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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

When you ask them why they turned you down, what do they say? Have you tried asking for resume feedback?

It is very unusual for companies in the US to cite any reason for turning down. It doesn't really help them, and while it might be nice and help the rejected candidate, the probability that said candidate will believe he was wrongly turned down and file a lawsuit is just too high for comfort.

It is unusual to come unprompted, but I got feedback 80% of the times I asked.

Most of the job ads (Dice, Indeed, etc.) obfuscate the actual company behind a recruiter and no-reply email addresses. I would love to reply and ask, but in 99% of cases the reply email is noreply@somerecruitmentfirm.com.

I have talked to a couple of real people, one over the phone and one over email. In both cases I feel like I had a good rapport built. The first guy turned me down because his company only had the budget for a junior programmer. The second guy hasn't yet responded to my reply to him, but I'm hopeful.

Overall, I've probably applied to 100 different places (mostly remote jobs) and haven't even received rejections--let alone a reply--from the vast majority.

It pains me to no end that I am seemingly not allowed to simply talk to a real person. I understand why; I'm not naive. It still sucks.

Since you mentioned Indeed, I thought I'd mention I had a similar sort of "resume black hole" experience. For a long time, I wasn't really thinking and just applied through those job board sites, directly from the posting. Later, I started using those sites just to research companies, and then go to the company site and apply there, and all of sudden I get five responses in a week. If there's no company listed, a lot of times you can google portions of the job description and it leads to a real company. My resume formatting would often be messed up by the job board sites, so it probably went straight to the garbage. There's really no reason to go through a recruiter if you can avoid it.

I've been doing that whenever possible. I even have my wife helping! It does work for some of the posts where the actual employer's name is listed, but for recruiter-obfuscated posts, it's much more difficult. Sometimes we are able to reverse-engineer the original company using location and other information, though. It's still a draining experience.

What's your timeline here? 100 resume sends over how long a period?

If I can give some unsolicited advice, I would recommend

1. Put your resume on Monster. Hordes of recruiters here will give you a lot of phone calls. 50% will be for bad fit jobs, oh well, sucks for the recruiter, take the call and use it as practice. Maybe they'll get you an interview, boom, interview practice. You might even get an offer this way which you can use as leverage against other positions (or just to add urgency to other applications).

2. Indeed jobs, in my experience, are absolute garbage. I don't waste my time on that site anymore.

3. LinkedIn and Angel.co have the highest quality positions that I could find.

4. Connect to as many people a day on LinkedIn as you are capable of - this will allow you to make more 1st level connections which will then allow you to send more "hey, do you know anything more about this position? I'm looking to apply and want to know what your experience at x company is" type messages.

5. Stack Overflow jobs is a great portal for remote jobs.

6. Those code-test-find-you-job sites I've heard good stories from, can't remember names off the top of my head, sorry.

7. Took me 250 resume sends to get my last job, which led to 30 phone calls which led to 10 code tests / interviews which led to 3 offers. Food for thought.

Many of the job ads are fake. They are simply going through the necessary motions to prove that they couldn't find a qualified candidate; then they can qualify for an H1B visa.

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