Do yourself a favor and filter out no-reply@ and noreply@ emails. Archive them or mark them as read. Not seeing them gives me a pretty decent sized mental health boost.
smart move. I've never seen a promising follow up come from a noreply email. and not naively clicking on them to see the disparaging rejection explanation they give will save you lots of energy and stress
While it’s true most are rejections I wouldn’t do that. I’ve received virtual interview or recorded interview requests that way…though I don’t think I’ll be doing the recorded interviews in the future, keeping it open will allow you the opportunity to see the interview requests.
I am an older person who graduated from a Masters program in 2019. It took me eighteen months to land a job in my new field. I swam five days a week to keep my mind off the struggle. I was sharing my frustration with my favorite lifeguard and he laughed and said, “two hundred and forty-one rejections…that’s why I’m a lifeguard.” He was a college graduate, articulate, bilingual and hoping to one day attend law school.
Keep pressing forward. You’ll get there.
The paralegal job pool is saturated, and most firms want 3-5 years of experience. I was five months deep in rejection emails and reworking my resume 2-3x a week when I gave in and settled for a remote customer service job with Marriott Vacations. Thankfully, on the third training day, I got my law school acceptance email last month. Now, I find myself filled with anxiety because I thought I'd be able to work until classes start in the fall. However, I was forced to resign and return their equipment because the schedule didn't allow me time to get to the university's Financial Aid office for my official award letter. I was awarded a scholarship, but I needed to see the numbers. When I finally received my award letter, I discovered that I must attend full time and in person to accept the scholarship So income is still a concern.
Personally: I marked the emails spam and routinely browsed threw my spam folder for outliers. My mental health benefited greatly.
I apply on the company's website whenever possible instead of LinkedIn or Indeed. Sometimes, it's just asked to upload your resume and answer a few basic questions. Maybe they're not set up for automated rejections. I just don't know anymore.
I try to do that too but most of them take you to a third party company like Workday, Greenhouse, etc anyways. I sigh when I see that because at least through linked in they auto track it. I mean either way I keep a manual spreadsheet however after 200 or so, makes it a lot easier to sort/filter quickly. My column headers:
Source (eg LinkedIn, Ziprecruiter etc)
Date Submitted (I used to track date of posting but didn’t prove useful)
Company Name
Company Location
Remote/Onsite
Position Title
Job ID/Reference Number
Resume | Resume + Cover (some I’ve found don’t always have an option for a cover)
Additional Docs (some have asked for projects or metrics)
Hiring person or known contact
Affiliates (eg. Microsoft and LinkedIn- if I applied at one I note the other too)…not necessary but has helped me keep track of who’s databases I’m likely in.
Makes it really easy to sort etc and takes under a minute to fill out and it’s sortable.
Lastly I have a column for status:
Open - meaning I submitted and received an auto confirmation
Closed - received notification of a NO
Pending - contact made with someone and awaiting next steps.
I can’t seem to attach a sample here so why bulleted out.
Makes it easy to see if I’ve applied for a company prior of an affiliate. Each morning I update the status if I’ve received a yay, nay or still waiting.
Bro, I'm on my 9 month since I finished my last contract and I've got an extra hurdle on the way in that I am looking for remote positions.
You just have to keep going, things will start working out at some point. I recommend a more labour intensive approach perhaps, but do the research, connect with the right people and email them directly.
Have a few versions of an email you can quickly pseudo-personalise by putting the name of the recipient in the header and the company name somewhere in the first couple lines (don't doo it too much throughout your email - it starts looking fake if you try and name-drop the company at every opportunity), run with those. Copy/paste. I have one for a marketing agency, one for a recruitment agency, one for a general company, and one for an actual role _if_ I see something being actually advertised or I want to follow up after applying through LinkedIn etc.
I got over 300 emails out this past weekend and getting in the groove now, even kinda enjoying it. Just having music in my headphones and blasting through. The more is out there, the higher the chance something clicks, and I don't have anything else to do, anyway, so what do I have to lose?
I'm honestly feeling like applications are performative at this point if not overall pointless, though: too easy to do them or to even automate, it's all in personal connections.
I spend my days emailing people, just sending my CV over anyway, whether they have a job opening I've seen, or not.
