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Comment by ripped_britches | Hacker News Reader

As someone who automates everything and normally loves this type of thing, my approach for job hunting has been way different. Instead of spray and pray, I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise. Everything 100% manual and focused, no more than 8 total companies.

Maybe spray and pray works if you’re more junior, but later in your career you’ll want to be very picky about where you spend your time interviewing because the roles are long term and have a huge impact on your life.

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Basically my approach as well. The problem is that your well-thought-through application will get lost in a sea of applicants (many using tools similar to the one shown above). The tools used by the recruiters/HR also suck and can be easily gamed (ie strategically spreading keywords/phrases throughout the resume even if the candidate has no actual experience). The end result is hiring managers cannot find good candidates to interview, and good candidates cannot get interviews.

The core problem is not that the systems suck but that so many people in IT lost their jobs in the last 2-3 years so that they don't have a choice other than to spray-and-pray (in the end of the day you need to put the food on the table).

Things won't improve until hiring recovers (increase in labor demand), and some IT professionals probably will pivot to other industries (decrease in labor supply), as it happened in 2000 and again in 2008.

This sounds like a good and noble pursuit, but I would be able to take exactly one ghosting or premature rejection before abandoning it completely. There are so many BS reasons applications are ignored, I can’t see this approach working well. Maybe if you can network your way to a manager or something

There are no foolproof methods. Shotgunning makes it much harder to get past the recruiter screen. Yes the high touch method leads to larger feelings of rejection but its also more likely to actually work.

That investment isn't worth it to just be ghosted

Agree. You need to see it from the other side. Most likely, they are receiving 100+ applications, so the chance that your application will be seen is too low.

This.

I also limit myself on how many applications I see in a day (no more than 20 on a busy day, 50 on a not so busy day) so that I give every resume a fair read. A team can only do so much in a day. It's disheartening when you see a blatant AI use (and it goes into the trash bin right away).

Do you have a technical background? 50 seems quite low for someone to get the gist of the resumes and have a sense of the applicants.

If recruiting departments really suffer at parsing about 50 apps per day per recruiter, I can see why this got so bad so quickly.

I think GP means they stop at this point to ensure that they are giving all of the resumes a pretty fair shake by being fresh.

Afaik, any kind of slush-pile reading (including grading, which is probably the best researched) tends to get less fair as the process wears on the reader.

GP isn't optimizing for finishing the pile, but for making the most of what's in it.

Yep. You got it.

I do. Credentials-wise I have BS in one of the STEM and currently enrolled in MS CS with intent to pursue PhD in Maths/CS. I have around 8 YoE and worked from Series B startups to IBs.

I want to give everyone a fair shake (including reading cover letters) and for me, resume fatigue sets in if I read more than 50.

I think you missed this part, emphasis mine:

I spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there role-wise.

Figuring out how to get there means figuring out how not to get ghosted, not just blasting off a quick application and crossing fingers. I imagine that probably means reaching out to people in their network at the company, learning about their hiring practices and how people get hired there, etc.

When was the most recent time you tried this, and for what level of role was it? I believe this could absolutely be effective pre-2023, or for very high level roles. I don't think it's currently viable advice for ~Senior level engineers, who are currently competing against thousands of other applications, many of whom were generated specifically for the given role.

Speaking as someone currently involved in hiring for Senior roles at my company: We have hundreds of resumes, most of which are garbage. We're not seeing a lot of evidence of large numbers of people working hard to tailor their resume to the role, so doing so would absolutely help you in our case.

Even more so, if we got a referral right now from within the company we'd absolutely skip them straight to the interviews. Dealing with resumes sucks right now as an employer, and we want to avoid that stage as much as you do.

I’m not going to get into my specific work history in the spirit of trying not to put more metadata about myself out there, but I can confidently say referrals are still king and I have witnessed those results.

I have a hard time believing that the market is as dire as people say it is at least right now approaching 2025. I see peers who are getting laid off get back into jobs, it’s just taking a few months longer than it used to. It’s just not a magical hot job market like it used to be.

A good indicator is to look at Meta’s employee count. It’s down dramatically since 2022 but they still have more employees working for them than the last day of 2021.

https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/employees/

Or look at layoffs.fyi, where layoffs are reported at their lowest level since early 2022.

When was the last time that worked for you and what's your background and the types of roles you were applying for?

So do you network yourself into the companies then to get an interview? Or do you apply online?

I'd like to know more about a manual approach.

I think both approaches are valid. I took the automated approach to online dating, married now. So that worked out.

Taking the automated approach for companies will probably work in a similar fashion as online dating. However, unlike online dating, I feel very strong targeted approaches have a chance of working better as long as you get to the interview stage.

Targeted approaches don't work with online dating as the biggest issue is figuring out with whom you have chemistry. For work, there's no such thing to figure out - not to the extent as it is required like romantic intimacy.

> Targeted approaches don't work with online dating

What would a targeted approach to online dating be?

From GP:

> spend a week or so deeply researching where I want to work and figure out how to get there

Replace "where I want to work" with "who I want to date" and it sounds concerning.

> What would a targeted approach to online dating be?

Courting someone, winning someone over. It's done in the offline world. I haven't thought about it much when it comes to online dating. I should've been a bit sharper on that.

When it comes to dating, I always went for the high volume approach. So I really shouldn't be speaking about a targeted approach. I guess I did because I was trying too hard to draw a parallel to applying to jobs.

So my mind just went:

              applying online    online dating
  volume           1                  2
  targeted         3                  4

But perhaps quadrant 4 doesn't really exist and I really was just shoehorning approaches of applying to jobs online into online dating because I saw this 2x2 matrix.

With that said, an LLM to a) generate a LONG-list and b) help you zero in on your short-list; is something I would pay for.

I agree! Not that it’s worked as of yet.

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