A few times in my life I have found job opportunities that would have been my dreamjob and I was uniquely qualified due to a cross-disciplinary background, previous experience and education, language skills and such. I was an SME with technical skills and I had so much knowledge of the company's products, industry and competitors that I could have done their marketing strategy and product strategy in a couple of weeks. Maybe it wouldn't all have been correct from the start, but I had so much knowledge that I could have done this by heart.
I spent a lot of time on targeted applications for these places, re-doing my CV and spending weeks iterating on my cover letter. I never heard back from any of those places.
Instead I've been hired into industries I knew nothing about. Sure, I was a decent candidate, but I was just another candidate. This has worked out fine.
Why did these places hire me and not the others? Because they were growing so they had a need to hire. The former places did not.
So for me the only real advice is to apply to places that are growing. When places are growing and really need to hire to expand, all the bullshit in the process is eliminated. Decisions are made fast. It's easier and more pleasant.
> So for me the only real advice is to apply to places that are growing.
Or sometimes when people are leaving and they need a replacement ASAP. That's how I was hired, but it was also quite lucky that there were not many applicants.
FWIW one of the things about advice on job hunting (and a lot of other things in life tbh) is that no one ever seems to acknowledge that, more often than we like to think, it's just luck.
Yes reaching out to your network is good, putting yourself out there through direct contact where possible is good (early in my career two jobs which were real stepping stones came from emailing a head of and ceo directly after a conference), spending time trying to find your edge relatively to others is good. But there are so many points in the whole process where it's simply luck of the draw that spray and pray within reason isn't a completely ridiculous route.
Unless you're already in a role, try what you have to. It's no fun in it but things are always easier once you don't have anything to fall back too.
Luck plays a big role, but it is not just luck. One can apply in a way that significantly stacks the deck in his favor.
So absolutely reach out to your network, study the current market and find your edge. It might still be poker-style games which you can still lose because of luck; but doing that gives you starting hands with two aces. My 2c.
No one will admit that because everyone likes to pretend that they "earned" it. Everything about you, your circumstances and surroundings is stochastic.
So true. Looking back, I got my current job because the preferred candidate dropped out and apparently there was no other preferred candidate, the one before that I bombed the interview but I guess they saw potential etc.
It's interesting that the first thing you see in the comments is "don't contact anyone."
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
>The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now.
The big shame is that the hardest PoW to fake right now tends to be under NDA's and proprietary codebases. So if you aren't in the position to make major contributions to FOSS in your free time or "code for fun", it feels like a soft reset all over again. As if those yeras in industry mean nothing.
I especially dread the idea of needing to jump on the very doomscrolling places I left at the start of the pandemic just to get a potential lead. My mental health over 2025 was already pretty bottom of the barrel without that.
I struggle with this a bit because while my network isn’t bad - I really can’t stand social network like threads/X etc - I’m not on any social media bar here and LinkedIn.
Do you think investing in bluesky is worth it? I’m in industry but have a PhD ongoing in TTI models so I should probably get on it :/
P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.
I also regularly get cold emails from candidates. Most often for marketing roles, rarely for technical roles.
Cold emailing definitely wont hurt your chances at the job.
But to be effective, the outreach needs to be heavily tailored and personalized. You need to make it obvious you aren’t copy and pasting the email to 20 other people.
> You are specifically interested in the job for reasons other than the money. It is unlikely that other applicants want the job as badly as you do.
This is really rat race to the bottom. Obviously it goes without saying that people passionate about a project get preference, but if you are trying to wind yourself up to be "passionate" your winding yourself up to accept less for more work.
> Do not ask employees for a referral!
This amount of times I get asked for blind referrals is insane. Maybe it is a non-western thing, but I nor anyone else I know does this or accepts these requests. It only kills an application, since it looks deceitful, an applicant should stand on their own.
> If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
There is already a lot of spam filtering through their inbox, this is white noise. This maaaay only work if you know them on other channels and they are "cool".
