I have been applying via linkedin, company portal which show up on google search but somehow nothing is working out, cold dm, emails almost all eventually ending in radio silence. Not asking for some shortcut just that it all isn’t making sense.
I hate to say it, but when it comes to landing a first job, connections trump almost everything else. If you have friends in the industry, ask for referrals. If not, you can try to foster relationships with industry professionals and directly ask them about any openings in their companies. They’ll know which ones are worth applying for, and a single word in your favor will greatly improve your chances of an interview.
If you still have access to your college resources, they often organize industry meet-and-greets for this very reason.
(This is also why mentors and internships are incredibly useful even beyond the skills they teach. The connections you form can give you a leg up for years afterwards.)
This is why better university programs have co-ops and internships. Most who don’t screw up get offered jobs as it removes risk from employers, because it’s hard to fire someone.
I graduated last year and it was a rough search. I think I submitted over 300 applications across LinkedIn, my schools Handshake account, Dice, Welcome to the Jungle, and a few other sites.
I’d honestly recommend just putting a good resume together and going for the spray and pray option with applications. It didn’t seem like anything I did really worked. Career fairs never actually led anywhere for me and I even saw a stack of resumes in the trash one time which was really discouraging.
Eventually I got a call while I was on vacation from a recruiting agency saying they had some opportunities. They said I had applied but I still have no recollection of visiting their website tbh. I landed a job in software support through them with my current company which is buying me out of the contract this coming month after being there for a little under a year.
I was skeptical at first going into software support since I really wanted to do some coding myself but it has so far worked in my favor. I have had the opportunity to do some coding with some of our engineers and my regular job duties also require code analysis so it is a lot more hands on with code than I first expected. There is also a clear path to becoming a software engineer with my current role so I will be pursuing that.
Overall, if you are comfortable doing something other than software engineering as your main role, I would look for similar roles like devops, db management, or anything that might involve some scripting programming as a smaller responsibility. Then you can try to work your way into software engineering from there. Definitely continue to apply to software engineering positions as your man focus though.
Every time I know somebody is in the market, I get them a copy of What Color is Your Parachute. It gets updated every year. It’ll help with finding a targeted position that wants your skills.
I hate working for big corporations. Recruiters will only find you the worst contract jobs. Finding where the small businesses are looking is something that shook out of the book for me. The methods you’re using are all the methods that the large companies want you to use and you’ll almost always get filtered out. Find places where small companies are looking for your specific skills. They don’t want to be awash in dozens of resumes anymore that you want to be blasting your resume out there to dozens of systems that are only there to filter you out. The places might be a niche job posting website, might mean an industry event, etc.
you keep trying until something works.
it took me 100s of applications to find employment anytime i was out of work. dozens of interviews. usually got 2-3 offers all at the same time.
most people need 6-12 months to find a job. it is a long process. even if the economy is booming, it will still take people 3-6 months. when it’s really bad, it’s years.
I’m in a different field, but my advice is the machine gun method. Go to indeed or wherever, and apply to anything that you’re even half qualified for. I sent 10 resumes a day for 6 weeks to land my job.
It sucks, but that’s what you gotta do these days. Also accept interviews for positions you have no interest in just to get the practice.
Came here to say the same thing. 5-10 applications 5 days a week a until I got an offer. It sucks.
Depending on where you live, going to IT events and conferences to connect to people in person is even more powerful. Ask them about their work and talk passionately about related stuff that you have some knowledge/skill in. Exchange contacts, say you’re looking for work.
For example, next month is DEVWORLD in amsterdam. They always give away free tickets close to the start of the event. I’m sure there are a ton more like this around the world.
As for writing applications: For me writing very high quality applications did the trick.
- only apply to companies/positions that you are REALLY interested in
- research the position
- research the company
- if you can find somebody that works there in a similar position, ask them some questions
- use the info you gathered to show interest in your appplication
- write everything yourself, no AI writing. Be a genuine human.
- But you can use AI to give it the position and your application and tell it to make a hiring decision with pro/con arguments and rework it based on that
- make a small demo project that shows off your relevant skills and tell them about the challanges you had and what you learned to overcome them
(About the last point: I found that talking about relevant hobby projects I did and showing the code made a huge difference)
It usually takes me about a week to write one such application. But I only sent out 3 before hearing back from 2 of the companies and getting signed on by one.
I know it’s a lot more hoops then just clicking “auto apply” or “apply with AI”, but the effort pays off.
Contrary to that I often see people complaining online about how they wrote 100 applications in a month and got no job interviews… yeah buddy. (And I was initially one of those people)
I graduated last year. I’ve sent out hundreds of applications and still nothing. Had a few interviews in the first few months but haven’t gotten anything since. I just do odd jobs while working on my own stuff like game dev. I feel like it’s gonna be at least a few years before the job market recovers. Once the AI bubble pops they’re going to be sorely missing a lot of talent. Don’t feel bad if you can’t find anything right now, there’s a lot of other people who can’t either.
you could also get a job in a related field. not enough people are willing to do this.
or take a job for lower pay. lots of smaller companies and non profits need tech skills, but they can’t afford to pay market rate salaries and many graduates won’t look at them. my company is one such company. but we provide such a great work environment… most of tech staff have been here for 10-20 years or longer. our entry level salary is only about 70K, compared to a market rate closer to 95K.
except we also offer gold plated healthcare, 10% retirement matching after 1 year, 75% off transit passes, and WFH 4 days a week… but most people only care about the SALARY IS LOW, even if our total comp is higher. plus i guess we’re not going to fast track you to making 200-400K a year. our senior programmer makes like 150K.
