I was contacted by a company recruiter for a small healthcare SaaS in California and had 3 interviews recently. When I looked up the job, only 7 people had applied in 2 weeks on LinkedIn. They are a very real company with very real people, but their job post is not getting seen (it's not a promoted post).
My next AI project will be to scrape LinkedIn jobs, analyze it for repost/promoted behavior, group it by consulting/headhunters vs company job post, eliminate duplicates, and filter based on my skillset and hard-no qualities (such as can't work if I live in California, must be in EST but I'm in PST timezone, requires Java experience, etc).
I'm currently also looking for a dev job. So you have 15 years of experience, live in California and struggle to find something? That sounds a bit demotivating to me lol, because I'm kinda half of all of that or a bit less.
I also like your LinkedIn analysis idea, should try that maybe, too.
But still good point that there might be promoted jobs and non-promoted ones, maybe it's worth creating an own job scraper.