generated applications. This blocks out people who are actually qualified for the role as they get drowned out by the "shameless" who apply for anything that "vaguely fits".
This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken.
"This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken."
You have this backwards. The only reason they have so many applicants in the first place is that the sector unemployment rate is so high and companies play games with evergreen postings.
Except it's not. A lot of people just got used to quit job on Monday, have several offers by Friday (with a big salary boost) which was never the norm for professional employment.
Go check the stats. Sector unemployment is about 6%. Full employment rate is considered 4%. There are numerous layoffs over the past two years. It's taking people a year or more and hundreds of applications to find new jobs. The IT job market has actually shrunk this year.
Again, check the stats. 6% is higher than full employment rate, higher than the overall rate, and is above the median unemployment rate for the past 100 years. It would be even higher except the participation rate is falling.
> It would be even higher except the participation rate is falling.
Prime age (25-54) labor force participation rate is steady and high (steady around the highest peak since the one at the height of the late-90s dotcom boom—which itself was the global maximum since the stat was tracked—for the last couple years.) Overall LFPR (16+) is dropping, but that's just the elderly population share growing.
A lot of people are looking for reasons why landing tech jobs isn't the turkey shoot that it was for the past 15 years or so. I'm unconvinced how much AI is the answer. I do think a lot of tech companies probably overhired during COVID for a variety of reasons. From what I see, professional hiring seems pretty normal even if certainly not overheated and you can argue about how it compares to the general economy by a percentage point or two.
This. OP is playing by the rules. The rules are silly and dysfunctional, but at least in the short term, that's the winning strategy. I'd probably do the same in his case (or at least a combination of sending maybe 5 well-made resumes or cover letters, to the companies that are the most promising, + 95 "spray and pray" ones for random fishing).
You got it. If you KNOW the company is ACTUALLY hiring and is serious about filling the role, and it's a good fit; take the extra time. But spray and pray helps counter ghost jobs which are impossible to detect until hindsight.
It's not a question of who to blame exactly. The poster's practice illustrates why sending resumes in response to job postings can't work anymore. From the point of view of the new hiring company or new job applicant, it doesn't matter who created the situation. What matters is what we do about it next. You can spray and pray but you certainly shouldn't expect it to "work".
For the poster: was their method a good use of their time? is the job "found" a good fit really? will they last in this position?
For the hiring company: was their method a good use of their time? is this person in any way a great fit? will they last in this position?
The poster complains that few companies sent him a rejection note! Why in the world would they? The poster was protective of their time, and should rightly expect the hiring companies to do the same.
Yes, the job i found is a perfect fit for me and my skillset. I did not fake my way into something.
and my point is: if you genuinely apply to a position and you never even hear back from them, not even to reject you, it doesn't make sense to only apply to a handful. again, emphasis genuine application; answered all their questions and the role is a fit for my resume. That's why you have to spray and pray.
Were your applications that good of a fit? You sent 450 applications for one hiring. Very roughly speaking this means you expect the employer to carefully consider 450 applications for their one job opening (assuming roughly speaking, that everyone does the same). "Carefully" is clearly not gonna happen. You sprayed and prayed but the employer is hiring one person for that one position (not quite true) and can't just spray and pray themselves.
You may have indeed found 450 real and fictitious openings that would be a great match for you. Yes, not impossible. Still the practice puts the employers themselves in a position where these resumes and answers cannot possibly be read. Not carefully, not at all. Again no blame one way or the other. I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants. Or hopefully, will see the light and consider other kinds of applications - such as network leads (but there are other options.)
My argument is about what we do next. My answer is that it cannot be job postings and answers to job postings. That ship has sailed. (And nonetheless, congrats on your new job.)
There's no good approach here. If you can't rely on hiring through the network, you need to apply. And then either you get hired or someone else. It's all broken, but we can't expect every single person to collectively choose the "cooperate" option in this massive game if prisoner's dilemma.
my application was not "AI generated" nor was it for unrelated roles. Everything I applied to was in alignment with my resume. I would much rather be able to apply to a handful of jobs and for that to be enough. But I don't control the market, i can only participate in it.
Having been applying to a lot of roles I appreciate the post you made. I will hang in there. I started working on an Elixir application to grow my skills while applying. It is an exhausting process and I'm glad you got a job. Hopefully I will get one soon.
Thanks for your comment; remember that it's a marathon, not a race! Make sure you pace yourself, take breaks, and don't take rejections too personally.
I understand the spray and pray sentiment, but I cannot recommend enough hustling connections at the companies you’re targeting. Channel your inner SDR and stalk the company, the people you’d work with and the best guess at who would be your boss. Clearly don’t be creepy, but connecting on LinkedIn, mentioning you’ve applied, generally seeing what these people are up to is 100% free and you might even spot an event they’re attending that you could “bump in to them”. It’s so hard for someone not to do some sort of follow up if you’ve met them face to face and had a pleasant conversation such as recommending the hiring manager follow up with you etc. Having a direct connection means you can also prod someone every couple of weeks if you haven’t heard anything from your initial application. Most of the time people are embarrassed their company is being slow on processing good applicants. It’s hard but it really makes you stand out from the pure spray and prayers.
I assure you if i had done this, I would not have a job right now. This may have worked in the past, but not in this job market. It's a numbers game now, and when you've only got a few months until you're homeless you do not have the time to mess around.
Your sample size leaves much to be desired. I lean towards the takes that you're indistinguishable AI fluff with no real value. If you could have offered more value and you had more people you had worked with in the past that thought highly of your work you wouldn't have struggled nearly as much. I'm not sure why your former colleagues won't stick their neck out for you. But I do think that reflects more on you than the current hiring environment. It's in vogue to blame others for your own problems right now, so I understand where you're at and what you're struggling with to some degree. But it's not the immigrant's fault.