> Again, send more than one email.
lol
CS is oversaturated right now for many reasons. Regardless, mass applications do not work unless you are cheating, targeted applications do not work unless everyone else does the same. The best bet is internal networks, or searching for work in unexpected locations, e.g. webmaster at the local pulp mill.
source: I worked in hiring for small stints over 7 years
I tried this a lot. It did not work for me. But I also only sent one email and did not follow up. A few points:
1. Getting rejected does not say anything about you. The guy they hire says a lot about the company.
2. "If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse"
This is the whole point. In most cased you don't deal with an expert, but with HR. HR are idiots most of the time. HR, like real estate, has also very low entrance requirements. This does not mean that all people are idiots, but the field attracts idiots.
3. A job is a sale. You have to sell yourself. And unfortunately there is only one way to make the buyer happy: Sell him what he wants, not what he needs.
> HR are idiots most of the time. HR, like real estate, has also very low entrance requirements
Soft skills are the most important. Calling a group of people you work with idiots because their role has a low barrier to entry reflects badly on you. Bad recruiters are beyond useless but a good one can read a resume, match it to the JD, learn what the hiring manager is looking for (do they keep saying no to people with too much experience or too little? Or in X tech stack), and they can glean out all of the really important job stuff - salary, location, flexibility, perks, etc. they can also get a read on whether the person is likely to be… difficult. The way they treat people they believe to be below them is how they’ll treat others when they’re frustrated/stressed or even succeeding.
> If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
When the people you're interviewing with are 'already senior' (e.g. direct reports to the CEO), you can sometimes make your case worse rather than better, because it feels like you're going over their head.
So rather than size...
- If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse.
- The kind of CEO that tends to meddle in things below their level might drag down your case even if they like you, because folks can develop a distaste for their meddling.
- Doing this for senior roles, or roles at small companies can actually be worse, because the person in question is more likely to be close in reporting chain to the CEO, who is more likely to directly meddle in your hiring process. Zero- or one-level removed can be the worst.
When the people you're interviewing with are 'already senior' (e.g. direct reports to the CEO), you can sometimes make your case worse rather than better, because it feels like you're going over their head.
If that happens then it's a very good thing - you do not want to work at a company where people are precious about how they succeed. If a great candidate (e.g you) drops into the inbox of the CEO who forwards it to someone else, and their first reaction is 'Well, they violated my personal kingdom by going over my head!' then that is a manager you do not need in your life.
I interpreted this post as being about how you get an interview in the first place, so the hope would be that the CEO forwards your mail to this senior person you're worried about.
I understood the OP to be saying "reach out to the CEO to express your interest in working for the company in order to get to the interview stage", not "email the CEO to make a case for being hired when you're already in the interview pipeline"
Oh, I get them all the time. Usually from junior engineers. I don't hold it against them - it's good advice.
So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"
I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.
Why not? Is the world really going to implode because someone wants a job so badly that they slip a message into some random CEO’s inbox, an inbox that’s probably already flooded with irrelevant emails from strangers asking irrelevant things?
Don’t ever convince yourself that someone is so important you can’t email them. That’s a self-defeating mindset. Send the email and let them decide whether to ignore it, mark it as spam, block you, or whatever. Life goes on, and there are far more important things to worry about.
I've interviewed 3k people with Karat as a professional interviewer, and several hundred more as a hiring manager. The very few times I received direct emails from candidates attempting to circumvent the normal process were met with unequivocally negative reactions. First, I find the Internet sleuthing they'd undergo to find my email address a bit creepy – for example, Karat would only show the first name and profile pic for your interviewer. But more importantly, the sheer audacity to go for such a stunt would firmly anchor them in the box of people I'd never want to work with. I'd still be polite and professional to a fault, of course, but I'd never seriously consider them past that point.
I had a really nice job hunt this time around because:
- I quit my job to work on a side project in a specific space (voice AI for me).
