But looking back on my 30 years of working (including in high school), every job I've ever had I got through personal referrals or recruiter reach-outs. I've gotten to interviews before but never actually taken a job without a personal connection.

Will say what's gotten me hired are my projects eg. robotics or getting published online for hardware stuff, I work in the web-cloud space primarily though, hardware would be cool but hard to make that jump