As a bootcamp dev, with barely 3 yoe, I'm hitting around 10% response rate for recruiter screening (remote/hybrid positions). I put a boatload of hours honing and perfecting my resume + a few other strategies.
I think there's always a way to stand out as long as they don't follow advice/opinions from anonymous forums like HN or reddit. Lots of bad noise out on the internet.
2008 was the last time I had to randomly apply for jobs because I stayed at my second job for over 9 years and had no network.
The only time I randomly applied for jobs was last year and the year before even though I had no expectations of it working.
My response rate from using local external recruiters that I had built a relationship with (before 2020) has been 100%.
I had three rejections between 2012-2020. Post 2022, my response rate through recruiters, my network and targeted outreach, has still been 100%. My success rate has been 5/7 for getting an offer - around 70%.
As I moved up in my career, around 2014, they would actually meet me for lunch. In 2016, I started working with one of the same recruiters when I was in a hiring position to staff.
By then, when new to company managers, directors, CxOs (small companies) were looking for their first couple of hires and spoke to recruiters they knew, I became top of mind.
That was kind of my thing between 2012-2018.
When people say that remote work hurts early career people, this is one of the issues. People who have been in the industry for awhile can still lean on a network we built when people were working in the office and in the same city.
I have a few new people in my network since working remotely in 2020. But that wouldn’t even be the case if I hadn’t done a lot of business travel meeting coworkers between Covid lifting and late 2023.
I don’t care if you said you were on the Amazon EC2 service team. I do care if you led a major feature on the EC2 service team and you can point to an YouTube video or a public blog post on AWS’s website explaining the feature.
I was looking for a job in both 2023 and last year. Both times my plan B was ordinary C#, Node or Python enterprise CRUD jobs where the company wanted AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience on my resume (I’ve worked a lot longer) and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS’s consulting department (Professional Services). I blindly submitted my resume to ATS’s far and wide including LinkedIn. Probably around 100 resumes.
I heard crickets. I never usually do this. But I didn’t have a job so why not?
On the other hand in three weeks…
I reached out to my network and that led to 2 full time offers and 1 short term contract.
I did a targeted outreach to two companies that had a “nice to have” experience implementing a popular open source official “AWS Solution” in its niche. Not only did I have experience with it, I was the third highest contributor at the time. This led to two interviews and one offer.
I accepted an offer within three weeks.
Last year when I was looking, it was about the same. But this time, I responded to an internal recruiter that reached out to me from the company I work for now. I got an offer again within three weeks.
If you are applying blindly to an ATS, you have already lost. Every remote job literally gets hundreds of applications and if your skill is generic - ie “full stack developer” or even “I can do leetCode and got into BigTech” - it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.