Context: Searching for a new senior level software development job over a 9 week period in summer 2025.
- Focused mostly on data engineering and backend roles that are in-person or hybrid in the SF Bay Area.
- Leads from recruiters on LinkedIn were much more likely to lead to interviews+offers.
- The winning offer came through my personal network.
- I mostly used Hiring.cafe for prospecting. They're a scraper with an interface I didn't hate.
This sounds to me like we need to move to Germany. It's not uncommon for people in the US to apply to hundreds, or even thousands, of jobs and get a single-digit number of interviews (or offers, in industries where interviewing is uncommon) out of it, regardless of effort put into the application. Most applications are rejected before a human ever reads them.
To be fair, I only worked at small/medium companies ( <100 people ) and a quarter of the time I had a contact there from some networking event.
That's an entirely different situation then. That's just the power of networking
Networking is 100% the easiest way to get a job. The people that have networking don't need advice. 99% of the job hunting advice is with the assumption you don't have a network you can rely on for finding jobs. Because if you did, you wouldn't be having trouble finding a job