Back in the doctom crash recruiters wouldn't pick your calls. Downmarket takes a bit of mental adjustment if it's your first time.

This definitely used to be the case for me, but the large employment gap absolutely killed that. Not a surprise.

I had one gap I thought could be a problem(a couple years). I definitely lost ~50%-75% of the offers because of it, but I found what I was looking for in the end. However in my case during the gap I was working on my own projects that are at least tangentially related to my work.

If you haven't and your gap is for other reasons I'd write a "skills based cv" and definitely spend at least 2 weeks reminding yourself everything you need to know before you go for technical interview. There is no worse feeling than getting a technical question you knew an answer for, but you can't quite remember what is was.

I also found it's easier to apply directly rather than through recruiters if you have a big gap in your work.

It flops from side to side, six months/a year ago I got about one-three per week, now zero for several months and only bot adds.

How do you identify a bot ad?

No profile picture, working in some big company that is entirely unrelated to me, lots of common connections but no posts, no engagement or anything. For example I have had five that works as "engagement manager at walmart" add me in the last few weeks, and also people common to me, I can see the number of common contacts go up by just updating the page because a lot of people will just accept any connection request.

Yeah but it’s all random phone calls from people with an accent so thick i can’t understand them, who obviously haven’t read my resume, and who won’t pick up the phone if I try to call them back anyways.