- Spent three months shipping a few things and sinking into the area.
- Apply to jobs in that space, custom cover letter if applicable.
- Reach out directly to hiring people/engineers on LinkedIn for those companies, if it is engineers I usually say things like "did you also struggle with 'x'", "I solved 'Y' by doing __"
- Be genuinely interested in that space.
~50% reach out to interview rate using that strategy.
- Hiring managers can actually focus on the resumes in their inbox and assume that people are genuinely interested in the role.
- The whole system works more efficiently.
From day one I thought the whole notion of AI in the hiring process (on both sides: candidates submitting AI resumes, HR filtering resumes with AI) was positively absurd. I hope more people catch on.
Why isn't there a job search website that forces you to adopt this targeted bet strategy? The game theory of job-hunting incentivizes both submitters and receivers to adopt inefficient practices. Why not limit applications to one per day to signal genuine interest? Then you can demonstrate skill at an in-person interview, or at your local legally-bound interview center? (my very boring sci-fi prediction)
I tried to build this back around 2020. I think my concept was trying to be too cute in several places. But this was the basic idea.
I found that neither side of the market wanted to rethink the market, they just wanted something that worked well for them. Even today, job seekers may be reaching for something like this but employers have no interest; there is a glut in the market.
I’m sure I never quite got the messaging correct. However, I distinctly recall that triplebyte attempted a pivot in this same vein and also failed bad.
Using spray-and-pray job-sites allows employers to analyze the market, so they can feel the quality, quantity and the price of proposition, to negotiate wages and assess if they can afford to hire to grow, or shrink to get lean.
Connecting the employer with employed to be is not the core proposition.
> Why not limit applications to one per day to signal genuine interest?
I'm not sure if this strategy taken at scale will end up being much different from the LinkedIn model. You just slow down the pipeline on the employee's side while the employer still ends up with way too many applications to process each day. Or the reverse in an employees' market.
It still might be worth a shot, though. Especially if it can cut down on fake AI profiles that LinkedIn has become rife with. Any job board that can commit to a "human experience" is worth its weight in gold at this point.
This seems to vary based on what stage of your career you are in.
Early career when I realized trying the 1000th way to make myself seem better than all the other college graduates with the same qualifications I gave up targetting and just sprayed and prayed and got jobs that way through pure lottery luck of ending up randomly on the pile at a moment when the company was too exhausted because they lost their preferred candidate at the last minute or something like that. I basically put in so many apps that the 1 in 1 million chance happened that I was an unremarkable cog that showed up at the right place at the right time.
By mid career when I actually had something worth anything to anyone then spray and pray was no longer necessary and targetting an application could actually be effective.
>Get in contact with current employees at the company. It is important that you send more than one email. I've gotten dozens of emails asking for meetings and referrals. The only time I actually respond to these is after the second email.
Please, no. Go through the proper channels like everyone else. If you have a referral - great. Otherwise, DON'T spam current employees you randomly find on linkedin or whatever. I get those from time to time and ignore 100% of them.
Some people don't though, and their referrals are much more valuable than dozens of additional applications.
Much like many other decisions you're making in the job market, it's a polarizing choice that increases your overall chances when the alienated class of people isn't too large. If 90% of people ignore those emails but your chance of getting a first-round interview goes up 5x compared to a cold application when the remaining 10% respond, 2+ emails are easier to send than 1 application, especially when you've done the legwork to make your application any good.
I haven't used techniques like these specifically yet, but as somebody who nearly always eventually gets the job once I've had a first-round interview, I wouldn't be opposed to seeking out the hiring manager and contacting them directly to decrease the resumé false rejection rate.
Don't spam. Don't be an asshole. And do everything you can to get that thing you want vs. spraying and praying for some cubicle job.
Exceptional folks rarely limit themselves to pushing submit to upload their CV. That proper channel is a lottery, and they know it. It's a broken system that requires hustle to increase the odds.
