A job seeker who spent nearly a year searching for a remote position has finally secured a role, sharing detailed insights into their journey on Reddit. The individual described their experience as a “ten-month marathon” that left them burned out, after initially expecting to find something within weeks.
LinkedIn Limitations and the Power of Tailored Resumes
“The first thing I realized was that LinkedIn is basically useless for finding real jobs right now. Great for networking and messaging people, but terrible for actual listings. Most of the jobs I saw were outdated, fake, or duplicated. By month four I stopped using it for applications entirely. Maybe it’s the market, maybe it’s LinkedIn, but either way the results were awful,” they wrote.
The breakthrough came through carefully tailoring resumes for each application. “What actually helped me was something I didn’t expect. The biggest game changer by far was tailoring my resume for every single job. Not just making an ATS friendly resume once, but fully rewriting parts of it for each listing. Summary, experience bullets, keywords, everything. It sounds like a lot of work but this one step made more difference than anything else I did in ten months,” they explained.
Diverse Job Search Tactics and Persistence
Beyond tailoring resumes, the individual diversified their approach. “I also stopped relying on a single job board. I set up filtered alerts on multiple sites with very specific criteria so I only saw roles that actually matched my background. Some days I had zero new listings but I kept applying consistently. Slow but accurate applications were way more effective than spamming hundreds of easy applies,” they said.
The Redditor also expanded outreach to recruiters and hiring managers. “I searched on Google and Google Maps for IT and tech recruiting firms using terms like Top IT Recruiting Companies in the US and similar lists. In total, I think, I sent my resume to around six or seven hundred firms… I also started buying weekly contact lists from someone who gathers companies in my industry and provides the hiring managers names, emails, LinkedIns and so on. I emailed around a hundred people every week which was roughly fifteen a day and sent them my tailored resume,” they revealed.
The results of this combined strategy were significant. The individual received multiple interview opportunities and eventually accepted a recruiter-mediated offer that provided better pay and lower responsibilities. “If anyone wants the exact prompt I used for tailoring or the filters I set on job boards I can share that too. Good luck to everyone still searching. It really can turn around out of nowhere,” they concluded.
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