Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired
As the title says, I have applied to over 450 positions. Most companies did not even send me a rejection. Ghost jobs are a thing, so are fake roles to get you to signup/join some rando job board.
I interviewed for a director of engineering role, and all interviews went well, but they ghosted me at the end.
I did several take homes and all were accepted, but companies dragged their feet on next steps.
I did reject a few kinds of roles: ones that used AI for interviewing me, ones that had me do a coding challenge as the first step, and jobs that had "no working hours" and expected you to be "on" 24/7.
Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?" and would say things like "don't use AI! we want your true self" or would go so far as to try to get you to agree to their AI interview policy. As If.
I eventually did get hired as a software architect. the company that hired me was very professional, respectful, forward thinking (i used windsurf during the interview) and did not play games with me. They had a 4-step interview process, and asked a lot of good questions. One of the best interview processes of my career.
My advice to other engineers on the job market:
1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless.
2) Always be willing to walk. Protect your time. Don't waste your time on lengthy job applications that take too long to complete. Some hiring managers will gladly waste your time. (one job application explicitly wanted you to spend 20 minutes filling out theirs)
3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2.
4) You can probably do a lot of different roles, "prompt engineer" is a real job title companies are hiring for, for example.
5) Work a couple of different job platforms. For example I used linkedin, dice, ziprecruiter, weworkremotely, and rubyonremote and a few others.
6) Use AI to generate your resume, but feed it all the context of your work history (don't misrepresent your skills)
7) Use AI to fill out asinine job application questions, but if they ask you thoughtful questions answer those yourself. I got the interview for director of engineering because i answered authentically to thoughtful questions.
8) Pace yourself. Spend a few hours a day at it then come back in a day or two and go again.
9) Work on a side project or learn a new lang/framework in parallel.
10) Interviewing is like dating, everyone is looking for something different, and some don't really know what they want. Not a you problem.
11) If they use workday for their job applications, bounce. It's the worst.
12) It takes time as roles become available. The job you end up getting might not open until 2 months from now. see #1.
In my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
If you have an "in" with somebody at the company you're applying to, then yes, that absolutely increases your chances of your resume at least being looked at by someone in the hiring chain. Barring that, though, cold calls are extremely unlikely to get you anywhere. As far as job applications go, AI-driven applicant tracking systems (ATSes) are what handle the majority of resume submissions now, and they absolutely does do not give a shit about thoughtful, artisanal resumes or job applications. More likely than not, it's a matter of what keywords an automated system seems in your resume that determines whether the company even bothers reaching out to you. And given that most companies are seeing 1-2 orders of magnitude more job applications now, it's incredibly unlikely a human is going to see your resume unless it passes the ATS filtering process.
Resume spray-and-pray is unlikely to get you good results, but that's not what the OP described. They used AI as a tool to automate parts of the resume preparation & submission process, & spent time on the parts they believed mattered.
As for pooh-poohing the 450 positions OP applied to, idk how many months they spent searching, but in terms of raw numbers that's pretty reasonable IMO. I submitted my resume to 150-175 companies over the course of 3 months before I found my job last year, and that was just before the tech job market started tanking harder -- those numbers seem low to me in today's market.
Gotta disagree with you there, given the post says:
> My advice to other engineers on the job market:
> 1) Spray and pray.
An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.
Spray and pray overwhelms the employers with low quality applicants, which leads to a lot of broad generalizations and generic qualifications being used to weed things down to something manageable.
For those who don’t want to put effort into applying, they should just be throwing their resume into a pool, imo.
I say this as someone who just posted his resume on a job site and waited until I got a call. It took about 8-12 months, but have been working at that job for almost 20 years now.
When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
This works for some folks, and not for others. Many of us have already exhausted our network, at which point it’s still spray and pray even if you are reaching out directly to folks.
It’s also very different for remote folks vs. folks in the hubs.
If someone can do that then they should. But if someone needs advice or information on how to get hired they probably don't have access to the methods that get them the easy hires.
Fun fact for anyone approaching this from a systems thinking perspective: usernamed7's experience is the invisible hand of the market signalling that there are around 450 too many people applying for software positions. Some people are going to have to give up; there is no other way.