I generally do not agree with this advice (or you can do both, cold emailing folks should not prevent you from cold applying to other jobs). It really just hinges on what you think your probability increase is relative to the amount of time you spend, https://crimede-coder.com/news/Post004.
Often when doing that, you look up the company on blind and it's got a 3 star rating with low pay, bad management, and no vision, though decent WLB.
My theory is that a lot of companies are one trick ponies. By the time you've heard of them, the core of their product is finished and they're left floating and have to make up stuff to pretend to work on.
Broadly I think this is nice summary of "what color is your parachute". That whole book is basically how to target like this. Just lot more examples and methods to do it.
I posted this mainly as something to refer friends to when they complain about something being to competitive / hard to get. Thought I'd shoot it here too.
If you can’t find a job, make a job. Sounds reasonable but fraught with risk.
Having been in the software industry for 30 years I feel the need to provide some balance and context to your advice. YMMV
Getting a startup to even survival level money takes incredible effort, skill, and time.
Outside of those, luck is by far the most important aspect. Which is out of your control.
You have to fight and beat dozens of biases and fallacies.
Here is a small sample…
Survivorship bias — focusing on visible winners, ignoring the many failures
Outcome bias — judging decisions by results rather than decision quality
Availability bias — overweighting memorable success stories
Publication bias — only successes get written about or promoted
Narrative fallacy — inventing clean stories after the fact
Please ignore the one-shot-bro-influencers who have a fool proof recipe for making 10MMR with Ralph mode. If they are real they have hit luck not execution.
As hard as it is getting a job. The massive amount of work and time it will take. Building a network via proof of work [side projects] and hitting only your archetype with applications is still far more valuable for landing a role. With, and this is key, much higher levels of success than startups.
So it comes back to "networking", huh? Sadly the advice doesn't work if your network is either also laid off or simply is in a soft/hard hiring freeze. They can't connect you to what isn't there.
And that's even before following point #1. This far in my career I don't really have a "dream job" anymore. My dream is to be my own boss. But I need a bit more money and a smidgen more time to establish myself there. So those facts make me fall back to "apply to whatever fits my skillset, maybe ping to check vibes if I know anyone".
dworks|1 month ago
I spent a lot of time on targeted applications for these places, re-doing my CV and spending weeks iterating on my cover letter. I never heard back from any of those places.
Instead I've been hired into industries I knew nothing about. Sure, I was a decent candidate, but I was just another candidate. This has worked out fine.
Why did these places hire me and not the others? Because they were growing so they had a need to hire. The former places did not.
So for me the only real advice is to apply to places that are growing. When places are growing and really need to hire to expand, all the bullshit in the process is eliminated. Decisions are made fast. It's easier and more pleasant.
mettamage|1 month ago
Or sometimes when people are leaving and they need a replacement ASAP. That's how I was hired, but it was also quite lucky that there were not many applicants.
brador|1 month ago
2 turn 18.
3 move to highest gdp location, capital city, largest city, that you can get to, or that your chosen industry, if you have one, is focused in.
4 make list of growing companies.
5 apply to growing companies.
Simple, yet so few will actually do this.
cal_dent|1 month ago
Yes reaching out to your network is good, putting yourself out there through direct contact where possible is good (early in my career two jobs which were real stepping stones came from emailing a head of and ceo directly after a conference), spending time trying to find your edge relatively to others is good. But there are so many points in the whole process where it's simply luck of the draw that spray and pray within reason isn't a completely ridiculous route.
Unless you're already in a role, try what you have to. It's no fun in it but things are always easier once you don't have anything to fall back too.
ptero|1 month ago
So absolutely reach out to your network, study the current market and find your edge. It might still be poker-style games which you can still lose because of luck; but doing that gives you starting hands with two aces. My 2c.
joquarky|1 month ago
The advice helps you cast a wider net to catch that luck.