Honestly, I disagree, my partner just did exactly this. 50+ “cold” applications with a single first round interview. Tracked down where the head of design of one company was going to be at an event, cornered her, chatted for 10mins and was then fast tracked through an interview process and had the job signed 2 weeks later. I know that is a sample of 1, but I’ve spent most of my time as the hirer, going the extra mile to stand out does make a difference even more so in this f’d up AI infected hiring world we’re now in.
Certainly, some companies just aren't hiring today so even knowing the right person probably doesn't help. But my (few) jobs over the past 25 years--including one right after 9/11--came through personal connections and didn't even involve a response to a job posting. In fact, in the last case, the job position was created for me. I'm a bit sorry I never checked to see if there was an associated posting on the jobs site.
But I've certainly been lucky. A few dodged bullets.
again, if i did this i would not have a job right now. This is my lived experience. This is what I had to do. It is not what I wanted to have done. That's why I wrote my post, because someone out there might really be struggling with this job market and need to hear about it.
I'm not saying taking a more personal approach doesn't work. Sure, if you've got an event you can go to or you've got a network you can tap, do that. But neither were options for me. Nobody in my network was hiring, and the one event i could have attended (where relevant people would be) sold out within a few hours.
Fair, proof is in the pudding and you scored a job with your approach. So congrats and 100% not knocking that, hopefully my comment provides a bit of perspective from the other side of the fence.
Spray and pray is why it takes everyone longer to get hired. Companies have to sift through thousands of resumes of people that aren't qualified and shouldn't have applied in the first place.
Common advice on Reddit is also to lie about your experience.
The irony is that because of both of these, it takes longer to get a response and get through the interview process.
Companies started this war when they laid off employees & began relying on applicant tracking systems (ATSes) to use algorithm-driven approaches to finding applicants well-suited to their open roles. Don't blame the people applying to jobs for also using AI to try and game the system in their favor.
Applicants lying on resumes does seem like it won't end well for them, even if it does mean they may get more initial callbacks from companies about open roles. But given how things are very much a numbers name right now, I also understand why an applicant would do it.
Layoffs are not a new thing. The 80ies were already seeing the combination of recurring layoffs at the same time as a thick book of open positions - for the same companies. Layoffs were frequent, openings were plentiful.
Resume processing software indeed was a problem from the start, at first leading to resumes stuffed with BS keywords.
I feel that what are (somewhat) recent are (1) the brazenness of the whole process, combined with (2) the time-intensive-ness of the interview process. All the way to different people applying and showing up for the job. That is new. Hundreds of responses for each and every job posting, that is recent. Just the lid on the coffin of a process that has been breaking for a while.
Exactly! So much of this is automated on their side already, as a job seeker you want to move as quickly as you can and automate as much as you can without resorting to lying or spam.
Sounds to me like these companies and those candidates deserve each other. I’d leave them to it.
Network. Talk to your friends and acquaintances. Go to meetups and talks, maybe even conferences. Speak to some recruiters. Find one who isn’t too full of shit.
Good advice except: my friends and acquaintances are either unemployed too or working for companies not hiring for my role/region. there are no meetups in my city and the conferences one can attend only happen a few times a year and sell out very quickly. And yes, I did speak to several recruiters and have probably spoken to dozens in my career. None have been useful in the end.
Given that, what is one to do? you can either quit tech and go work at whole foods, or you can try another tactic. That's what I did. And it actually landed me a perfect job that pays well and is aligned with my skill set.
Game theory says if everyone else is spraying and praying, i miss out if i don't do the same. Spray and pray is not my choice, i'd rather apply to a handful of jobs and that be enough.
I also discourage lying on your resume that's just a genuine waste of everyone's time.
I disagree. If the market is stacked against you and it takes even 30 attempts to get a job through the usual job seeking process, then I question whether you're truly going to be happy and satisfied with whatever you happen to get offered after months of searching. If you're lucky, maybe. But the most probable reality for most people is that you'll be an expendable employee with zero leverage in a position that doesn't suit you. Not to mention the probability of getting serious burnout from getting rejected and ignored hundreds of times. A fair, healthy job market does not look like this.
If something is not working out, change up your approach. The first obvious step is to try networking instead of applying. Perhaps start something on your own, becoming a B2B service provider rather than an employee. Or try to out-compete the companies which have rejected you. Be a stalwart, not a pushover.
Considering it took 450 applications, perhaps this isn't the best advice.
Perhaps in the future, employers will use a centralized system that tracks and limits the amount of applications a person can do to prevent this sort of AI spam
Don't hate the player, hate the game. Why would you want to limit people from applying to jobs? as if there are not enough barriers already. I'm not advocating for spamming to roles that are not a fit; everything i applied to aligned with my resume.
This is probably my approach (maybe minus the AI), I do think networking and reaching out to people can yield better results but I was never any good at that
Indeed, the situation reminds me of those people on reddit who invite 20 people to a party and are surprised when nobody shows.
Of course there is supposed to be competition when applying to positions, but you should have a good idea of your chances of getting a job before investing/wasting your (and their) time.
Thank you very much for the insight. I also do have 15 years of IT QA Engineer Experience. Nice to know from a tech vet their journey to the path of job that will never be a permanent position. Good luck!
In 10 who interviewed me, only 1 or 2 knew about the job. All others recruiters did not have a single clue on they were talking about.