When I was a university student, I accidentally established my own network just by getting involved in my department as a TA and undergrad researcher. My department would openly advertise those opportunities, and I was shocked at how few of my peers took them up on it. This involvement revealed opportunities that were really only disseminated within this TA/research community. While technically anyone could have applied to those internships and jobs, you'd be hard-pressed to even know about them if you weren't involved in this community to begin with. At that point, I "beat" the competition by playing somewhere where there's a lot less of it. It's not about being any "better" than the competition, but by strategically avoiding it.
This is how real networking looks like, and how someone (in my case, a lowly student) with little established experience and history can do it. The particulars can vary from one person and environment to another, but the trick is to start small and follow the unique opportunities presented to you.
Networking has always been the best way to get another job. Sadly, like most success in this world, it usually comes down to "who you know".
That's a different thing to applying to 'public' jobs ads, which often have an AI discard most applications, then they just throw 50% in file 13, filter another 50% with stupid questions, and so on, and that's even if the job is real.
The same as for the freelancer sites; there's a high chance your applications won't even be read, so it's really not worth spending quality time on them.
The point of the comments here is that things ARE different today.
I would never have imagined that "AI resume" would be a good idea, but ...
Looking at the posts on HN from the hiring side, total cheats are making it past the screening regularly. There's a lot of problems in the hiring process right now, and they aren't just from the economic downturn.
People who need jobs (or want different jobs) have to play the game with the current rules, not wait around for the rules to change (again).
Of course, if you don't have a network, that's probably not a great place to be in absent credentials that make you stand out.
But nobody in my network of ~100 is in either situation. They are either also jobless, or their company is not hiring or, what they are hiring for is not applicable to me (such as wrong role/country/TZ/stack).
If you can, getting a job through personal connections and networking has always yielded the best results for both parties in my experience. In 20 years, only my first graduate job didn’t come this way.
I also saw no mention of speaking to an actual recruiter/headhunter, which is the only way other than the aforementioned personal intros and networking that I/we have hired anyone with 15 years of experience that I can remember.
I’m not surprised it took 450 attempts.
As a hiring manager now, I hate, hate, hate the spray and pray applicants. Wastes a vast amount of my time weeding them out. And I'm probably rejecting actually good candidates now, as I just immediately reject anyone who doesn't seem to have thought even a little about the position they're applying for.
What if you recently changed specialization, or moved city or even country? What if it's been a few years since you were in actual employment, you were working on startups, or had a career break or whatever. What if you have way more than 15 years experience. And so many other situations, which might result in your network being limited or not that good for finding the kind of work you want.
The point is, if you apply to advertised jobs, it's a numbers game.
I can't hire those people, they're unlucky
So the OP numbers game is a safer bet and one that everyone is playing right now. Not that I am playing this game but not everyone has the option to remain unemployed for this long.
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This is a much better approach and while others say that it doesn't work for them or it worked for them, well that is the point.
It is meant to give you an unfair advantage to anyone else applying to the same role who is applying straight through the jobs page which there are too many applicants.
This is why employers fast-track applicant referrals rather than go through the typical jobs page as the latter is their last resort ONLY IF there are no internal hires, referrals or existing employees that can fill the role.
Here'a a recent case for a remote software engineering role for a US based company:
A position is posted publicly, in 2 days it gets 300 applicants. Out of those 300, 9 are selected for interviews. Of the 9, only 2 showed up for the interview. Both candidates weren't close to a good fit (skills didn't match resume, etc.).
It opened my eyes on the process. Imagine an engineering manager getting handed a few hundred resumes and now they need to hand select ones that move onto the next phase. This takes a huge amount of time and it also indicates if your resume isn't strong, you will probably get passed over in a few seconds.
With that said, he told me most of the applications were AI spam.
Finally, not even one application was matching the job profile and many had used AI to misrepresent their skill.
My company has a policy that once a position has to be opened, I need to fill it within 6 months. So, fed up I had to work with HR to message people on Linkedin.
This has basically dissuaded me using the spray and pray or AI generated resumes, if and when I start my job hunt.
To be clear: I was only applying to jobs that were a fit for my resume, and my AI generated resume was 100% truthful about my skills, background and experiences.
I would not encourage applying to jobs that are entirely unrelated, nor lying on ones resume.
The only difference is that spam these days is custom tailored using AI. And it makes weeding out bad resumes more difficult. But absolute numbers remain about the same I’d say.
I don't think we answered every single of them, we were a small company (15 people at that time), and even our wish for basic courtesy was constrained by real lack of time and people. That is also why we needed a secretary...