I just wish there were more job search advice for weird people. My net is tattered and falling apart after two years of fishing.
csomar|1 month ago
No one will admit that because everyone likes to pretend that they "earned" it. Everything about you, your circumstances and surroundings is stochastic.
jamesfinlayson|1 month ago
So true. Looking back, I got my current job because the preferred candidate dropped out and apparently there was no other preferred candidate, the one before that I bombed the interview but I guess they saw potential etc.
ebiester|1 month ago
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
johnnyanmac|1 month ago
The big shame is that the hardest PoW to fake right now tends to be under NDA's and proprietary codebases. So if you aren't in the position to make major contributions to FOSS in your free time or "code for fun", it feels like a soft reset all over again. As if those yeras in industry mean nothing.
I especially dread the idea of needing to jump on the very doomscrolling places I left at the start of the pandemic just to get a potential lead. My mental health over 2025 was already pretty bottom of the barrel without that.
dandelionv1bes|1 month ago
Do you think investing in bluesky is worth it? I’m in industry but have a PhD ongoing in TTI models so I should probably get on it :/
leeny|1 month ago
P.S. I'm CEO of a Series A company. I get a lot of email from prospective candidates. I never hold it against them, and as long as it doesn't look like spam, I reply. Telling people not to send emails (I saw a bunch of that in the comments) is categorically bad advice.
cj|1 month ago
Cold emailing definitely wont hurt your chances at the job.
But to be effective, the outreach needs to be heavily tailored and personalized. You need to make it obvious you aren’t copy and pasting the email to 20 other people.
Atomic_Torrfisk|1 month ago
This is really rat race to the bottom. Obviously it goes without saying that people passionate about a project get preference, but if you are trying to wind yourself up to be "passionate" your winding yourself up to accept less for more work.
> Do not ask employees for a referral!
This amount of times I get asked for blind referrals is insane. Maybe it is a non-western thing, but I nor anyone else I know does this or accepts these requests. It only kills an application, since it looks deceitful, an applicant should stand on their own.
> If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
There is already a lot of spam filtering through their inbox, this is white noise. This maaaay only work if you know them on other channels and they are "cool".
> Again, send more than one email.
lol
CS is oversaturated right now for many reasons. Regardless, mass applications do not work unless you are cheating, targeted applications do not work unless everyone else does the same. The best bet is internal networks, or searching for work in unexpected locations, e.g. webmaster at the local pulp mill.
source: I worked in hiring for small stints over 7 years
Beijinger|1 month ago
1. Getting rejected does not say anything about you. The guy they hire says a lot about the company.
2. "If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse"
This is the whole point. In most cased you don't deal with an expert, but with HR. HR are idiots most of the time. HR, like real estate, has also very low entrance requirements. This does not mean that all people are idiots, but the field attracts idiots.
3. A job is a sale. You have to sell yourself. And unfortunately there is only one way to make the buyer happy: Sell him what he wants, not what he needs.
maccard|1 month ago
Soft skills are the most important. Calling a group of people you work with idiots because their role has a low barrier to entry reflects badly on you. Bad recruiters are beyond useless but a good one can read a resume, match it to the JD, learn what the hiring manager is looking for (do they keep saying no to people with too much experience or too little? Or in X tech stack), and they can glean out all of the really important job stuff - salary, location, flexibility, perks, etc. they can also get a read on whether the person is likely to be… difficult. The way they treat people they believe to be below them is how they’ll treat others when they’re frustrated/stressed or even succeeding.
tekacs|1 month ago
When the people you're interviewing with are 'already senior' (e.g. direct reports to the CEO), you can sometimes make your case worse rather than better, because it feels like you're going over their head.
So rather than size...
- If the interviewer(s) in question feel like you're trying to circumvent them, you're probably making your case worse.
- The kind of CEO that tends to meddle in things below their level might drag down your case even if they like you, because folks can develop a distaste for their meddling.
