I've been looking for a few months. I've got 20 years of professional dev experience, including in an eye-catching domain and haven't used LLMs in the process either.
Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous income where she said they were struggling with the number of applications, that I didn't hear back from).
It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any answers, but good luck with your search.
Similar story here. 20+ years experience in leading dev, pm, and UX teams. Launched multiple 0-1 market leading products, worked with dozens of Fortune 500s.
Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen and one interview.
Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have multiple opportunities - companies creating positions so they can hire me.
Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting and who are hiring for their teams - the number of ghost jobs, and frozen but posted positions is staggering. Something is fundamentally broken in the hiring world today.
If this is a true story, then it means there’s no point in applying at all. You should just go full LinkedIn, and networking, preferably when you still have a job.
I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.
I think that's more or less true. Outside of school (one of which was way back in spray and pray physical letter days), my few jobs have always been through personal connections. Any online applications pretty much resulted in nada.
This is the way. Submitting an application is useless. We've reverted back to networking for jobs. You have to connect with actual humans, as nobody is going to wade through 5k resumes and pick yours out no matter how good it is...
Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous income where she said they were struggling with the number of applications, that I didn't hear back from).
It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any answers, but good luck with your search.