It's always been the case, but now it's more true than ever: your professional network is super important. If somebody on the inside can recommend you, your chances of getting an offer are good compared to throwing your resume on the pile.
While not as bad as applying yourself, they can be pretty damned awful.
The problem is companies would actually have to make compelling offers to qualified people.
Now people act like they must have this ridiculous firehose of resumes to sort through, then have non-technical HR gals sort and filter out based on whatever random criteria they use, and then by the time it gets to the hiring managers - they still have no idea if this person is a complete idiot or has any skills at all. The qualified people you actually want to hire don’t want to be treated like idiots or liars either.
I just don’t feel it has to be this way - there is zero value in a firehose unless you were looking for desperate and cheap people.
However I'll agree with you, the non-technical people sorting CVs on unknown criteria is something that became very widespread lately, and is certainly part of what's contributing to the problem.
Perhaps managers starting to do it by themselves rather than having HR in the middle is the answer to the problem.
You have to appear like a real human. The candidates in demand get recruiter spam all week long. If you go LLM slop canon on their inbox they're not going to respond.
Cold outreach has a low response rate. It's worth doing, but you can't rely on it. You have to go through all angles.
Typically I'd be doing a mix of my own cold outreach, public job postings, an internal company referral program, and for difficult roles a trusted external recruiter who I know is good for candidates.