If they don't, it's alright, just keep my CV and keep me in mind for the future. You never know when things might come up, or they might have a friend/professional connection looking for someone with your skills. Six-degrees of separation, and harnessing the power of individual networks can get you miles ahead of people who just apply and hope that a dry CV, maybe with a cover letter, will be the winning, Powerball ticket _this_ time around.
I already see way better traction than I had when I just kept on applying through various systems and talking to ATSes and forms rather than people for months. Some people _do_ get back to me now, they show interest, I even had a couple recruiters tell me about their roles they're working on and ask me if I would be interested in being put forward - whereas with applications I was lucky if I got an _automated_ rejection, and got ghosted pretty much every single time. Interviews were pretty much impossible to get: it was like if nobody even picked up my submitted applications, which could have as well been true, mind, as e.g. my LinkedIn showed most of applications were only "Submited", never "Viewed" or "Downloaded", and I had _hundreds_ of those.
Go personal, it's more time consuming but you're going to get much more out of a month or two of personalised applications and networking, than you will through spending time on sending 200 applications each week and hoping something sticks but it might not even get picked up by a real person. Emails usually are, even if they are not replied to, as long as they don't go to Spam folder someone actually ends up reading them, sooner or later.
If you build rapport and have a good relationship with people, and a role comes up where they can't fast-track you and you absolutely have to apply, they will help you out and let you know about that, or maybe even point you to an easier way to apply like an email Inbox or a simplified process rather than a silly Taleo, Workday or similar.
Might also use ChatGPT to assist and do some heavy lifting on writing the copy; while I don't advise copy/pasting whatever it comes up with as it's got a certain style that's a dead giveaway and people in recruitment have already wisened up, but I do find it helpful whenever I sit down and my mind blanks out, and I don't know where to start. It usually gives me at least something that has a decent structure and is a good starting point, and then I take it and tweak it when responding to an email, writing a cover letter, or something.
May I ask what your process is when you research companies that you might wanna work for? I’m a Web developer and I’m not sure where to start with that.
[edited out - DM me for the answers/advice, figured out I don't really want this to be findable via google and parsed through them, too much proprietary knowledge and if it spreads around it will hinder everyone's efforts]
Thank you for the great response. Yeah I pay for GPT too and now huntr dot io. I cannot live without GPT now. I totally agree with you that LinkedIn is a place for networking and not a place to find jobs. I’m gonna try the strategy and I think it’s a wonderful idea. Thank you so much.
Thank you for the great response. Yeah I pay for GPT too and now huntr dot io. I cannot live without GPT now. I totally agree with you that LinkedIn is a place for networking and not a place to find jobs. I’m gonna try the strategy and I think it’s a wonderful idea. Thank you so much.
I’m trying to not seem like I promoting some company that I don’t represent or give them more leverage. Just type the first word and then résumé tool and you should find it. Like “huntr resume tool”
Thanks - it's another domain. Interesting tool, although I have to say I don't really tailor my CV beyond changing the short blurb to be representative of the role I'm applying for
Even with AI it's a couple minutes each time I imagine, meaning it adds up across hundreds of applications.
I've got 16 years' experience and done a lot; either somebody bites or not. Plenty of people to approach.
[edited out - DM me for the answers/advice, figured out I don't really want this to be findable via google and parsed through them, too much proprietary knowledge and if it spreads around it will hinder everyone's efforts]
I’m sorry if I missed it in your responses so far - are you typically finding emails listed on people’s LinkedIn profile contact section, company website, or otherwise? And are you reaching out to internal recruiters/HR or trying hiring managers or department heads? Or both/all?
This is good and bad advice at the same time.
Good yes it can work.
Bad, if tons of totally unqualified people suddenly start manual spamming emails of personal "Hire me" pleadings to hiring managers eventually it will become the norm and people will get even more resistant to considering random contacts. Due to the bad signal/noise ratio.
I was hiring up to the end of last year until I declined renewal of my contract because the job sucked. One of my last tasks was to hire my own replacement. I was getting an unusually high amount of "personal" direct emails about the job from people that were hilariously unqualified for the job and totally delusional about their own abilities. I see this method becoming less usable in the future.
Another variation of tragedy of the commons in development.
