I have interviewed for almost 4 months (I was originally going to do 1 quarter, but I thought I had cracked something more on it in March and decided to extend).
In mid March, I kinda figured out that applying is a terrible (3% conversion) numbers game. I started cold calling or directly contacting recruiters, and also asking existing recruiters if they had other roles. My conversion rate went up fairly dramatically (10-15%, not nearly as many data points) once I did that. It seems that at this time the key to even having a chance of getting a job is having a connection to the recruiter or the hiring manager. Every "full round" interview I did was through a direct human reach out (either me to them or a human contacting me). By "conversion", I simmply mean that I succeeeded in talking to a human recruiter or hiring manager. I did not get a single full round interview from filling out an application.
I've also noticed that the number of steps I have to do has gone up a lot. Many companies are like 1 system design, 2 technical, 1 behavioral, then meet onsite to talk about your takehome and do some pairing and talk to our muckity-muck or whatever. FAANGS used to be the high water mark in that there were 4 separate rounds of interview (5 if you count the screener). They now actually seem to be some of the less demanding interview.
My learnings are:
- If you are going to apply online, you need to do so at an industrial level. I am talking spin up playwright and write things that fill out applications for you level here. There are lots of extensions and tools you can also install to try to automate this stuff. I didn't do any of this, but if you are serious, you should either pay people to fill out these forms for you or write some code to do so automatically. Simply filling out applications is an extremely low rate of return way of spending your time at this juncture.
- You will have much better outcomes directly contacting the recruiters, it doesn't guarantee anything, but only filling out applications will result in your application most likely never even being passed to a hiring manager (maybe not even a human being). You need the recruiter to pass you up to even have a chance to swing.
- I did probably 3-5 (depending on how you count it) full round interviews in 4 months. The average interview is 5-8 discreet steps. This is probably an average "talked to a human being" ratio of ~15% when going through a recruiter or hiring manager.
- I think companies are looking for "perfect fit" candidates at this point. They feel (reasonably?) that it is better to keep looking for the perfect fit candidate than to hire someone who has strengths but also has things they will need to learn on the job.
- (only applies to me) FullStack development is... it is weird. On one hand there is lots of demand for it, but on the other hand there are just so many people applying that I feel in aggregate it appears to be bad place to be (not even mentioning worries about it being largely replaced by AI).
The Bureau of labor and Statistics says that the current unemployment rate for "Computer & Mathematical Occupations" is 3.5%. Although this is higher than it was in the past, it is still below the 4.2% for the nation as a whole. My lived experience is that getting a job is pretty challenging at this time. I am seeing similar sentiments among my friends.