In the six months I was unemployed more than a year ago I applied to one or two dozen jobs directly and that went nowhere. The only traction came from working with third party recruiters. There was one week when I landed three interviews that resulted in two offers each with prestigious firms but my wife did not want to relocate so I had to drop them. After that I felt like giving up. Part of wanting to quit is that I did not want to write JavaScript professionally anymore and really didn’t care to lie on a resume to compete with people that cannot program only to work in low expectation environments to deliver low quality work.
About 6-8 weeks later I received two offers for different lines of work. One paid more and was more prestigious but required a long commute. The second was work from home. I took the second one and have since been promoted into leadership.