There are, in the simplest terms, two hurdles you have to overcome to get hired.
1. Get an interview
2. Interview well enough to get an offer
There’s various approaches to either, and it sounds like (1) isn’t a problem?
For (2), if you interview and test as well as you say you do, it’s likely the case that you are recognized as somebody who would be a good fit, but they have more viable candidates than open positions, and you’re basically losing a coin flip.
If this is happening a lot, it might mean that you come across as unlikeable. Given two equally competent candidates, they are choosing the more likeable person.
Key metrics, for sadists so inclined, might be—
A) Number of applications
B) application-to-callback ratio,
C) Interview-to-offer ratio
You could make this more fine-grained, but that’s it.
I was part of a mass firing in April last year, and found work in August. I had a similar experience; I had enough on my resume to have several interviews per week, so I never put much effort into optimizing that.
I, in retrospect, was usually failing interviews that were open-ended, and the interviewer had a long list of questions to fit into a short time, and I believe we weren’t getting through all the questions. I was talking too much—I get excited about Software Development—and they were content to let me. Even if they really liked me, what were they supposed to do when they have half a blank form at the end of the call?
I was getting into late stages with many of the companies, definitely completing all stages before you would expect an offer. This happened a few times too. It happens. There are lots of good candidates, I guarantee that the reasons would seem very petty and capricious if you could see what was said when the hiring committee met. I’ve been on both sides. That’s life.
Two months is not a long time in a job search, unfortunately. Many companies you’ve applied to are barely organized enough to start screening candidates within 30 days.
As for myself, I eventually had a friend/colleague from my former company refer me for an interview at the company I ended up at. And after I got one offer I found myself with three the same week, after months of searching. And no income, pregnant wife, mortgage payments, etc. Fun times!
It’s nerve-wracking and frustrating to look for a job and constantly be interviewing. I often say that job hunting is the most humiliating thing someone can do. It’s exhausting and awful. It’s hard to be likeable when you do something that is exhausting and awful all day. I set some target for daily applications, and made sure I had free time for interviews, and was technically ready. I trusted my skills, so I actually spent far more time trying to stay sane and personable and energetic for the calls I was getting.
I think committing to the numbers game is sound advice. If 100 applications gets you ten interviews, and you need 10 interviews to get an offer, it’ll be somewhere between 0 and some hundreds of applications to get an offer.
The good news is that you only need one offer, and your search is done.
The bad news is that the only variable you can really affect without improvements to your applications or interviewing skills, is to increase application volume.
The worse news is that a lot of really terrible applicants and bots are flooding employers with not-good applications, which makes this whole thing more awful for everybody. Which increases the value of a referral.
I read this unironically before every interview I do, and recommend it to all the developers who ask me for interviewing tips: https://codeformore.com/can-you-pretend-to-be-normal-for-up-...
Good luck! Stay sane!