The tech world at present is plagued by multiple uncertainties; there is the financial situation with startups failing, high interest rates, rise in unemployment and inflation, there is also the after effects of overhiring, indiscriminate firing, and rampant outsourcing, to top all of this, most companies want to let the world know that they are using AI in any and every aspect of running their business. Given all of this, there is a saturation of well qualified engineers vying for the same job in the current market. However, there is no shortage of advice and tips from engineers (some of them in the same boat) on how to search for, apply, and interview for a role.

Condensed, the advice they offer is as follows:

  1. Apply far and wide, even for roles you might not qualify.
  2. Use AI tools or automation to bulk apply to multiple roles.
  3. Try and get referrals, even if you don’t know or haven’t worked with the person.
  4. Try and contact the hiring manager and the recruiter for the role and send them emails or messages expressing your interest in the role.
  5. Follow the company on LinkedIn, comment on their posts, make yourself visible.

Being an active applicant and having gone through this process more than once, I can tell you what actually works — and it isn’t most of what’s on that list.

Bulk applying is noise. Recruiters can tell. AI-generated cover letters read like AI-generated cover letters. Em dashes and writing in threes make it very obvious. Contacting people you’ve never met asking for referrals puts them in an awkward position, they don’t know your work, so they can’t vouch for it, and most won’t try. Following a company on LinkedIn and commenting on their posts has never once, in my experience, resulted in an interview.

What has actually worked for me, across multiple job searches in one of the hardest markets in recent memory:

  1. Warm referrals from people who know your work. Not acquaintances, not people you found on LinkedIn who happen to work somewhere — people who have seen you do the job. A colleague who worked alongside you and can say “I watched this person debug an issue that three other engineers had given up on” carries infinitely more weight than a stranger checking a referral box. Invest in those relationships before you need them.
  2. Being specific about why you want the role. Not “I’m passionate about cloud infrastructure” but “I read your engineering post about navigating MongoDB Atlas storage limits and the decision to archive cold data rather than scale vertically resonated with me — that’s the kind of infrastructure judgment I want to be part of.” Specificity is evidence that you paid attention. Most candidates don’t.
  3. Doing the work before the interview. Not just studying LeetCode patterns, but understanding the company’s actual technical challenges, their stack, their engineering culture, and how your specific experience maps to their specific problems. The engineers who interview well aren’t the ones who rehearsed the most generic answers, they’re the ones who show up already thinking like a member of the team.
  4. Treating every interaction as a relationship, not a transaction. The recruiter who screens you out today might remember you for the next role. The hiring manager who passes this time might refer you to a friend at another company. The colleague you helped on a Friday afternoon three years ago might be the one who walks your resume to the hiring manager when you need it most. I’ve had both happen.

None of this is fast. None of it scales the way bulk applying does. But the job search is not a numbers game; it’s a trust game. The question every hiring manager is really asking is: would I bet my team’s reliability on this person? The answer to that question doesn’t come from a keyword-optimized resume or a LinkedIn comment. It comes from evidence, and the best evidence is someone they already trust saying your name.

There is one more thing worth saying, and it has nothing to do with your own search.

When a colleague loses their job, reach out to them. Not a LinkedIn reaction, not a public comment on their announcement post, a private message. Two sentences. “I heard what happened. How are you doing?” That’s it. You don’t need to have a referral ready or a job lead to share. You just need to not disappear.

I’ve been on both sides of this. The people who reached out when I least expected it are the ones I remember. The silence from everyone else is something I remember too. In a market where we’re all one restructuring away from the same situation, a little basic human decency costs nothing and means more than any advice about optimizing your LinkedIn profile ever could.