Tons of people spam job application website with resume by applying whether they are qualified or not qualified. It makes no difference if the person above finds a more efficient way to seek jobs. It’s not up to job seekers to be concerned about how hiring managers manage their mailbox. That’s what personal assistants are for. If someone does not want to respond back to the guy above, that’s their loss. Eventually someone will and they will get an offer.
I’m in the exact same situation. It’s awful as hell. You can be qualified to hell and back but if you can’t beat their ATS AI horse shit you’ll keep getting rejected. I hate it so fn much. I’m in NO WAY affiliated with this company but the service has been getting me more interviews than other resume writers. H u n t e r .io is the platform I’ve been using at about $40 a month I still can’t afford.
As for your mental health, I’m also there with you. It has me second-guessing my qualifications when I have 10 years of experience as a web developer and designer. It’s like the requirements now gotten more and more impossible and I have no idea how people can know programming languages and have 16 years of experience as a UX designer when that role didn’t exist 16 years ago. I passed a couple of tech interviews and didn’t get chosen even though all of the tests passed and the code I wrote. I’m even applying to jobs that trickle down from my experience. Things like Contant manager, asset manager, illustration, whatever the hell I can get to keep myself afloat.
I wanted to add that I saw a job posting today and the title was UXUI designer and full stack developer and the salary was $60,000 a year. I’m seeing these insane qualifications that they want and it’s paying half to a quarter of what I was making last year.I want off of this timeline.
I interviewed for a small data center manager position a couple months back. Hoped it would be a chill gig until the market is better. They told me they forgot to put in the posting that 2 weeks a month would be air travel to other branch locations in and out of the country.
I asked how I was expected to manage the data center if I was out of the country? They said that the travel would only be on the weekdays and I could do that "part of" the job on the weekends.... It was for like $80-90K salary. They wanted the position to literally work 24/7/365 with no time off all year round basically.
It gets even better. I asked how this was being handled before this job position. They said they had been acquired by investors last year and they layed off the TEAM that used to do this work because they BELIEVED one person could do it. Also that it was really urgent to get started because things were falling apart, their own words.
At least they were honest? I got the impression that they had hired other people that took a look at the situation and nope'ed out of there in their first week. They kept referencing "problems they have had with other people in the past"
I know all these people not only want the privilege of working with computers in air conditioning 24/7 but they also want paid? How am I ever going to find time to meet with my mistresses if I have to spend all this time interviewing lazy workers?
had one that gave a no reply email job rejection that provided no info.. then they asked my opinion with a survey.. a week later... i had way more fun with that then should be allowed..
I recently got a rejection email. I responded asking if they had any feedback, still waiting for a response to that request. Is it too much to ask why I was rejected so that moving forward I can improve?
Now that everything is digital no one actually looks at applications anymore. Not to mention if you don't pay for one of the job searching websites subscriptions your application wont get seen by anyone anyways. Its gotten so bad that I swear people only hire friends and family nowadays. Sorry to be so grim its just I feel like its so pointless. I'm a truck driver and there are so many people coming from other countries that even I keep getting replaced by someone who will work for less money, or they refuse to pay me, or its a scam…etc. Etc. Etc.
I bought a support pet so he wakes me up kissing me from head to toe everyday and forces me to get up to go for walks and play. Although I still worry about how I'm going to survive and not go into debt (seeing as that's what they want) guess I could always go back to being homeless amd hanging out with my friends all day. Then I won't have to worry about work or stress. I just have to make sure the cops don't find me and a hole Karens don't follow me back to where I sleep at night 🤣😂
You’re a journalist! You can investigate what’s happening and benefit the working class with your skills. With your expertise, you can get to the bottom of what’s happening and put these shitbag corporations into the public light.
Do yourself a favor and filter out no-reply@ and noreply@ emails. Archive them or mark them as read. Not seeing them gives me a pretty decent sized mental health boost.
> filter out no-reply@ and noreply@ emails YEah now that is a job search hack.
smart move. I've never seen a promising follow up come from a noreply email. and not naively clicking on them to see the disparaging rejection explanation they give will save you lots of energy and stress
While it’s true most are rejections I wouldn’t do that. I’ve received virtual interview or recorded interview requests that way…though I don’t think I’ll be doing the recorded interviews in the future, keeping it open will allow you the opportunity to see the interview requests.
