Switching from job boards to direct applications was night and day for me

I spent about 6 months applying through Indeed and LinkedIn, getting maybe one interview for every 50 applications. Felt like I was shouting into a void. Then I tried something different: I made a list of 20 companies in my field in Austin, looked up their careers pages, and applied directly on their sites. First round I got 3 interviews out of 12 apps. The difference is companies on job boards get flooded with hundreds of people, but direct applicants show you actually know who they are. I also started tailoring my resume to each job instead of sending the same one everywhere. Has anyone else had better luck going around the big job sites?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_barbara6d ago

Oh I don't know about all that... I mean sure it worked for you and @lisa671 but job boards are flooded for a reason, they're where most companies actually post. Applying direct on a careers page just means you might miss the jobs that only get advertised on the big sites. And tailoring every resume takes forever, who's got time for 20 different versions? Plus I've applied directly before and still got the same automated rejection email two weeks later. Sometimes it's just luck no matter how you send the app.

lisa6716d ago

Oh man, same exact thing happened to me. I sent out like 80 apps through LinkedIn for a solid 3 months and got nothing but crickets. Finally I just picked 15 places I actually wanted to work at and applied through their own sites. I changed my resume for each one too, like really matched it to their job posting. Ended up getting 4 callbacks from that batch. One of them even said they liked that I found them directly instead of just blasting through a job board. It made me feel less like a number and more like a real person.