Job was about Linux admin and I told one about bash programming and that I like and know about it. At the end, he says "there are some things I did not hear like scripting in Linux..." and I just went ok, thanks for you time, bye.
This type of thing is why I was essentially forced to start my own solo company. There isn’t a force on earth which could make me subject myself to all that.
Enjoy your jobs those who will. I’m choosing a different life, even if it doesn’t dump endless money into my bank account.
"forced entrepreneurship" is a thing, and i commend you for the effort. I tried my hand at it, but was not able to find strong PMF despite some early sales.
I built a browser extension that turned X into a CRM. Did 35 demo's to people and most of them were excited for it, even made a woman cry (in a good way). got ~16 sales but things have plateaued, and actual usage has been mixed for a variety of reasons, namely people use their phones more than their computers.
Because there's no other choice for entry/mid-level positions (and some lower end senior ones). Thankfully they are not 5 hours long, that's something I would also avoid.
For instance, in my recent job search for a new grad role, I had to do an OA for every company but Jane Street and Databricks (props to them).
To be clear, i am talking about: you apply, they send you a response (sometimes automated) telling you to do a couple hours of work, and only then will they decide if they want to speak with you.
This a great way to waste one's limited time on a role that might not even be a fit. If they aren't even willing to spend 15 minutes talking to you first, i would encourage everyone, at any level, to bounce. If they are at all serious, they'll speak with you first.
And I'll also highlight: you never know when they are using you for their own goals, like AI training. Or if it's a ghost job. Or if they aren't hiring for your state. Lots of stuff can come up that would make your work null & void.
To prevent burn out, you really have to guard your time. companies can structure things to be highly optimized for them, and very expensive for you.
> Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?"
I don't see this as a asinine/foolish/stupid thing to ask. It's helpful for both sides:
- potential employee can provide an honest opinion on their motivation, in a targeted, specific way to highlight their talent.
- offering company can use it for evaluating mutual fit, as well as filter out generic trash applications.
Pretty much. There is a lot to be said about silly HR questions, but this one I consider legit. And after all - if nothing excites you about changing what you are doing for 1/3 of your waking life - just be honest, say "this job is not exciting and I'm already bored and unmotivated from the start". The outcome might be not what you want, though.
Yeah. Even without being overly candid, I don't think I'd ever have had an issue giving a fairly lucid answer to that question even if I left out the "And I need to eat part."
If there's some naive optimism in the answer, the company can take that into account in the context but may also decide the candidate is going to be disappointed or is BSing.
Did you try using a recruiter? Not one that works for a company but one that matchmakes between candidates and companies. My last three jobs I've used a recruiter and this worked great as a filter.
In the old days, they were awesome. More like talent agents, than matchmakers. They were usually older folks that advocated for you, maintained extensive Rolodexes (shows how long ago that was), which they exercised on your behalf (basically, they "networked" for you), and made pretty significant commissions. I believe that top-tier executive recruiters still work like this.
These days, they seem to be very young, and, I suspect, make a great deal less money.
Maybe you found a diamond in the rough with that one recruiter. In the 25 years I've worked in tech, I've only worked with one (1) recruiter that was good, & they helped me land two positions over the course of a decade. The rest ranged from benign to harmless or incompetent.
> Use AI to fill out [...] job application questions
The irony is strong on this one, and one person's "asinine" question is another person's "thoughtful" question. It's a bit hard to take this seriously.
call 1: general interview with recruiter
call 2: Technical Interview with coding & questions
call 3: Team call and culture questions
call 4: call with CEO
call 5: HR offer
Congratulations on landing the job! I have to ask though: Why do you think the "What excited you about this role?" question was asinine? IMHO questions like those are totally valid, even in a technical interview.
The answer is literally always “It will allow me to pay my bills. This won’t be a giddy, young-love crush of a hobby for me. Hire me and I’ll just do good work, not cheerlead.”
The question is a synecdoche for “How awesome do you think we are, and so how much will we be able to coast on our respect for you as a result?”
Not true. I can think of a bevy of reasons that I'd be excited for a role that have nothing to do with being a cheerleader. For example, working in the banking industry for many years, I was tied down with a very rigid, sometimes antiquated tech stack. I started applying to smaller companies because I was excited about the prospect of having more autonomy and being exposed to a more modern tech stack.
Nice advice. How long did the process take? How many hours a day did you spend doing all this? You say, pace yourself, send a few hours, does that mean it took you months to find and apply to 450 jobs? Did you read company reviews on Glassdoor?
> 1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless.
I just skipped the rest of the steps after reading (1) and completely stopped reading after (6).
This is poor advice and it is no wonder you had to send 450+ applications and I think people reading this would want to do this with less steps and less than 450+ applications.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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".
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.
Things may be different today. But after getting an on-campus interview job out of grad school, my few jobs were all through people I knew.
> Things may be different today.
The point of the comments here is that things ARE different today.
I would never have imagined that "AI resume" would be a good idea, but ...
Looking at the posts on HN from the hiring side, total cheats are making it past the screening regularly. There's a lot of problems in the hiring process right now, and they aren't just from the economic downturn.
People who need jobs (or want different jobs) have to play the game with the current rules, not wait around for the rules to change (again).
I'm unconvinced that reaching out to people you know and know your work--especially if they have hiring authority--isn't a pretty good strategy. In fact, with the arms race of flooding the application process and then the company tossing most of it in the trash essentially at random, I wonder if it isn't the better strategy.
Of course, if you don't have a network, that's probably not a great place to be in absent credentials that make you stand out.
This is delulu. Yes, if you know people who are hiring, or companies where people you know who work, great. By all means do that. Referrals are a strong mechanism IF you can leverage it.