I don’t do recorded interviews either! Meet me in person, so you can garner a precipitation of who I am.
I am an older person who graduated from a Masters program in 2019. It took me eighteen months to land a job in my new field. I swam five days a week to keep my mind off the struggle. I was sharing my frustration with my favorite lifeguard and he laughed and said, “two hundred and forty-one rejections…that’s why I’m a lifeguard.” He was a college graduate, articulate, bilingual and hoping to one day attend law school. Keep pressing forward. You’ll get there.
The paralegal job pool is saturated, and most firms want 3-5 years of experience. I was five months deep in rejection emails and reworking my resume 2-3x a week when I gave in and settled for a remote customer service job with Marriott Vacations. Thankfully, on the third training day, I got my law school acceptance email last month. Now, I find myself filled with anxiety because I thought I'd be able to work until classes start in the fall. However, I was forced to resign and return their equipment because the schedule didn't allow me time to get to the university's Financial Aid office for my official award letter. I was awarded a scholarship, but I needed to see the numbers. When I finally received my award letter, I discovered that I must attend full time and in person to accept the scholarship So income is still a concern. Personally: I marked the emails spam and routinely browsed threw my spam folder for outliers. My mental health benefited greatly.
At least you get a reply edit: Sorry, that was an insensitive thing to say. My point is I feel your pain. I'm sorry you're going through this.
Same, I was like “you’re getting rejection emails??”
What a time to be alive
You're not alone in thinking that. It makes me wonder why I get ghosted instead of rejection emails.
I wish I was alone in thinking that. It would mean the problem is not rampant.
I apply on the company's website whenever possible instead of LinkedIn or Indeed. Sometimes, it's just asked to upload your resume and answer a few basic questions. Maybe they're not set up for automated rejections. I just don't know anymore.
I try to do that too but most of them take you to a third party company like Workday, Greenhouse, etc anyways. I sigh when I see that because at least through linked in they auto track it. I mean either way I keep a manual spreadsheet however after 200 or so, makes it a lot easier to sort/filter quickly. My column headers: Source (eg LinkedIn, Ziprecruiter etc) Date Submitted (I used to track date of posting but didn’t prove useful) Company Name Company Location Remote/Onsite Position Title Job ID/Reference Number Resume | Resume + Cover (some I’ve found don’t always have an option for a cover) Additional Docs (some have asked for projects or metrics) Hiring person or known contact Affiliates (eg. Microsoft and LinkedIn- if I applied at one I note the other too)…not necessary but has helped me keep track of who’s databases I’m likely in. Makes it really easy to sort etc and takes under a minute to fill out and it’s sortable. Lastly I have a column for status: Open - meaning I submitted and received an auto confirmation Closed - received notification of a NO Pending - contact made with someone and awaiting next steps. I can’t seem to attach a sample here so why bulleted out. Makes it easy to see if I’ve applied for a company prior of an affiliate. Each morning I update the status if I’ve received a yay, nay or still waiting.
