Will say what's gotten me hired are my projects eg. robotics or getting published online for hardware stuff, I work in the web-cloud space primarily though, hardware would be cool but hard to make that jump

But looking back on my 30 years of working (including in high school), every job I've ever had I got through personal referrals or recruiter reach-outs. I've gotten to interviews before but never actually taken a job without a personal connection.