But nobody in my network of ~100 is in either situation. They are either also jobless, or their company is not hiring or, what they are hiring for is not applicable to me (such as wrong role/country/TZ/stack).
At some point, if you've exhausted your network and sending out a flood of generic application letters/resumes isn't getting you anywhere, you probably should consider shifting your focus in some way. That might mean going to events, writing, considering different types of roles, etc. Obviously some markets have more potential targets than others.
If you have 15 years experience as the OP does and you’re trying to get a job by replying to “public” postings on the internet, you’re probably making your life harder than it needs to be and missing out on the best opportunities.
If you can, getting a job through personal connections and networking has always yielded the best results for both parties in my experience. In 20 years, only my first graduate job didn’t come this way.
I also saw no mention of speaking to an actual recruiter/headhunter, which is the only way other than the aforementioned personal intros and networking that I/we have hired anyone with 15 years of experience that I can remember.
I’m not surprised it took 450 attempts.
I concur. All my roles have either come from my network or working with recruiters.
As a hiring manager now, I hate, hate, hate the spray and pray applicants. Wastes a vast amount of my time weeding them out. And I'm probably rejecting actually good candidates now, as I just immediately reject anyone who doesn't seem to have thought even a little about the position they're applying for.
You seem to be saying 15 years experience means you should have a network that will be good for jobs, so why bother applying to ads?
What if you recently changed specialization, or moved city or even country? What if it's been a few years since you were in actual employment, you were working on startups, or had a career break or whatever. What if you have way more than 15 years experience. And so many other situations, which might result in your network being limited or not that good for finding the kind of work you want.
The point is, if you apply to advertised jobs, it's a numbers game.
>then they just throw 50% in file 13
I can't hire those people, they're unlucky
They lack the Teela Brown gene. Too bad.
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.
cult ure is dead
> 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.
One of my friends mentioned how on the hiring side it's not much better.
Here'a a recent case for a remote software engineering role for a US based company:
A position is posted publicly, in 2 days it gets 300 applicants. Out of those 300, 9 are selected for interviews. Of the 9, only 2 showed up for the interview. Both candidates weren't close to a good fit (skills didn't match resume, etc.).
It opened my eyes on the process. Imagine an engineering manager getting handed a few hundred resumes and now they need to hand select ones that move onto the next phase. This takes a huge amount of time and it also indicates if your resume isn't strong, you will probably get passed over in a few seconds.
With that said, he told me most of the applications were AI spam.
One of my job postings, I got over 100 applications. Most people weren't even tangentially related. They were spraying and praying. Worse yet, I had to screen everything by hand. A rather tedious job and made worse by Taleo. And as much I understand why people don't want AI screening and my company strictly prohibits it - by the end I was begging for one.
Finally, not even one application was matching the job profile and many had used AI to misrepresent their skill.
My company has a policy that once a position has to be opened, I need to fill it within 6 months. So, fed up I had to work with HR to message people on Linkedin.
This has basically dissuaded me using the spray and pray or AI generated resumes, if and when I start my job hunt.
That's unfortunate.
To be clear: I was only applying to jobs that were a fit for my resume, and my AI generated resume was 100% truthful about my skills, background and experiences.
I would not encourage applying to jobs that are entirely unrelated, nor lying on ones resume.
Honestly these numbers don’t seem to change. I’ve had 200 resumes in 2002 posted on a Canadian government jobs board (for private sector) and the resulting resumes were like 2 good ones. Then about ten years ago a job posting on Stack Overflow attracted 450 applicants in a few days. Most were spam.
The only difference is that spam these days is custom tailored using AI. And it makes weeding out bad resumes more difficult. But absolute numbers remain about the same I’d say.
It's their job to go through applications.
In the Czech Republic, the post-2008 crisis dragged for quite a long time, and the job market around 2012 was so bad that when we put out an ad for a secretary, we got over 300 applicants.
I don't think we answered every single of them, we were a small company (15 people at that time), and even our wish for basic courtesy was constrained by real lack of time and people. That is also why we needed a secretary...
I can't even imagine the same situation in 2025, with AI. Would that be 3000 applicants?
Maybe in 2030, everyone will have several AI agents constantly looking for their dream job. One job listing will receive 3 million applications. Companies will start requiring payment to submit a job application to show you're serious and not a spammer. Any hiring manager hoping to get reached out to by an actual human applicant via a job listing will be hopeless, and any individual applicant hoping to reach a human hiring manager will also be hopeless
I don't know in the Czech Republic but in the US for many years now, most of the job applications are garbage: complete mismatch between experience and position applied to, lists of keywords that are clearly BS, unreadable presentations... This is not new. But no, most of them have always been very easy to dismiss. It takes time but mostly because of the quantity. Not much time per resume. It was just one of these thankless tasks that needed to be gotten through. (And HR - for good or bad - did much of that.)
Perhaps the problem is that we all root for a non-standard application to be a great find. And that yes, sometimes they are! Probably looking for these in job posting applications is not worth it anymore.
There is attaining employment and then there is attaining employment that doesn’t suck and those are very different beasts.
If you are competing with child like people for a low quality position targeting child like people it’s going to suck. Yes, there are many positions like that but I found it’s so much better to wait for positions that don’t suck.
Before my current job I was unemployed for 6 months, so there was a lot of pressure to land any job. The reality is that some jobs require far less time and energy to attain than others and that cost is completely irrespective to the quality of work. As a result it’s so much better to be patient and target a desirable job than just any job.
