I skipped the HR black hole by finding my future leads personal email in their public repo commits.
I spent three weeks shouting into the void of some generic greenhouse portal for a backend role I was actually overqualified for. Every time I reached out to the recruiter she gave me the same automated trash about high volume of candidates and how they were still reviewing portfolios . It was pretty obvious she did not even know the difference between Java and Javascript based on her LinkedIn profile so I decided to stop playing the game by their rules. I found the company’s public organization on GitHub and started digging through the recent commmits on their main infra structure repo. It is wild how many senior devs forget to scrub their personal emails from their local git config before pushing to public repos. I found the guy who was clearly running the project because he had about eighty percent of the commits in the last six months.
I did not even bother with a cover letter. I just sent him a direct email with a link to a specific bug I found in their public documentation and a quick note about how I could fix their current scaling issues. No corporate fluff, no "I am excited to join your mission" garbage. Just a technical breakdown and my resume attached. He replied in forty minutes. Turns out HR had not even shown him my application yet because some filter flagged me for not having a specific certification taht nobody in the actual industry cares about. We had a technical screen over Zoom that same afternoon and skipped the entire "behavioral" nonsense where they ask you where you see yourself in five years.
The funny thing is the recruiter called me two days later to tell me they were "moving forward with other candidates" while I was literally signing the offer letter that the engineering VP had sent me directly. I did not even correct her. I just said thanks and hung up. It really proves that the entire hiring process is designed by people who do not understand the work they are hiring for. If you are waiting for an ATS to pluck your resume out of a stack of five hundred people you are basically playing the lottery with bad odds. Most of these HR departments are just a bottleneck that keeps talent away from the people who actually need it.
I am starting on Monday and I already know more about their codebase than the recruiter knows about the entire company. I still think about that "rejection" call sometimes when I am bored. The lack of communication between the people hiring and the people working is actually insane. I guess if you want a job in tech you have to start acting like a debugger and find the point of failure in the system. In this case the failure was a lady named Karen in talent acquisition who thinks Python is a type of snake. My new lead even thanked me for reaching out because he was drowning in work and had no idea they even had an open req posted on the site.