The job landscape is tough out there and thanks to completely unnecessary automation, it’s getting even harder to find a job. Now that tech work has become commoditized, the job cuts are as capricious as any other industry and there’s a glut of qualified applicants, regardless of what Big Biz says. And job boards are part of that Big Tech biz now, and they’ve been just as played by Big Tech as anything else has.
I used to work for one of those job boards in the HR adtech industry, so I know how it works. Aside from the fact that those boards usually share all their content with everybody else like some dysfunctional, incestuous family, the truth of the matter is that they don’t actually want to give results so good that you to find a job with one click. Just like any other site, they want to make as much money from you through clicks and “lifetime value” as possible. They want to keep you coming back to the site, just like Facebook. They essentially have three customers that they’re trying to serve: the job advertisers, their publishers (with whom they share the job ads they get), and the job seekers. It should come as no surprise as to which of those three they actually care least about (aside from getting as much data from them as they can).
I’ve also been unemployed for the last 15 months, actually searching for jobs for half that time, so here’s my tips on what has gotten me interviews and what hasn’t in an effort to maybe help you save some time and maybe find an actual job more quickly. Also note that these are going to be fairly tech-centric strategies, as that’s the space upon which I have built my career and it’s the main industry with which I am familiar. For other industries, YMMV, but I think these tips will still hold up across them.
Find Some Humans To Help
The number one thing (the only thing, in fact) that has gotten me interviews in the last 8 months is working with actual human recruiters and contacts in the industry.
- Find as many recruiters in your industry as you can and work with them directly. Having a human being that knows who you are and what your goals are and can then not only recommend positions to you but also recommend you for positions with the companies they’re serving goes a long, long way.
- Use your contacts. Hit up former co-workers, friends, etc. - anybody that works at a company you’re targeting. Most places will have referral bonuses for employees (at least in tech), and who doesn’t like getting money? Even if they don’t refer you, they can at least give you the “inside skinny” on what working for the company is like. IMO, this is the one thing that LinkedIn is good for.
- Post on (ideally) non-corpo social media. Using your social graph can expand your reach beyond your “inner circle” and might present some opportunities that you wouldn’t otherwise know existed.
- Attend job fairs. If your community has them, go to job fairs and put your resume in the hands of a real person that you can talk to. It’s basically the equivalent of a screening call, but you’ve bypassed the whole automated filtering thing. Even if you’re older and most of the people there are college age or whatnot, go and you might just catch someone’s attention.
- Ideals don’t pay the bills. There is a massive reset of wages and benefits going on right now, and while we would all like to find something we can agree with and that we like to do, desperate times call for desperate measures. Consider taking a lower title or a lower salary (if you can afford to) in order to get a job. Also note that titles vary almost company to company in their definitions and scopes.
Job Boards
Know that job boards have multiple layers between the seeker and the advertiser so that everyone can get their cut. There is also a fair amount of dead jobs out there where the position has been closed but the job board hasn’t yet gotten the message that the posting is no longer open (for a variety of reasons).
Furthermore, most hiring companies that post jobs on automated job boards use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that utilizes “AI” to rank resumes and is built on keywords (and isn’t very good at NLP processing) to determine if an applicant is “legit enough” to pass on to the actual humans in the HR or internal recruiting department. While it used to be that you needed to have a nicely formatted resume that would stand out in a pile of other resumes on somebody’s desk, what you need now is multiple resumes that are formatted in such a way as to get through the ATS filtering and into the eyeballs of a real, live human. And usually, each company will have their own very specific list of keywords and number of matches that they deem “acceptable” to get passed on. The job board itself is just a middle man and usually whatever they push to the top of the pile is what’s best for them, not for you.
So, if you decide to go the job board route, I would suggest having the following things in your bag of tricks:
- Have multiple versions of your resume specifically tailored to each position you apply for. Or, at least have one tailored for every sub-level and variation of position you are applying for (associate, junior, staff, senior, principal, etc.) and manipulate the keywords on each resume you send in to match as many words in the job advertisement as you can.
- Treat cover letters as additional keyword stuffing opportunities. I doubt a human being is actually going to read the damn thing, but the “AI” will. Try to make a coherent cover letter that uses as many terms from the job posting and your resume as possible to further reinforce the “I’ve got all the right skills for this” flavor for the “AI”.
- Consider investing in a tool that help you autofill resume boilerplate fields. I hesitate to suggest this because usually these sites charge a lot of money, but places like SimplifyJobs have both resume and cover letter generation tools as well as browser plugins that can help you automate your own process as much as possible. But the jury’s still out as to how well this works.
- Avoid jobs that have too much interest or have been open for a long period of time. For various reasons, companies post job listings that they have no intention of filling. So avoid jobs that have more than 50 applicants (especially in a very short time), have been open for more than a month, or have multiple postings for minor variations of the same job.
- Skip the job board entirely. Go directly to the website and make sure that the specific job is still posted and listed as open on the company’s website, and then apply to the company directly through their website. Just remember that the ATS rules still apply here.
- Make sure the job is a legit posting. There are a lot of scam jobs out there, so before you apply to anything, do some due diligence on a prospective company and ad to determine if it has a good chance to be legit. Also note that companies will post “evergreen” listings - jobs that they have no intention of filling but keep open “just in case they find that unicorn they’re looking for”. They will also post jobs in an effort to motivate their own workforce (as in "you’re replaceable) or lie to them (“see? we really are trying to hire someone, we just can’t find anyone who wants to do the job”).
- Talk to the recruiter or hiring manager that posted the job directly. I generally look for jobs that are posted by recruiters on behalf of other companies so that I can talk to a real human and also get into their system for any other openings that they might have that are a better fit. If you can get a hold of an actual employee inside that company, so much the better!
- Use job boards just to get a sense of the industry. If you’re thinking of switching careers, these postings can give you an idea of what skills you need to target or develop. You can get an idea of the current median salary, state of remote vs. hybrid vs. in-person work, and a whole host of other indicators just by cycling through similar job descriptions.
- Avoid job postings that are too general or too specific. Ads that are too general might mean that they’re looking for one person to do multiple jobs, and a listing that is too specific could be an indicator of an “evergreen” “honey trap” trying to lure a very, very specific person (whom they don’t know exists).
Finally, and I don’t advocate this because I believe it’s just making an already dystopian hellscape that much worse, if you’re going to use an automated application tool like ApplicationHawk or whatever it is to “fight ‘AI’ with ‘AI’”, please take the time to focus it and narrow the configuration down as much as you possibly can so that it only applies to jobs that you might actually want and for which you are qualified. I believe that the proliferation of apply bots has just made the HR industry respond with even more capricious and specific filtering to make it even harder for real people to find real jobs. But, if you feel that you must use a tool like this, I beg you - please use it responsibly. 
I hope that these tips are helpful as we all face the unexpected and shocking loss of our jobs at some point in time due to the whims and greed of The Management. It just underscores the need for us to band together in community and try not to burn our bridges so that we have some folks that we can rely on when we need help in that eventuality.
Feel free to add your tips and tricks that you’ve found to work for you in the comments! I’m sure that we’d all love to hear them and benefit from the shared knowledge of how to navigate this greed-induced dystopia that all find ourselves within.