Moving forward I look at the tech stack qualifications of job postings and if I see a bunch of tools and frameworks listed, as opposed to expectations and responsibilities, I just discard that opening. It signals the employer wants a candidate to be a disposable tool monkey instead of a problem solver with ownership of responsibilities.
I don’t know in what world you live (or in what world I do live for that matter). I used to apply to one or two jobs in the past when I was looking for something new. I prepared each interview in advance for a couple of weeks. Nowadays it’s harder… but I apply to 3 or 4 job ads, not 450! It’s harder because obviously it takes two or 3 times what it used to take me. I have around 12 years of experience in a few different tech stacks, I read tech books regularly, I don’t have a good professional network, I do find jobs via linkedin, I’m based in western europe, and I have a masters degree in comp sci (but no one ever has asked me to show my degree).
In my cv I care a lot about the details: the typeface, margins, grammar (I use llms since i’m not a native speaker), bullet point order, succinctness, etc. Perhaps that counts for something. Then if I get an interview, that’s like already 50% of the job done. Im an easy guy imho. I have failed mainly systems design interviews, so that’s where I put some work nowadays.
Your CV and cover letter probably does a lot of the work at least in DACH.
The stories I hear from friends in HR, at varying company sizes, is the stuff of fiction. Apparently most people apply with utter trash, its no surprise they get filtered out if they can't even be bothered to present themselves properly.
At least at smaller companies, if you have something that actually looks like you tried, you immediately stand out. (After HR waded through all the bad ones)
We are also not talking about typos or gaps in the CV here, but things like: including everything expected in a CV, writing something even vaguely resembling a formal letter, or even, addressing the right company in it (bonus points if they are a direct competitor).
when was the last time you applied for 3 or 4 jobs and already got a job? Things got complicated quite recently, maybe since only one or two years.
3 months ago. Again, I do deep research for every company I apply for (e.g., search for employees in linkedin, check glassdoor reviews, check for potential code tasks in github, read the company/employee blogs, etc.). The research could take me several days up to a max. of one week (because more is just too much info too). I tailor (to a degree) the cv for the job (I try that at least I do have experience with 50% of what they ask, but let's say they ask for Python and I have mainly Ruby experience, well, I dedicate a week or so to brush up on Python and then I swap Ruby for Python on my cv. This doesn't work with every tech stack, of course, but works for the mainstream ones).
Another "trick" (common sense from my point of view) is to schedule if possible the first interview in the middle of the week. Typically I would schedule for a Wednesday/Thursday so that the second interview can land on the next Monday or Tuesday, that gives me at least 4-5 days to prepare for it. I try to avoid first interviews on Mondays because then it's more difficult to schedule something for the following week. I also notice that interviews with engineers scheduled in the afternoon (between 2 and 4pm) are rather "softer" than those in the mornings (I don't know why, perhaps everyone is just a bit sleepy after lunch perhaps?). I wear a white t-shirt to avoid any kind of subconscious prejudices on the side of the interviewers (you never know what kind of people are on the other side of the screen). And many more "tricks". I know that the core of the matter is to pass the challenges, but I do care about every single detail. I write down exactly how I'm gonna introduce myself, I prepare in advance potential questions like "tell me a project you've worked recently" to the point that I feel super confident talking about them. I don't leave anything to chance, but of course I may fuck it up sometimes (and I did 4 months ago in the systems design interview).
In any case, I could easily submit my cv dozens of times, but I find that preparing exhaustively for a couple of weeks for 1 or 2 jobs works best for me (based on previous experience. I have worked for around 5 companies so far in my entire career).
Traditional engineering companies in DACH area often ask to see your master's degree as they treat SW engineering like the other credentialed engineering professions(mechanical, etc) that sometimes carry liability.
Your spray and pray technique is flooding HR departments with AI generated applications. This blocks out people who are actually qualified for the role as they get drowned out by the "shameless" who apply for anything that "vaguely fits".
This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken.
"This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken."
You have this backwards. The only reason they have so many applicants in the first place is that the sector unemployment rate is so high and companies play games with evergreen postings.
>sector unemployment rate is so high
Except it's not. A lot of people just got used to quit job on Monday, have several offers by Friday (with a big salary boost) which was never the norm for professional employment.
Go check the stats. Sector unemployment is about 6%. Full employment rate is considered 4%. There are numerous layoffs over the past two years. It's taking people a year or more and hundreds of applications to find new jobs. The IT job market has actually shrunk this year.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/
That's still not "so high."
Again, check the stats. 6% is higher than full employment rate, higher than the overall rate, and is above the median unemployment rate for the past 100 years. It would be even higher except the participation rate is falling.
> It would be even higher except the participation rate is falling.
Prime age (25-54) labor force participation rate is steady and high (steady around the highest peak since the one at the height of the late-90s dotcom boom—which itself was the global maximum since the stat was tracked—for the last couple years.) Overall LFPR (16+) is dropping, but that's just the elderly population share growing.
A lot of people are looking for reasons why landing tech jobs isn't the turkey shoot that it was for the past 15 years or so. I'm unconvinced how much AI is the answer. I do think a lot of tech companies probably overhired during COVID for a variety of reasons. From what I see, professional hiring seems pretty normal even if certainly not overheated and you can argue about how it compares to the general economy by a percentage point or two.
Don’t blame the applicants. As the poster says, they have to do this.
This. OP is playing by the rules. The rules are silly and dysfunctional, but at least in the short term, that's the winning strategy. I'd probably do the same in his case (or at least a combination of sending maybe 5 well-made resumes or cover letters, to the companies that are the most promising, + 95 "spray and pray" ones for random fishing).
