| I looked for a job last year around September and again this year. The rules haven’t changed. If you are blindly spamming ATS’s you’ve already lost. If your skill set is generic , why would your resume stand out among hundreds of other applications? If isn’t, why aren’t you doing careful targeting? My “Plan B” jobs were ordinary old CRUD C#, JavaScript or Python jobs looking for developers with AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience (according to my resume) and 5-6 years of AWS experience including three working at AWS Professional Services. I was looking for remote only roles. The city I moved to post Covid is tourist heavy. But doesn’t have that many local jobs in software development even if I did want to go into the office. Between both times, I submitted my resume to hundreds of jobs and heard crickets. According to LinkedIn’s Easy Apply, only maybe four times was my application viewed. Blindly submitting your resume to an ATS is a fool’s errand. Of course, at 49 (last year) and 50 (this year) I already knew this. I was in between jobs and I was like “why not”? What did work both times is the same thing that has worked for me across now 10 jobs. I found the kind of jobs I wanted within 3 weeks each time - AWS + app dev strategic consulting working full time at consulting companies. 1. Reaching out to my network - 2 job offers 2. Targeted outreach to companies where I had a unique skill set. A “nice to have” was experience with a particular official open source “AWS Solution” for which I was the second largest contributor at the time - 2 interviews, 1 offer. 3. Responding to an internal recruiter that reach out to me - 1 interview and offer. |