Ask HN: How do I understand the results of my job search?
I'm in the very beginning of a search for a new job now, but already feel like things have changed a lot over the last few years, in some socio-economic sense, that I can't quite put my finger on.I never had any problems with passing technical interviews, so that's not what bothers me. My gripe is with the job ads, that are 100% relevant to my experience on paper, and yet somehow my applications seem to go into a black hole.I'm not comfortable with carpet bombing 100s of companies and hoping that someone will hire me for some _arbitrary_ job. I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions.  And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.Overall, I think that the "market" for jobs depends a bit too much on the middlemen lately. Needless to say, that most of these middlemen are not interested in catering to candidates' aspirations, nor are they going to spend too much time looking for a perfect match. The end result is (a) total mess with regards to matching jobs to people and (b) little hope for proper career progression, because the whole process is pretty much random.