I’d be happy to take a lowpaying job or even an unpaid internship just to get my foot in the door, but even that doesn’t seem to help.
What related fields are you thinking of?
Your organisation location?
we aren’t hiring thanks to President Trump destroying science funding.
This advice won’t be helpful to you unfortunately, but if there are students reading, the answer as others have said is already being connected. A key way to make this happen is through research with faculty followed by (potentially) internships and then full time offers. If you just show up and kick ass every day for 3 to 5 years and even get a 4.0 GPA the market will still be very tough.
Bonus points though which might help OP: anything you can do that narrows the pool helps you. For example, if you’re a white bread american dude maybe look for a job that requires getting a clearance, if you’re mandarin Chinese maybe look for something that requires some translation or speaking, etc. You may not be the best programmer or the best salesman, but you might be a top tier salesman for programming tools.
by definition very few people get those connections and opportunities. how many student research jobs are there compared to majors? like 1 per 50 students?
More than you would think. Most people don’t show up to ask to do research in my opinion. I got my first one by literally walking up to a Prof after class and saying “I like this. Do you know anyone who does research like this?”. He said “me”, gave me a test project, and I worked for him for like almost 20 years.
I should say I also did this my freshman year (the year before the story above) and I got referred to a different guy in the department where I worked for a summer but it didn’t work out for either of us. Turns out I’m more engineer than physicist, but it was good knowledge.
Edit: To be more direct about numbers, you’re right there’s not a spot for everybody or even half, but when I was in undergrad way less than that even went looking for research, they just did the job fair every year mostly and were students the rest of the time which was… not as reliable a strategy we will say.
Companies often go to recruiting events / job fairs, where you can talk to a recruiter (or sometimes an engineer) for a couple minutes and make an impression.
As others have said, relationships are the key. The current state of the tech job market is bad. Probably the worst I’ve ever seen and it is still getting steadily worse.
I spent almost a year applying before getting my latest job. I was even getting interviews until the beginning of this year. Then they very abruptly stopped for some reason. Only reason I got the job I have now is because an old business associate happened to think of me and reached out to see if I was looking. I’ve been doing this for years and I’ve got a solid resume but it is tough out there.
That said, I’m not trying to discourage you. Keep at it and you’ll find something. Working on side projects or contributing to open source projects can help give you accomplishments to put on your resume.
Doesn’t your college have a good jobs program? Part of the job of a good college is to have some program to help graduates get a job. You should find out and reach out. If your college doesn’t, that’s a sign that they’re a bad college, and I’m sorry you picked the wrong college… Make sure you review your college in this case and point out that they’re lacking good help.
That’s it. Unfortunately right now the economy is not in the best shape and so it will be hard for you and all I can say is best of luck. (well, beyond what others already mentioned, there’s other good advice. Read it all, don’t give up)
Recruiters. Reach out to them on LinkedIn
You use the contacts you gained during your studies and internships to get your foot inside the door and a chance to speak to a human.
The linkedin approach only works when a company headhunts, not when a worker does the same, in my experience.
Chasing offers by headhunters is such a miserable experience. Your résumé will be one amongst hundreds of applicants, most of which will be filtered out by AI before a human ever reads them (using opaque logic that could disqualify you for no reason whatsoever, so if you never hear back after many applications there’s a good chance something in your résumé is tripping their filter and there’s no way to know what it is).
And the headhunter is probably a third-party hire not affiliated with the actual team, so the first interview will be with someone who doesn’t know what questions to ask and you have to somehow make a good impression without being able to show off any of your knowledge. Basically showing good vibes or whatever. Good luck if you’re a talented but socially awkward person!
Then you’ll have to go through the whole interview process again once they hand you over to the people who hired them and actually know what they need. At this point you’ve finally reached what was once the starting line of the hiring process.
TL;DR: Fuck LinkedIn and modern hiring.
Yeah, a third-party headhunter isn’t worth it. When <friend from school> reaches out and says their team at <company> needs someone with <skill set> and they thought of you then it’s another question completely. :)
you have no know people already in the industry unfortunately at this point. And that’s for ANY position. even if you’re fine with settling on just being a prompt monkey for some agent you still need to know someone.
if you don’t have anyone then start going on github and codeberg and contributing to FOSS projects. You need to get your name out there and this is an easy way to build connections.
Be an asshole on linkedin. I’m not kidding. it sucks, I hate linkedin, but years ago I got so many clients by just replying to tech bros bullshit posts and telling them how wrong they were and why they were wrong. CTOs and managers at start ups and what have you doom scroll linkedin all the time so seeing someone telling some silicon valley wannabe middle manager how much they suck is actually quite refreshing. Get your name out there. think outside the box.
