[cabbagehead]

There's definitely a lot of ghosting in hiring. My resume is finally at a point where it ticks all the boxes, and of about 10 of those recruiter chats recently I progressed to speak with the hiring company on 2 or 3 of them.

There are lots of good reasons for a company to be really choosy in who they hire, primarily because a bad hire can be hugely damaging to a company. Rightly or wrongly, this means that a single perceived negative on your resume can mean you're immediately discarded.

If you're not having much luck, it might be worth getting your resume read by someone who hires, to understand if there any inadvertent red flags, or missing key info. I did this recently with a friendly recruiter and they made some useful suggestions. I also made changes in response to concerns people raised about my background that they said during interviews, so I could counter potentially negative reactions to things in my work history.

[PainfullyNormal]

> There are lots of good reasons for a company to be really choosy in who they hire, primarily because a bad hire can be hugely damaging to a company.

I think this is overstated. The only engineering positions that can really do any reasonable amount of damage to a company are people who set policy for the whole company (CTO, CEO, VPs). Everybody else is designed to be replaced. Any changes they make can be reversed. The worst you've lost is a little time and money.

> If you're not having much luck

I utilized /r/EngineeringResumes/ and rewrote my resume last month in an X, Y, Z format. I haven't had any problem getting interviews since then. But, I apply directly through the company website. I haven't had a single response on hired or linkedin, but I've had about 20 interviews in the past two weeks at companies I applied to directly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