I can't even imagine the same situation in 2025, with AI. Would that be 3000 applicants?
Perhaps the problem is that we all root for a non-standard application to be a great find. And that yes, sometimes they are! Probably looking for these in job posting applications is not worth it anymore.
In my cv I care a lot about the details: the typeface, margins, grammar (I use llms since i’m not a native speaker), bullet point order, succinctness, etc. Perhaps that counts for something. Then if I get an interview, that’s like already 50% of the job done. Im an easy guy imho. I have failed mainly systems design interviews, so that’s where I put some work nowadays.
The stories I hear from friends in HR, at varying company sizes, is the stuff of fiction. Apparently most people apply with utter trash, its no surprise they get filtered out if they can't even be bothered to present themselves properly.
At least at smaller companies, if you have something that actually looks like you tried, you immediately stand out. (After HR waded through all the bad ones)
We are also not talking about typos or gaps in the CV here, but things like: including everything expected in a CV, writing something even vaguely resembling a formal letter, or even, addressing the right company in it (bonus points if they are a direct competitor).
Another "trick" (common sense from my point of view) is to schedule if possible the first interview in the middle of the week. Typically I would schedule for a Wednesday/Thursday so that the second interview can land on the next Monday or Tuesday, that gives me at least 4-5 days to prepare for it. I try to avoid first interviews on Mondays because then it's more difficult to schedule something for the following week. I also notice that interviews with engineers scheduled in the afternoon (between 2 and 4pm) are rather "softer" than those in the mornings (I don't know why, perhaps everyone is just a bit sleepy after lunch perhaps?). I wear a white t-shirt to avoid any kind of subconscious prejudices on the side of the interviewers (you never know what kind of people are on the other side of the screen). And many more "tricks". I know that the core of the matter is to pass the challenges, but I do care about every single detail. I write down exactly how I'm gonna introduce myself, I prepare in advance potential questions like "tell me a project you've worked recently" to the point that I feel super confident talking about them. I don't leave anything to chance, but of course I may fuck it up sometimes (and I did 4 months ago in the systems design interview).
In any case, I could easily submit my cv dozens of times, but I find that preparing exhaustively for a couple of weeks for 1 or 2 jobs works best for me (based on previous experience. I have worked for around 5 companies so far in my entire career).
This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken.
You have this backwards. The only reason they have so many applicants in the first place is that the sector unemployment rate is so high and companies play games with evergreen postings.
Except it's not. A lot of people just got used to quit job on Monday, have several offers by Friday (with a big salary boost) which was never the norm for professional employment.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/
Prime age (25-54) labor force participation rate is steady and high (steady around the highest peak since the one at the height of the late-90s dotcom boom—which itself was the global maximum since the stat was tracked—for the last couple years.) Overall LFPR (16+) is dropping, but that's just the elderly population share growing.
For the poster: was their method a good use of their time? is the job "found" a good fit really? will they last in this position?
For the hiring company: was their method a good use of their time? is this person in any way a great fit? will they last in this position?
The poster complains that few companies sent him a rejection note! Why in the world would they? The poster was protective of their time, and should rightly expect the hiring companies to do the same.
Yes, the job i found is a perfect fit for me and my skillset. I did not fake my way into something.
and my point is: if you genuinely apply to a position and you never even hear back from them, not even to reject you, it doesn't make sense to only apply to a handful. again, emphasis genuine application; answered all their questions and the role is a fit for my resume. That's why you have to spray and pray.
You may have indeed found 450 real and fictitious openings that would be a great match for you. Yes, not impossible. Still the practice puts the employers themselves in a position where these resumes and answers cannot possibly be read. Not carefully, not at all. Again no blame one way or the other. I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants. Or hopefully, will see the light and consider other kinds of applications - such as network leads (but there are other options.)
My argument is about what we do next. My answer is that it cannot be job postings and answers to job postings. That ship has sailed. (And nonetheless, congrats on your new job.)
But I've certainly been lucky. A few dodged bullets.
I'm not saying taking a more personal approach doesn't work. Sure, if you've got an event you can go to or you've got a network you can tap, do that. But neither were options for me. Nobody in my network was hiring, and the one event i could have attended (where relevant people would be) sold out within a few hours.
Also thank you for sharing your experience here.
Common advice on Reddit is also to lie about your experience.
