[throwawaaaaay17]

YMMV, but this worked for me. Find an industry you want to work in. Find a small but quickly growing company in that industry. Email the CEO, try to make yourself look as relevant as you can to that company and ask to get coffee. Come prepared with a pitch of what you can do for them.

If you reach out to CEOs directly, you skip HR, so you skip profile screens. Reaching out to medium-large company CEOs doesn't work because they have assistants/are too busy.

[germinalphrase]

How does someone identify a “find a small but quickly growing company” without already understanding the industry?

[JCharante]

I'm guessing you'll need to know a little bit so that you can sell yourself during the coffee talk. If you are new to the self driving car field you'll probably come across Geohot's startup in the first hour of online search.