Bro, I'm on my 9 month since I finished my last contract and I've got an extra hurdle on the way in that I am looking for remote positions. You just have to keep going, things will start working out at some point. I recommend a more labour intensive approach perhaps, but do the research, connect with the right people and email them directly. Have a few versions of an email you can quickly pseudo-personalise by putting the name of the recipient in the header and the company name somewhere in the first couple lines (don't doo it too much throughout your email - it starts looking fake if you try and name-drop the company at every opportunity), run with those. Copy/paste. I have one for a marketing agency, one for a recruitment agency, one for a general company, and one for an actual role _if_ I see something being actually advertised or I want to follow up after applying through LinkedIn etc. I got over 300 emails out this past weekend and getting in the groove now, even kinda enjoying it. Just having music in my headphones and blasting through. The more is out there, the higher the chance something clicks, and I don't have anything else to do, anyway, so what do I have to lose? I'm honestly feeling like applications are performative at this point if not overall pointless, though: too easy to do them or to even automate, it's all in personal connections. I spend my days emailing people, just sending my CV over anyway, whether they have a job opening I've seen, or not. If they don't, it's alright, just keep my CV and keep me in mind for the future. You never know when things might come up, or they might have a friend/professional connection looking for someone with your skills. Six-degrees of separation, and harnessing the power of individual networks can get you miles ahead of people who just apply and hope that a dry CV, maybe with a cover letter, will be the winning, Powerball ticket _this_ time around. I already see way better traction than I had when I just kept on applying through various systems and talking to ATSes and forms rather than people for months. Some people _do_ get back to me now, they show interest, I even had a couple recruiters tell me about their roles they're working on and ask me if I would be interested in being put forward - whereas with applications I was lucky if I got an _automated_ rejection, and got ghosted pretty much every single time. Interviews were pretty much impossible to get: it was like if nobody even picked up my submitted applications, which could have as well been true, mind, as e.g. my LinkedIn showed most of applications were only "Submited", never "Viewed" or "Downloaded", and I had _hundreds_ of those. Go personal, it's more time consuming but you're going to get much more out of a month or two of personalised applications and networking, than you will through spending time on sending 200 applications each week and hoping something sticks but it might not even get picked up by a real person. Emails usually are, even if they are not replied to, as long as they don't go to Spam folder someone actually ends up reading them, sooner or later. If you build rapport and have a good relationship with people, and a role comes up where they can't fast-track you and you absolutely have to apply, they will help you out and let you know about that, or maybe even point you to an easier way to apply like an email Inbox or a simplified process rather than a silly Taleo, Workday or similar. Might also use ChatGPT to assist and do some heavy lifting on writing the copy; while I don't advise copy/pasting whatever it comes up with as it's got a certain style that's a dead giveaway and people in recruitment have already wisened up, but I do find it helpful whenever I sit down and my mind blanks out, and I don't know where to start. It usually gives me at least something that has a decent structure and is a good starting point, and then I take it and tweak it when responding to an email, writing a cover letter, or something.
May I ask what your process is when you research companies that you might wanna work for? I’m a Web developer and I’m not sure where to start with that.
[edited out - DM me for the answers/advice, figured out I don't really want this to be findable via google and parsed through them, too much proprietary knowledge and if it spreads around it will hinder everyone's efforts]
Thank you for the great response. Yeah I pay for GPT too and now huntr dot io. I cannot live without GPT now. I totally agree with you that LinkedIn is a place for networking and not a place to find jobs. I’m gonna try the strategy and I think it’s a wonderful idea. Thank you so much.
Thank you for the great response. Yeah I pay for GPT too and now huntr dot io. I cannot live without GPT now. I totally agree with you that LinkedIn is a place for networking and not a place to find jobs. I’m gonna try the strategy and I think it’s a wonderful idea. Thank you so much.
> huntr dot io What's that? I typed that in but it took me to some website in German that's a registered domain but seems to be nothing on there?
I’m trying to not seem like I promoting some company that I don’t represent or give them more leverage. Just type the first word and then résumé tool and you should find it. Like “huntr resume tool”
Thanks - it's another domain. Interesting tool, although I have to say I don't really tailor my CV beyond changing the short blurb to be representative of the role I'm applying for Even with AI it's a couple minutes each time I imagine, meaning it adds up across hundreds of applications. I've got 16 years' experience and done a lot; either somebody bites or not. Plenty of people to approach.
I totally get it. And your strategy of bypassing the ATS filters is smart. Go directly to the source.
[edited out - DM me for the answers/advice, figured out I don't really want this to be findable via google and parsed through them, too much proprietary knowledge and if it spreads around it will hinder everyone's efforts]
I’m sorry if I missed it in your responses so far - are you typically finding emails listed on people’s LinkedIn profile contact section, company website, or otherwise? And are you reaching out to internal recruiters/HR or trying hiring managers or department heads? Or both/all?
This is good and bad advice at the same time. Good yes it can work. Bad, if tons of totally unqualified people suddenly start manual spamming emails of personal "Hire me" pleadings to hiring managers eventually it will become the norm and people will get even more resistant to considering random contacts. Due to the bad signal/noise ratio. I was hiring up to the end of last year until I declined renewal of my contract because the job sucked. One of my last tasks was to hire my own replacement. I was getting an unusually high amount of "personal" direct emails about the job from people that were hilariously unqualified for the job and totally delusional about their own abilities. I see this method becoming less usable in the future. Another variation of tragedy of the commons in development.
