My experience exactly, it was only after actually calling a company about a job that everything clicked.

Sending an application using a recruitment website is like buying a lottery ticket with the same poor chance of winning.

And the easiest way to get a job offer is to know someone within the company that can recommend you.

Yeah I’ve never seen an employee recommendation not lead to at least an interview. This is one of the biggest lasting benefits of my MBA — if I’m ever out of a job, I can just find a company I want to work for and I probably know someone relatively influential there. It’s sort of a professional courtesy to recommend business school classmates even decades afterwards. These network effects are also why there’s often a bimodal distribution in outcomes between “top” schools and the rest of the pack.