Spent 4 hours applying to jobs on LinkedIn with no luck, then tried a totally different trick

I was blasting out applications through LinkedIn Easy Apply for weeks and getting nowhere, maybe one callback out of 50 attempts. Then I found a direct email for a hiring manager at a local marketing firm in Austin and wrote a short note instead. Has anyone else had better luck skipping the online portals and reaching out to people directly?

3 comments

3 Comments

finleyf881mo ago

LinkedIn Easy Apply is basically a black hole. I did a test once where I applied to 30 jobs on there with a fake resume just to see what happened. Zero responses. Then I took the same fake resume and emailed it directly to a hiring manager I found through a news article about their company. Got a response in two days. The trick nobody talks about is checking local business journals or industry blogs for mentions of people getting promoted or hired. Those articles often list their email or at least give you enough context to guess it. That's way better than fighting with 500 other applicants on LinkedIn.

grace_white1mo agoTop Commenter

Local business journals are a smart idea, but I gotta push back on writing off Easy Apply completely. Most people treat it like a lottery ticket, clicking through without tailoring a single thing, then wonder why it fails. If you use Easy Apply to send a short, custom note and match your resume to the job description, it works way better than the average person thinks. A test with a fake resume isn't really fair, since hiring managers can spot a generic application from a mile away. The real trick with any application is making it obvious you're a real person who actually read the posting, not just another robot hitting submit.

lisak2626d ago

That test with the fake resume is really telling - hiring managers can spot generic applications instantly, so it makes sense that direct emails work better when you actually read about their company first.