- Doing this for senior roles, or roles at small companies can actually be worse, because the person in question is more likely to be close in reporting chain to the CEO, who is more likely to directly meddle in your hiring process. Zero- or one-level removed can be the worst.
onion2k|1 month ago
If that happens then it's a very good thing - you do not want to work at a company where people are precious about how they succeed. If a great candidate (e.g you) drops into the inbox of the CEO who forwards it to someone else, and their first reaction is 'Well, they violated my personal kingdom by going over my head!' then that is a manager you do not need in your life.
wrs|1 month ago
zem|1 month ago
drillsteps5|1 month ago
Do that.
>Get in contact with current employees at the company. It is important that you send more than one email.
Don't do that.
>I've gotten dozens of emails asking for meetings and referrals.
I've never gotten one in my entire career, and I was hiring manager in multiple companies/roles.
>If the company is <30 people, reach out to the CEO directly.
Don't never ever EVER do that.
Edit: formatting
ebiester|1 month ago
So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"
I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.
guessmyname|1 month ago
> Don't never ever EVER do that.
Why not? Is the world really going to implode because someone wants a job so badly that they slip a message into some random CEO’s inbox, an inbox that’s probably already flooded with irrelevant emails from strangers asking irrelevant things?
Don’t ever convince yourself that someone is so important you can’t email them. That’s a self-defeating mindset. Send the email and let them decide whether to ignore it, mark it as spam, block you, or whatever. Life goes on, and there are far more important things to worry about.
cj|1 month ago
Now if you use AI to automate the personalization and start blasting it out indiscriminately, then yea, please don’t.
But if you are being genuine and hand writing emails expressing why you want to work for someone, it’s hard to screw it up.
smnscu|1 month ago
strix_varius|1 month ago
This may say more about how people interpret you, personally, than about the situation generally.
hansonkd|1 month ago
Heck my CEO asks me all the time that people are messaging him and if i think they are interesting enough to hire.
ericmcer|1 month ago
- I quit my job to work on a side project in a specific space (voice AI for me).
- Spent three months shipping a few things and sinking into the area.
- Apply to jobs in that space, custom cover letter if applicable.
- Reach out directly to hiring people/engineers on LinkedIn for those companies, if it is engineers I usually say things like "did you also struggle with 'x'", "I solved 'Y' by doing __"
- Be genuinely interested in that space.
~50% reach out to interview rate using that strategy.
j_bum|1 month ago
gnarlouse|1 month ago
- HR is no longer inundated with garbage resumes
- Hiring managers can actually focus on the resumes in their inbox and assume that people are genuinely interested in the role.
- The whole system works more efficiently.
From day one I thought the whole notion of AI in the hiring process (on both sides: candidates submitting AI resumes, HR filtering resumes with AI) was positively absurd. I hope more people catch on.
pjc50|1 month ago
This just means the average employee starts getting inundated with spam resumes instead that they are ill equipped to handle.
AI in the process is absurd, but the logic of the spam arms race is inescapable.
biophysboy|1 month ago
webel0|1 month ago
I found that neither side of the market wanted to rethink the market, they just wanted something that worked well for them. Even today, job seekers may be reaching for something like this but employers have no interest; there is a glut in the market.
I’m sure I never quite got the messaging correct. However, I distinctly recall that triplebyte attempted a pivot in this same vein and also failed bad.
jjmarr|1 month ago
It's unclear if anyone cares.
pavlus|1 month ago
Connecting the employer with employed to be is not the core proposition.
johnnyanmac|1 month ago
I'm not sure if this strategy taken at scale will end up being much different from the LinkedIn model. You just slow down the pipeline on the employee's side while the employer still ends up with way too many applications to process each day. Or the reverse in an employees' market.