You got it. If you KNOW the company is ACTUALLY hiring and is serious about filling the role, and it's a good fit; take the extra time. But spray and pray helps counter ghost jobs which are impossible to detect until hindsight.
It's not a question of who to blame exactly. The poster's practice illustrates why sending resumes in response to job postings can't work anymore. From the point of view of the new hiring company or new job applicant, it doesn't matter who created the situation. What matters is what we do about it next. You can spray and pray but you certainly shouldn't expect it to "work".
For the poster: was their method a good use of their time? is the job "found" a good fit really? will they last in this position?
For the hiring company: was their method a good use of their time? is this person in any way a great fit? will they last in this position?
The poster complains that few companies sent him a rejection note! Why in the world would they? The poster was protective of their time, and should rightly expect the hiring companies to do the same.
what are you actually talking about.
Yes, the job i found is a perfect fit for me and my skillset. I did not fake my way into something.
and my point is: if you genuinely apply to a position and you never even hear back from them, not even to reject you, it doesn't make sense to only apply to a handful. again, emphasis genuine application; answered all their questions and the role is a fit for my resume. That's why you have to spray and pray.
Were your applications that good of a fit? You sent 450 applications for one hiring. Very roughly speaking this means you expect the employer to carefully consider 450 applications for their one job opening (assuming roughly speaking, that everyone does the same). "Carefully" is clearly not gonna happen. You sprayed and prayed but the employer is hiring one person for that one position (not quite true) and can't just spray and pray themselves.
You may have indeed found 450 real and fictitious openings that would be a great match for you. Yes, not impossible. Still the practice puts the employers themselves in a position where these resumes and answers cannot possibly be read. Not carefully, not at all. Again no blame one way or the other. I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants. Or hopefully, will see the light and consider other kinds of applications - such as network leads (but there are other options.)
My argument is about what we do next. My answer is that it cannot be job postings and answers to job postings. That ship has sailed. (And nonetheless, congrats on your new job.)
There's no good approach here. If you can't rely on hiring through the network, you need to apply. And then either you get hired or someone else. It's all broken, but we can't expect every single person to collectively choose the "cooperate" option in this massive game if prisoner's dilemma.
You get to fight with the army you have. This is what companies want… talent or qualification is not a primary objective.
my application was not "AI generated" nor was it for unrelated roles. Everything I applied to was in alignment with my resume. I would much rather be able to apply to a handful of jobs and for that to be enough. But I don't control the market, i can only participate in it.
Having been applying to a lot of roles I appreciate the post you made. I will hang in there. I started working on an Elixir application to grow my skills while applying. It is an exhausting process and I'm glad you got a job. Hopefully I will get one soon.
Thanks for your comment; remember that it's a marathon, not a race! Make sure you pace yourself, take breaks, and don't take rejections too personally.
I understand the spray and pray sentiment, but I cannot recommend enough hustling connections at the companies you’re targeting. Channel your inner SDR and stalk the company, the people you’d work with and the best guess at who would be your boss. Clearly don’t be creepy, but connecting on LinkedIn, mentioning you’ve applied, generally seeing what these people are up to is 100% free and you might even spot an event they’re attending that you could “bump in to them”. It’s so hard for someone not to do some sort of follow up if you’ve met them face to face and had a pleasant conversation such as recommending the hiring manager follow up with you etc. Having a direct connection means you can also prod someone every couple of weeks if you haven’t heard anything from your initial application. Most of the time people are embarrassed their company is being slow on processing good applicants. It’s hard but it really makes you stand out from the pure spray and prayers.
I assure you if i had done this, I would not have a job right now. This may have worked in the past, but not in this job market. It's a numbers game now, and when you've only got a few months until you're homeless you do not have the time to mess around.
Your sample size leaves much to be desired. I lean towards the takes that you're indistinguishable AI fluff with no real value. If you could have offered more value and you had more people you had worked with in the past that thought highly of your work you wouldn't have struggled nearly as much. I'm not sure why your former colleagues won't stick their neck out for you. But I do think that reflects more on you than the current hiring environment. It's in vogue to blame others for your own problems right now, so I understand where you're at and what you're struggling with to some degree. But it's not the immigrant's fault.
15 years of experience and you're a few months from being homeless? My friend, there's a lot you're not telling us.
Honestly, I disagree, my partner just did exactly this. 50+ “cold” applications with a single first round interview. Tracked down where the head of design of one company was going to be at an event, cornered her, chatted for 10mins and was then fast tracked through an interview process and had the job signed 2 weeks later. I know that is a sample of 1, but I’ve spent most of my time as the hirer, going the extra mile to stand out does make a difference even more so in this f’d up AI infected hiring world we’re now in.
Certainly, some companies just aren't hiring today so even knowing the right person probably doesn't help. But my (few) jobs over the past 25 years--including one right after 9/11--came through personal connections and didn't even involve a response to a job posting. In fact, in the last case, the job position was created for me. I'm a bit sorry I never checked to see if there was an associated posting on the jobs site.
But I've certainly been lucky. A few dodged bullets.
again, if i did this i would not have a job right now. This is my lived experience. This is what I had to do. It is not what I wanted to have done. That's why I wrote my post, because someone out there might really be struggling with this job market and need to hear about it.
I'm not saying taking a more personal approach doesn't work. Sure, if you've got an event you can go to or you've got a network you can tap, do that. But neither were options for me. Nobody in my network was hiring, and the one event i could have attended (where relevant people would be) sold out within a few hours.
Fair, proof is in the pudding and you scored a job with your approach. So congrats and 100% not knocking that, hopefully my comment provides a bit of perspective from the other side of the fence.
