- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Context: Searching for a new senior level software development job over a 9 week period in summer 2025.
- Focused mostly on data engineering and backend roles that are in-person or hybrid in the SF Bay Area.
- Leads from recruiters on LinkedIn were much more likely to lead to interviews+offers.
- The winning offer came through my personal network.
- I mostly used Hiring.cafe for prospecting. They’re a scraper with an interface I didn’t hate.
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That’s pretty good! Only 9 weeks and less than 200 applications, with that many interview rounds and offers? A lot better than what I’ve seen other people do
This, but 28 months and remove that blue line at the top right.
My partner with two masters and tons of experience in management has sent over 400 applications in the past year. She even learned appscript and made a smart spreadsheet to track them all. She’s still unemployed.
She just got rejected from a dentist receptionist job because they were worried they were gonna have to pay her too much
Formatting, fonts, and file format are very important. Certai. formats like PDF are harder to scrape. 2 or more colums cause the A.I. to get confused. Sometimes the scanners have trouble with fo ta with heavy kerning.
i would suggest ms word, with the default font, and a single colum. Dont get fancy with the formatting.
Also, there are a couple of online services that will use a.i. to score your resume. Find a service that uses the same ranking algo as the popular recruiting tools such as greenhouse and workday.
It sucks, but your resume has to get past the a.i. screener before it ever reaches a human.
More recently I injected an AI poison pill into her resume. Honestly, it’s been working, at least with interviews. Getting past the human stage is still impossible.
Could you share more info about that please? I love the idea!
Ms word recommended really? I went through markdown resume route for simple formatting, but still went with PDF as the norm
PDF is a typesetting format. Behind the scenes, every letter is placed on the page at a specific x,y coordinate. parsing text out of a pdf is essentially a series of guesses. sometimes the algorithm guesses wrong. PDF was invented for perfect layouts for printing.
Word docs are a text-based format. It’s very easy to correctly pull text from a Word doc.
Why risk an ai parsing a pdf incorrectly? There is no upside.
A word document converted to a PDF maintains the text content. A tagged PDF has the same (plus accessibility to screen readers).
Same, triple/cuadruple the leads amount though for me. Got like 5 last round interviews where I was rejected. Glad for OP though!
😞
I know some folks have it much worse.
Being out of work sucks and I treated fixing it like a full time job.
Hang in there buddy.
Usually these sorts of results are an issue with your resume or cover letter.
As someone on the other end, the sheer amount of applications I get means any resume that isn’t setup correctly can just go straight into the bin and I still have hundreds of good resumes to work with.
If the majority of your applications get rejected/ignored BEFORE a screener that means your resume or cover letter is improperly formatted or something is wrong with them that triggers an auto reject
This sounds like it might be true for you but isn’t for others. I’d hesitate to say this is the norm.
I’ve put my resume through multiple parsers and made it as best as I can. I’ve gone through phases where I’ve tailored my cover letter down to every single miniscule details and saw the same results as OP, or pretty similar.
so you’re either talking bs or you’re in a different field where it does matter
Or… I know what I’m talking about maybe.
For perspective, I sit at around a 40%-50% callback rate on my submissions to go to screening, when I’m looking for a job.
What are the things that would be wrong?
Formatting is honestly a big part. Left align what matters.
Too wordy, missing key details, too big, too small, etc
Missing they key words the job posting covers. If the job posting talks about Node and angular and your resume doesn’t explicitly namedrop them, then it loses a tonne of points.
Usually the majority of resumes that pass the sanity check then go to screening. You’d be surprised how many people just screw up basic stuff.
Every single time I’ve had someone complain to me about job offers, I’ll grab a random job posting I find and ask em to send me the version of their resume + cover letter they would send to that specific posting.
Quite often within a min or two I can find several reasons why their resume would’ve gotten bin’d
Any of the screening or application through AI? From what I’ve seen that is more a slap in the face than being rejected or ignored.
I find it not surprising the final success was through networking - my son got into his work because he happened to run into someone who helped get his foot in the door, and would probably not be at his level now had he gone through the usual process.
There was one application where the first reply was asking me to do a 2hr coding test solo using their secure coding environment.
If I had spoken with a recruiter and they said I seemed like a worthwhile candidate and asked me to complete it as a screener, sure thing.
Instead I got the impression no human had looked at me and that I was being jerked around by automation. No way I’m going to be to waste 2 hours pouring effort into a black hole.
I’m sure the ATSs are using AI for early screening, but all I can see is the responses or lack thereof.
I feel like a separate breakdown per lead source would be interesting - was one source complete junk?
No sources were junk, but in-network and recruiter leads were much more likely to pan out.
If I had to call one thing ‘junk’ it would be any job openings that use Workday to apply. Big fucking waste of time to reenter everything on your resume and satisfy their picky but stupid form validators.
Ashby and Greenhouse are much nicer ATSs.
Gj OP. What’s you’re work experience? You application process seems so easy (not to put down your work or anything). I’ve done a lut triple if not cuadruple your applications, and no offers. I have a lit 2 years of software experience though and would not apply to a senior position.
About 20 years experience at a mix of startups and big tech.
Looking for senior individual contributor roles, mostly with “staff” in the title.
Oof, yeah huge difference in experience. I envy your position and wish you the best!