The irony is that because of both of these, it takes longer to get a response and get through the interview process.
Applicants lying on resumes does seem like it won't end well for them, even if it does mean they may get more initial callbacks from companies about open roles. But given how things are very much a numbers name right now, I also understand why an applicant would do it.
Resume processing software indeed was a problem from the start, at first leading to resumes stuffed with BS keywords.
I feel that what are (somewhat) recent are (1) the brazenness of the whole process, combined with (2) the time-intensive-ness of the interview process. All the way to different people applying and showing up for the job. That is new. Hundreds of responses for each and every job posting, that is recent. Just the lid on the coffin of a process that has been breaking for a while.
Network. Talk to your friends and acquaintances. Go to meetups and talks, maybe even conferences. Speak to some recruiters. Find one who isn’t too full of shit.
Given that, what is one to do? you can either quit tech and go work at whole foods, or you can try another tactic. That's what I did. And it actually landed me a perfect job that pays well and is aligned with my skill set.
I also discourage lying on your resume that's just a genuine waste of everyone's time.
If something is not working out, change up your approach. The first obvious step is to try networking instead of applying. Perhaps start something on your own, becoming a B2B service provider rather than an employee. Or try to out-compete the companies which have rejected you. Be a stalwart, not a pushover.
I've only once applied to a job I didn't get, and I've had more than 10 jobs.
It's called networking.
Here is one advice to rule them all:
Talk to people and build a network for yourself.
Of course there is supposed to be competition when applying to positions, but you should have a good idea of your chances of getting a job before investing/wasting your (and their) time.
Job was about Linux admin and I told one about bash programming and that I like and know about it. At the end, he says "there are some things I did not hear like scripting in Linux..." and I just went ok, thanks for you time, bye.
Enjoy your jobs those who will. I’m choosing a different life, even if it doesn’t dump endless money into my bank account.
What did you try if you don’t mind my asking?
I hope no one outside of highly experienced individuals applies this rule when looking for a job in 2025.
For instance, in my recent job search for a new grad role, I had to do an OA for every company but Jane Street and Databricks (props to them).
To be clear, i am talking about: you apply, they send you a response (sometimes automated) telling you to do a couple hours of work, and only then will they decide if they want to speak with you.
This a great way to waste one's limited time on a role that might not even be a fit. If they aren't even willing to spend 15 minutes talking to you first, i would encourage everyone, at any level, to bounce. If they are at all serious, they'll speak with you first.
And I'll also highlight: you never know when they are using you for their own goals, like AI training. Or if it's a ghost job. Or if they aren't hiring for your state. Lots of stuff can come up that would make your work null & void.
To prevent burn out, you really have to guard your time. companies can structure things to be highly optimized for them, and very expensive for you.
https://jck.earth/2025/04/06/finding-a-rails-job.html
I don't see this as a asinine/foolish/stupid thing to ask. It's helpful for both sides:
- potential employee can provide an honest opinion on their motivation, in a targeted, specific way to highlight their talent. - offering company can use it for evaluating mutual fit, as well as filter out generic trash applications.
Most people have no idea what a job is actually like before they have the job, much less during the interview process.
One way to approach job interviews is that one is interviewing the company while it is interviewing you.
saves a lot of time for both sides.
If there's some naive optimism in the answer, the company can take that into account in the context but may also decide the candidate is going to be disappointed or is BSing.
In the old days, they were awesome. More like talent agents, than matchmakers. They were usually older folks that advocated for you, maintained extensive Rolodexes (shows how long ago that was), which they exercised on your behalf (basically, they "networked" for you), and made pretty significant commissions. I believe that top-tier executive recruiters still work like this.
These days, they seem to be very young, and, I suspect, make a great deal less money.
Real verifiable references, referrals and LinkedIn recommendations are more important than ever.
> Use AI to generate your resume
> Use AI to fill out [...] job application questions
The irony is strong on this one, and one person's "asinine" question is another person's "thoughtful" question. It's a bit hard to take this seriously.
The question is a synecdoche for “How awesome do you think we are, and so how much will we be able to coast on our respect for you as a result?”
Most job interviews involve this and many other similar type moronic questions. It's one of the many "joys" of the process.
I just skipped the rest of the steps after reading (1) and completely stopped reading after (6).
This is poor advice and it is no wonder you had to send 450+ applications and I think people reading this would want to do this with less steps and less than 450+ applications.