I'm in this industry and doing well because of recruiter reaching out to me (multiple times) and not vice versa. The whole idea of applying for jobs just doesn't seem to work at all.
On the other end a recruiter reached out to me and I'll be doing the final interview with their VP next week.
I don't think we can draw conclusion at that stage (we are a dataset of 2..). But I'd love to have access to the LinkedIn dataset to figure out if applying for jobs is broken at scale.
It's ugly and mimicks real life... more effort gives better results but life isn't fair and never has been. Luck factors but always fight on multiple fronts.
My major are slightly mismatched though.
Then I stopped bothering when it's super obvious that isn't working. Particularly, on Linkedin you could see the number of people that has applied (maybe a paid feature, i don't remember now). And for any entry level software engineering and data science position it's always in the 100s.
The one recruiter that I had contact with did more work than all of these. I've since switched jobs (to one of the FAANG) and that was through recruiter too.
I also don't think field matters until one gets to PhD levels, which I did not.