Another reason you are not sent as a rejection letter, is because it looks bad on HR's end if you were rejected, only to get hired months later. It basically says to the candidate "Our first pick dipped out on us, we were desperate enough to go through the 2nd pool, called a bunch of people, you were our backup". HR doesn't care about you, just what works for their company.

Sending rejection letters takes effort and offers no short-term benefits from HR's standpoint. Also, it can get quite messy to manage emails, especially if HR is aggregating prospective candidates from different portals all to one email.(remoteok.io, indeed.com, glassdoor.com, careerbuilder, reactjsjobs.com, etc)

Email responses becomes difficult to manage since you get 100+ emails in your inbox daily, 95% of candidates being unqualified. HR might not be big enough to warrant a dedicated system or tooling for hiring. You can use builtin tools like indeed.com, but from my experience its slower than using email. If you want to get shit done really fast forwarding to an email is time-saving, simple, and cheap.

You can then take the best candidates there, put it in kanban / trello / notion task board, etc if its a multistage interview process.

Companies aren't going to care enough to blacklist you in some database unless you caused some serious offense to warrant this. I can only think of one company that might actually do this, and its Valve.

Also if you apply to the same company more than once, you might be dealing with the same recruiter. They might recognize your resume just from memory though

Good perspective, I had not thought of that. Thank you.

I know one person, she's a data analyst (2 years experience, +5 years of marketing experience) here in the bay area. hasn't been able to get a Data analyst job for 3 years now, even after applying thousands of jobs and interviewing dozens of times. Finally, she was forced to take an after school baby-sitting job for 17$/hour (bay area).

Our software engineering job posts on LinkedIn & Indeed generate hundreds of applicants per day, the vast majority of which can't code at all. Attempting to sift through them is just too costly so we mostly use alternate sources: tech recruiters, more selective job sites. The problem is those sources heavily filter themselves and don't always use the most fair criteria.

We used to have unique challenge problems online to offer a more level playing field, but solutions were constantly posted to github so even that became quite time-consuming to maintain.

We're still hiring at a decent rate, but do have more headcount than we can fill right now. There are definitely qualified candidates out there but attempting to filter them from the mass of applicants is difficult.

Trying to 'hack/red-team' your own system may reveal weaknesses and flaws you weren't thinking of and help the hiring process. See what penetrates, what doesn't, chat about it over lunch, etc. And yes, it does seem like taking an adversarial approach towards your very own hiring processes is insane, but here we are.

I'm convinced that interviewing for programming jobs and being able to code are two different skills. Making it worse for myself is that I come from the military and IC so i dont have any public blogs or Github activity so i can't pretend to be a "thought leader", which I'm also pretty sure is a bullshit term.

Working on a side project and creating a real Github commit stream is also useful.

I can't speak to your personal situation, but speaking generally I think too many tech people over-value their technical skills. If all a company needs is a warm body that can code or patch servers they will hire a better coder in India for half the price. The number one differentiator is communication and social skills. At my job there are 4 main groups I talk to: local coworkers, India coworkers, management, clients. Being a person who can talk to all 4 of those groups is valuable. Being a person who can churn out code is not particularly valuable.

Communication, of course, starts on the resume. If you're not even getting calls, I would suggest getting some help on your resume. Hire a professional if you need to.

If your job history is a mess take a few crappy consulting gigs and then a year from now you can say, "I've been successfully consulting for a while but now am looking for a place to settle in." That way you at least look consistent.

If interviewing is tough for you, then do it more. If you have stable job put your resume out there and accept at least 2-3 interviews every 6 months. Even/Especially if you are happy with your current job. Not needing the new job takes the pressure off. The practice will be good for you and you never know, you might find an amazing opportunity.

I've had several recruiters ghost me, then months later contact me with potential gigs.

I think more likely it was experience as I was in the midst of changing careers. The unfortunate part is they could have seen that on my resume and from our phone calls (not that they pay much attention).

I actually suspect a lot of my meetings were a case where my preference level was low but they were meeting with me to sort of bank a contact they might use in the future.... but not likely now. I suspect this as after I got a job, several have suddenly followed up with me after ignoring me in the meantime....

That was your first mistake. Recruiters provide little to no value for potential hires.