| That by itself doesn’t solve the problem. If you reach out to me blindly and your skill set doesn’t stand out from every other candidate, if I reply at all, I’m just going to redirect you to HR unless I already know you. I don’t care if you said you were on the Amazon EC2 service team. I do care if you led a major feature on the EC2 service team and you can point to an YouTube video or a public blog post on AWS’s website explaining the feature. I was looking for a job in both 2023 and last year. Both times my plan B was ordinary C#, Node or Python enterprise CRUD jobs where the company wanted AWS experience. I had 12 years of development experience on my resume (I’ve worked a lot longer) and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS’s consulting department (Professional Services). I blindly submitted my resume to ATS’s far and wide including LinkedIn. Probably around 100 resumes. I heard crickets. I never usually do this. But I didn’t have a job so why not? On the other hand in three weeks… I reached out to my network and that led to 2 full time offers and 1 short term contract. I did a targeted outreach to two companies that had a “nice to have” experience implementing a popular open source official “AWS Solution” in its niche. Not only did I have experience with it, I was the third highest contributor at the time. This led to two interviews and one offer. I accepted an offer within three weeks. Last year when I was looking, it was about the same. But this time, I responded to an internal recruiter that reached out to me from the company I work for now. I got an offer again within three weeks. |