It still might be worth a shot, though. Especially if it can cut down on fake AI profiles that LinkedIn has become rife with. Any job board that can commit to a "human experience" is worth its weight in gold at this point.
cadamsdotcom|1 month ago
Seems like good advice.
mothballed|1 month ago
Early career when I realized trying the 1000th way to make myself seem better than all the other college graduates with the same qualifications I gave up targetting and just sprayed and prayed and got jobs that way through pure lottery luck of ending up randomly on the pile at a moment when the company was too exhausted because they lost their preferred candidate at the last minute or something like that. I basically put in so many apps that the 1 in 1 million chance happened that I was an unremarkable cog that showed up at the right place at the right time.
By mid career when I actually had something worth anything to anyone then spray and pray was no longer necessary and targetting an application could actually be effective.
lbrito|1 month ago
Please, no. Go through the proper channels like everyone else. If you have a referral - great. Otherwise, DON'T spam current employees you randomly find on linkedin or whatever. I get those from time to time and ignore 100% of them.
hansvm|1 month ago
Much like many other decisions you're making in the job market, it's a polarizing choice that increases your overall chances when the alienated class of people isn't too large. If 90% of people ignore those emails but your chance of getting a first-round interview goes up 5x compared to a cold application when the remaining 10% respond, 2+ emails are easier to send than 1 application, especially when you've done the legwork to make your application any good.
I haven't used techniques like these specifically yet, but as somebody who nearly always eventually gets the job once I've had a first-round interview, I wouldn't be opposed to seeking out the hiring manager and contacting them directly to decrease the resumé false rejection rate.
drsim|1 month ago
Exceptional folks rarely limit themselves to pushing submit to upload their CV. That proper channel is a lottery, and they know it. It's a broken system that requires hustle to increase the odds.
hackable_sand|1 month ago
apwheele|1 month ago
daxfohl|1 month ago
My theory is that a lot of companies are one trick ponies. By the time you've heard of them, the core of their product is finished and they're left floating and have to make up stuff to pretend to work on.
apt-apt-apt-apt|1 month ago
"Contact current employees [presumably ask for referral]."
"Don't ask employees for a referral, most are incentivized (referral bonus) to give you one if you can convince them"
sennalen|1 month ago
and draw the rest of the owl?
This blog is really missing the core question of what contact would be more effective than applying to the company's explicit job postings
hammock|1 month ago
FrustratedMonky|1 month ago
seany62|1 month ago
aswegs8|1 month ago
red-iron-pine|1 month ago
it's implied but not said that you should be talking to people from the same school or hometown... but what if you're from NYC, or Mumbai?
Unbeliever69|1 month ago
rvz|1 month ago
dommer|1 month ago
Having been in the software industry for 30 years I feel the need to provide some balance and context to your advice. YMMV
Getting a startup to even survival level money takes incredible effort, skill, and time.
Outside of those, luck is by far the most important aspect. Which is out of your control.
You have to fight and beat dozens of biases and fallacies. Here is a small sample…
Survivorship bias — focusing on visible winners, ignoring the many failures Outcome bias — judging decisions by results rather than decision quality Availability bias — overweighting memorable success stories Publication bias — only successes get written about or promoted Narrative fallacy — inventing clean stories after the fact
Please ignore the one-shot-bro-influencers who have a fool proof recipe for making 10MMR with Ralph mode. If they are real they have hit luck not execution.
As hard as it is getting a job. The massive amount of work and time it will take. Building a network via proof of work [side projects] and hitting only your archetype with applications is still far more valuable for landing a role. With, and this is key, much higher levels of success than startups.
johnnyanmac|1 month ago
4m1rk|1 month ago
johnnyanmac|1 month ago
So it comes back to "networking", huh? Sadly the advice doesn't work if your network is either also laid off or simply is in a soft/hard hiring freeze. They can't connect you to what isn't there.
And that's even before following point #1. This far in my career I don't really have a "dream job" anymore. My dream is to be my own boss. But I need a bit more money and a smidgen more time to establish myself there. So those facts make me fall back to "apply to whatever fits my skillset, maybe ping to check vibes if I know anyone".