Also thank you for sharing your experience here.
Spray and pray is why it takes everyone longer to get hired. Companies have to sift through thousands of resumes of people that aren't qualified and shouldn't have applied in the first place.
Common advice on Reddit is also to lie about your experience.
The irony is that because of both of these, it takes longer to get a response and get through the interview process.
Companies started this war when they laid off employees & began relying on applicant tracking systems (ATSes) to use algorithm-driven approaches to finding applicants well-suited to their open roles. Don't blame the people applying to jobs for also using AI to try and game the system in their favor.
Applicants lying on resumes does seem like it won't end well for them, even if it does mean they may get more initial callbacks from companies about open roles. But given how things are very much a numbers name right now, I also understand why an applicant would do it.
Layoffs are not a new thing. The 80ies were already seeing the combination of recurring layoffs at the same time as a thick book of open positions - for the same companies. Layoffs were frequent, openings were plentiful.
Resume processing software indeed was a problem from the start, at first leading to resumes stuffed with BS keywords.
I feel that what are (somewhat) recent are (1) the brazenness of the whole process, combined with (2) the time-intensive-ness of the interview process. All the way to different people applying and showing up for the job. That is new. Hundreds of responses for each and every job posting, that is recent. Just the lid on the coffin of a process that has been breaking for a while.
Exactly! So much of this is automated on their side already, as a job seeker you want to move as quickly as you can and automate as much as you can without resorting to lying or spam.
Sounds to me like these companies and those candidates deserve each other. I’d leave them to it.
Network. Talk to your friends and acquaintances. Go to meetups and talks, maybe even conferences. Speak to some recruiters. Find one who isn’t too full of shit.
Good advice except: my friends and acquaintances are either unemployed too or working for companies not hiring for my role/region. there are no meetups in my city and the conferences one can attend only happen a few times a year and sell out very quickly. And yes, I did speak to several recruiters and have probably spoken to dozens in my career. None have been useful in the end.
Given that, what is one to do? you can either quit tech and go work at whole foods, or you can try another tactic. That's what I did. And it actually landed me a perfect job that pays well and is aligned with my skill set.
Game theory says if everyone else is spraying and praying, i miss out if i don't do the same. Spray and pray is not my choice, i'd rather apply to a handful of jobs and that be enough.
I also discourage lying on your resume that's just a genuine waste of everyone's time.
I disagree. If the market is stacked against you and it takes even 30 attempts to get a job through the usual job seeking process, then I question whether you're truly going to be happy and satisfied with whatever you happen to get offered after months of searching. If you're lucky, maybe. But the most probable reality for most people is that you'll be an expendable employee with zero leverage in a position that doesn't suit you. Not to mention the probability of getting serious burnout from getting rejected and ignored hundreds of times. A fair, healthy job market does not look like this.
If something is not working out, change up your approach. The first obvious step is to try networking instead of applying. Perhaps start something on your own, becoming a B2B service provider rather than an employee. Or try to out-compete the companies which have rejected you. Be a stalwart, not a pushover.
Considering it took 450 applications, perhaps this isn't the best advice. Perhaps in the future, employers will use a centralized system that tracks and limits the amount of applications a person can do to prevent this sort of AI spam
upgrade to our premium tier for 10 more chances to beg to afford to feed yourself per day!
Don't hate the player, hate the game. Why would you want to limit people from applying to jobs? as if there are not enough barriers already. I'm not advocating for spamming to roles that are not a fit; everything i applied to aligned with my resume.
Wet dream of HR. Top-tier dystopian system that gives the companies ultimate control over whether you can afford food and shelter.
This is probably my approach (maybe minus the AI), I do think networking and reaching out to people can yield better results but I was never any good at that
These are very bad advice, and it's clear why you needed to send 450 applications.
I've only once applied to a job I didn't get, and I've had more than 10 jobs.
It's called networking.
Here is one advice to rule them all:
Talk to people and build a network for yourself.
Indeed, the situation reminds me of those people on reddit who invite 20 people to a party and are surprised when nobody shows.
Of course there is supposed to be competition when applying to positions, but you should have a good idea of your chances of getting a job before investing/wasting your (and their) time.
Thank you very much for the insight. I also do have 15 years of IT QA Engineer Experience. Nice to know from a tech vet their journey to the path of job that will never be a permanent position. Good luck!
Thanks for your comment, and good luck in your search!
In 10 who interviewed me, only 1 or 2 knew about the job. All others recruiters did not have a single clue on they were talking about.
Job was about Linux admin and I told one about bash programming and that I like and know about it. At the end, he says "there are some things I did not hear like scripting in Linux..." and I just went ok, thanks for you time, bye.
This type of thing is why I was essentially forced to start my own solo company. There isn’t a force on earth which could make me subject myself to all that.
Enjoy your jobs those who will. I’m choosing a different life, even if it doesn’t dump endless money into my bank account.
"forced entrepreneurship" is a thing, and i commend you for the effort. I tried my hand at it, but was not able to find strong PMF despite some early sales.
That’s too bad. I’m in the grey area with some hits and misses. It’s a tough market but I’m surviving.
What did you try if you don’t mind my asking?
I built a browser extension that turned X into a CRM. Did 35 demo's to people and most of them were excited for it, even made a woman cry (in a good way). got ~16 sales but things have plateaued, and actual usage has been mixed for a variety of reasons, namely people use their phones more than their computers.
I also had a tough time finding a job this year. Ended up somewhere great but the process was a drag:
https://jck.earth/2025/04/06/finding-a-rails-job.html
> 3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2.
