[msabalau]

You mentioned applying to a hundred jobs over a six month period.

When I seriously needed a job as a less senior person, I targeted closer to 100 applications a week. Maybe only a few of these will be "high effort" dramatically recrafting a cover letter and resume, but you can also get responses from "there is a reasonable fit" opportunities and applying with one of a handful of stock resumes.

If your best tailored resume given who you are has a 1% chance of a response and a "good enough" resume has a 0.5% chance of response, you need to play the numbers game and apply a lot more, not hope wordsmithing will make "not having a education" dramatically more appealing and change minds.

Marketers like good messages for their direct mail campaigns, but what they need is to be able to cost effectively get their message in front of a lot of the right people, because most won't respond. As one of many junior people trying to land one of many (slightly less)junior jobs, you need to play this numbers game too.