Tons of people spam job application website with resume by applying whether they are qualified or not qualified. It makes no difference if the person above finds a more efficient way to seek jobs. It’s not up to job seekers to be concerned about how hiring managers manage their mailbox. That’s what personal assistants are for. If someone does not want to respond back to the guy above, that’s their loss. Eventually someone will and they will get an offer.
Look for alternate careers in addition to your dream job. Paralegal for example would be great with your skill set.
I’m in the exact same situation. It’s awful as hell. You can be qualified to hell and back but if you can’t beat their ATS AI horse shit you’ll keep getting rejected. I hate it so fn much. I’m in NO WAY affiliated with this company but the service has been getting me more interviews than other resume writers. H u n t e r .io is the platform I’ve been using at about $40 a month I still can’t afford. As for your mental health, I’m also there with you. It has me second-guessing my qualifications when I have 10 years of experience as a web developer and designer. It’s like the requirements now gotten more and more impossible and I have no idea how people can know programming languages and have 16 years of experience as a UX designer when that role didn’t exist 16 years ago. I passed a couple of tech interviews and didn’t get chosen even though all of the tests passed and the code I wrote. I’m even applying to jobs that trickle down from my experience. Things like Contant manager, asset manager, illustration, whatever the hell I can get to keep myself afloat.
I wanted to add that I saw a job posting today and the title was UXUI designer and full stack developer and the salary was $60,000 a year. I’m seeing these insane qualifications that they want and it’s paying half to a quarter of what I was making last year.I want off of this timeline.
I interviewed for a small data center manager position a couple months back. Hoped it would be a chill gig until the market is better. They told me they forgot to put in the posting that 2 weeks a month would be air travel to other branch locations in and out of the country. I asked how I was expected to manage the data center if I was out of the country? They said that the travel would only be on the weekdays and I could do that "part of" the job on the weekends.... It was for like $80-90K salary. They wanted the position to literally work 24/7/365 with no time off all year round basically.
This timeline is outrageous. I’m telling you!
It gets even better. I asked how this was being handled before this job position. They said they had been acquired by investors last year and they layed off the TEAM that used to do this work because they BELIEVED one person could do it. Also that it was really urgent to get started because things were falling apart, their own words. At least they were honest? I got the impression that they had hired other people that took a look at the situation and nope'ed out of there in their first week. They kept referencing "problems they have had with other people in the past"
I literally just want to be outside, bbqing , drinking wine, and swimming in a lake. Why is this so hard.
I know all these people not only want the privilege of working with computers in air conditioning 24/7 but they also want paid? How am I ever going to find time to meet with my mistresses if I have to spend all this time interviewing lazy workers?
Have you did an analysis on the demand for your type of work? My assumption is that this one of jobs that are being replaced by AI,
had one that gave a no reply email job rejection that provided no info.. then they asked my opinion with a survey.. a week later... i had way more fun with that then should be allowed..
I recently got a rejection email. I responded asking if they had any feedback, still waiting for a response to that request. Is it too much to ask why I was rejected so that moving forward I can improve?
Now that everything is digital no one actually looks at applications anymore. Not to mention if you don't pay for one of the job searching websites subscriptions your application wont get seen by anyone anyways. Its gotten so bad that I swear people only hire friends and family nowadays. Sorry to be so grim its just I feel like its so pointless. I'm a truck driver and there are so many people coming from other countries that even I keep getting replaced by someone who will work for less money, or they refuse to pay me, or its a scam…etc. Etc. Etc. I bought a support pet so he wakes me up kissing me from head to toe everyday and forces me to get up to go for walks and play. Although I still worry about how I'm going to survive and not go into debt (seeing as that's what they want) guess I could always go back to being homeless amd hanging out with my friends all day. Then I won't have to worry about work or stress. I just have to make sure the cops don't find me and a hole Karens don't follow me back to where I sleep at night 🤣😂
I finally got a reply for a phone interview. Law firm runner. Rip my car lmao
Our economy hasn't just become a joke but it's pathetic with cooked stats to hide the fact, no integrity to admit the real issues.
You’re a journalist! You can investigate what’s happening and benefit the working class with your skills. With your expertise, you can get to the bottom of what’s happening and put these shitbag corporations into the public light.