I hope no one outside of highly experienced individuals applies this rule when looking for a job in 2025.
why subject yourself to a 5 hour coding exercise before you've even spoken to someone at the company?
Because there's no other choice for entry/mid-level positions (and some lower end senior ones). Thankfully they are not 5 hours long, that's something I would also avoid.
For instance, in my recent job search for a new grad role, I had to do an OA for every company but Jane Street and Databricks (props to them).
There is always a choice.
To be clear, i am talking about: you apply, they send you a response (sometimes automated) telling you to do a couple hours of work, and only then will they decide if they want to speak with you.
This a great way to waste one's limited time on a role that might not even be a fit. If they aren't even willing to spend 15 minutes talking to you first, i would encourage everyone, at any level, to bounce. If they are at all serious, they'll speak with you first.
And I'll also highlight: you never know when they are using you for their own goals, like AI training. Or if it's a ghost job. Or if they aren't hiring for your state. Lots of stuff can come up that would make your work null & void.
To prevent burn out, you really have to guard your time. companies can structure things to be highly optimized for them, and very expensive for you.
> Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?"
I don't see this as a asinine/foolish/stupid thing to ask. It's helpful for both sides:
- potential employee can provide an honest opinion on their motivation, in a targeted, specific way to highlight their talent. - offering company can use it for evaluating mutual fit, as well as filter out generic trash applications.
Pretty much. There is a lot to be said about silly HR questions, but this one I consider legit. And after all - if nothing excites you about changing what you are doing for 1/3 of your waking life - just be honest, say "this job is not exciting and I'm already bored and unmotivated from the start". The outcome might be not what you want, though.
This type of question, if the company truly wants an answer to it, should only be asked at the end of an interview process.
Most people have no idea what a job is actually like before they have the job, much less during the interview process.
One way to approach job interviews is that one is interviewing the company while it is interviewing you.
asked at the beginning gives the potential employer the chance to inform the candidate about any misunderstandings about the position, focus, etc.
saves a lot of time for both sides.
It's fine to ask during an interview but shouldn't be 'asked' as part of the initial application step.
Yeah. Even without being overly candid, I don't think I'd ever have had an issue giving a fairly lucid answer to that question even if I left out the "And I need to eat part."
If there's some naive optimism in the answer, the company can take that into account in the context but may also decide the candidate is going to be disappointed or is BSing.
Did you try using a recruiter? Not one that works for a company but one that matchmakes between candidates and companies. My last three jobs I've used a recruiter and this worked great as a filter.
In my experience, they were absolutely awful.
In the old days, they were awesome. More like talent agents, than matchmakers. They were usually older folks that advocated for you, maintained extensive Rolodexes (shows how long ago that was), which they exercised on your behalf (basically, they "networked" for you), and made pretty significant commissions. I believe that top-tier executive recruiters still work like this.
These days, they seem to be very young, and, I suspect, make a great deal less money.
Maybe you found a diamond in the rough with that one recruiter. In the 25 years I've worked in tech, I've only worked with one (1) recruiter that was good, & they helped me land two positions over the course of a decade. The rest ranged from benign to harmless or incompetent.
How do you go about finding a recruiter? (for technical roles like system engineers)
Message them on LI
The problem is there is no real way to validate. With AI, every person has a really good looking resume that matches the job description.
Real verifiable references, referrals and LinkedIn recommendations are more important than ever.
What's your location?
> ones that used AI for interviewing me
> Use AI to generate your resume
> Use AI to fill out [...] job application questions
The irony is strong on this one, and one person's "asinine" question is another person's "thoughtful" question. It's a bit hard to take this seriously.
thanks for sharing and congrats. solid stuff! I would add that expect tripple the amount of applying and ghosting if you are mid-level.
I would appreciate it if you could describe the interview process in more detail for the position you accepted.
Sure! it looked like this:
Congratulations on landing the job! I have to ask though: Why do you think the "What excited you about this role?" question was asinine? IMHO questions like those are totally valid, even in a technical interview.
The answer is literally always “It will allow me to pay my bills. This won’t be a giddy, young-love crush of a hobby for me. Hire me and I’ll just do good work, not cheerlead.”
The question is a synecdoche for “How awesome do you think we are, and so how much will we be able to coast on our respect for you as a result?”
Not true. I can think of a bevy of reasons that I'd be excited for a role that have nothing to do with being a cheerleader. For example, working in the banking industry for many years, I was tied down with a very rigid, sometimes antiquated tech stack. I started applying to smaller companies because I was excited about the prospect of having more autonomy and being exposed to a more modern tech stack.
I'd love to hear this answer. So much better to work with honest people, who's not afraid to call out BS.
yep! you nailed it. "because I have bills to pay" is the true reason. But they want some flowery "your mission really resonates with me" BS answer.
Congratulations on getting hired in this garbage market! I wish you well!
senior engineer for what?
"Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?""
Most job interviews involve this and many other similar type moronic questions. It's one of the many "joys" of the process.
Nice advice. How long did the process take? How many hours a day did you spend doing all this? You say, pace yourself, send a few hours, does that mean it took you months to find and apply to 450 jobs? Did you read company reviews on Glassdoor?
Yeah, I was also curious how many months those 450 applications were submitted over the course of.
approx 2 months: many days i'd bang out ~50 job applications, then wait a few days for new roles to show up, and repeat.
50 job applications in a few hours?
yep! most positions usually takes only a few minutes to apply to, and some are quicker than others.
> 1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless.
I just skipped the rest of the steps after reading (1) and completely stopped reading after (6).
This is poor advice and it is no wonder you had to send 450+ applications and I think people reading this would want to do this with less steps and less than 450+ applications.