Context: Searching for a new senior level software development job over a 9 week period in summer 2025.
- Focused mostly on data engineering and backend roles that are in-person or hybrid in the SF Bay Area.
- Leads from recruiters on LinkedIn were much more likely to lead to interviews+offers.
- The winning offer came through my personal network.
- I mostly used Hiring.cafe for prospecting. They’re a scraper with an interface I didn’t hate.
I guess the approach is different.
I do 1-3 high quality applications and get invites to an in person meeting for all of them. Often times getting an offer from all as well and then I decide. Each one takes about 3-5 days in total including research on the company, completely custom cover letter, proof reading, getting feedback from friends that work in the field, and hand picked example code projects from my repo or even throwing together a quick prototype related to the job offer. Been doing it this way for 12 years.
If you do a shotgun approach with 160 low quality ones then it doesn’t surprise me that half don’t reply.
If I did 160 applications the way I usually do them, I would literally be writing them for nearly 2 (two!) years… thats the only reason I assume yours are low quality.
How old are you and when was the last time you looked for a job?
you can guess from this.
Last time was this year.
This sounds to me like we need to move to Germany. It’s not uncommon for people in the US to apply to hundreds, or even thousands, of jobs and get a single-digit number of interviews (or offers, in industries where interviewing is uncommon) out of it, regardless of effort put into the application. Most applications are rejected before a human ever reads them.
To be fair, I only worked at small/medium companies ( <100 people ) and a quarter of the time I had a contact there from some networking event.
That’s an entirely different situation then. That’s just the power of networking
Networking is 100% the easiest way to get a job. The people that have networking don’t need advice. 99% of the job hunting advice is with the assumption you don’t have a network you can rely on for finding jobs. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be having trouble finding a job
I’m pretty sure some places would just skip over your application (with some probability) because the sheer amount of applications they receive
Oh yes.
As the old joke goes:
“Well, we don’t want our future employee to be unlucky… *grabs half of the printed applications and tosses them in the trash*”
My friend who works in marketing usually try to find out the hiring manager and also emailed them directly while also providing something similar to the commenter above (3-month marketing and content plan instead of a sample project) and it’s basically 100% success rate for getting a response for him.