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Comment by itsmequinn | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking the same thing. If you send out 100 resumes a week, how great a quality can any of them be? If only because of how exhausted and frustrated you get after sending out 100 resumes. Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to write an excellent cover letter and a tailored resume.

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My parents (and I'm sure many others) pushed for resume blasts until the last couple of years. It makes sense from the perspective of the world they grew up in. You sent as many as you could and got a lot of job opportunities to choose from.

I sent out 15 highly targeted applications and got a 100% response rate. All of them were polite, mostly manually written rejections. I got one interview that went nowhere. That's when I decided I'd be better off starting my own business.

I'm so totally with you on this part:

Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to

and then it needs to get followed with "convince the person with hiring authority in the company to hire you." The resume is designed to be rejected.

In my experience, the resume is so thoroughly designed to be rejected that you basically can't rely on it. I don't know how ordinary people would actually get jobs in this market by simply submitting a resume for an open requisition; there will always be someone out there whose resume has less HR red flags on it (probably because they falsified it) so you never even get an email back from hiring.

100% of my job opportunities have been from networking (or nepotism) and most of the people I know have the same experience.

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