I have a friend at my company that has access to some insider stuff who (subtley) tipped me off that I'm on the chopping block for upcoming layoffs.
Obviously, I'm trying to resume-spam now, but I am pretty sure that cold applying to companies doesn't work anymore, because every job posting is immediately botted to shit (and a lot of job postings are fake anyway).
So...what do people actually do to find work now? Is it really just going through your metaphorical Rolodex and bothering friends/previous coworkers and asking if that can forward your resume?
Before LLM filtering winning a chance to interview from resume submission online was like winning a lottery. Now I imagine that is still true but with even more keyword matching from your resume.
My best suggestion is get certifications in things like security and cloud infrastructure. The best security certs are not vendor certs, for example: CompTIA certs and CISSP. The cloud certs will be vendor certs from Azure and AWS. Resume filters will absolutely recognize those, but they won’t recognize programming capability beyond language name.
The lower half of software jobs, junior and senior developers, prioritize language experience and tool identification. The upper half, lead and principal, prioritize current capabilities expressed more in terms of accomplishment and business requirements.
But not in the context of showing up as a candidate. The only thing that will work will be personal contacts. Join user groups and do something without the actual purpose of finding a job. Volunteer for things in an IT context.
You might say this will mean weeks to months of wasted activities, but believe it will be way better than weeks or months of applying for non existing jobs.
Here is a tip that I dont find unethical, call agencies but as in the role of a job offer not job seeker. Have a conversation, and you will then have the full picture.
Here are things that have gotten my every job ever, including one in the last year: LinkedIn or applying to vacancies
However the last cold application did work, although it was to an agency rather than direct to the company.
It’s demoralising work applying for jobs. Good luck!
This is not strictly limited to your region, but I would start with companies you can at least call by phone for questions about the job listings.
Sorry to hear you are about to be in a struggle.
Get resume out, and start looking. You will get more if you are employed vs unemployed.
If USA apply for unemployment as soon as laid off. Companies have paid into this pot, you deserve the payout. Not collecting does not leave more for others.
We get a lot of bots, but the software itself filters out 99% of that and then our recruiters filter out the rest. Referrals push candidates to the top of the queue for interviews, but otherwise it's literally just hiring people who cold applied to a job posting they saw online.
That's not to say it's not still terrible to be interviewing, just my point is, don't write off applying just because it sucks.
Presumably AI is helping some-to-many reasonable candidates apply to many more positions
I heard from one recruiter they had 800+ applications to a role
It’s rough out here.