This small resume trick helped me understand recruiter behavior and land a $75k remote SWE offer
A few months ago, my daily routine looked almost exactly the same every day.
Wake up. Apply for jobs. Solve NeetCode problems. Revise system design. Give interviews. Get ghosted. Repeat.
At one point, my browser permanently had the same tabs open: LinkedIn, Gmail, LeetCode, NeetCode.io, HelloInterview.
And after enough rejections, you start questioning everything.
Maybe my resume wasn’t good enough. Maybe recruiters didn’t care about projects anymore. Maybe nobody was even opening the links I had spent hours polishing.
One night after another rejection email, I opened my resume and just stared at it for a while.
It had everything people usually recommend. GitHub links, deployed projects, technical work, portfolio links.
But then I realized something weird.
I had absolutely no idea what recruiters were actually interacting with after opening my resume.
Were they checking my backend projects? Were they opening deployed demos? Did they care about GitHub at all? Or were they spending 10 seconds on the resume and moving on?
Out of curiosity, I changed one small thing.
Instead of directly adding links, I started shortening all my resume links using sendurl.to so each one was trackable.
Every project had its own link. My GitHub had a separate one. Portfolio too.
I honestly didn’t expect it to matter much.
But after a few weeks of applications, patterns started showing up.
One project I almost removed from my resume kept getting clicked repeatedly.
Meanwhile, another project I personally thought was my best work barely got opened at all.
Some recruiters only opened GitHub. Some only checked deployed demos. Some resumes got views but zero clicks anywhere.
It sounds like a tiny thing, but for the first time, I felt like I had some visibility into what was actually happening instead of blindly sending resumes into a black hole.
So I started changing things based on that.
I rearranged projects. Rewrote certain bullet points. Removed things nobody interacted with. Started tailoring resumes more intentionally depending on the role.
And honestly, it helped.
A few months later, I ended up getting multiple offers, including a $75k US-based SWE role.
Obviously this wasn’t some magical shortcut. Most of the hard part was still interview prep, consistency, DSA, system design, and handling the mental exhaustion that comes with job hunting.
But this was one of the few things that gave me actual feedback instead of generic resume advice.
Thought I’d share because I rarely see people talk about resumes this way. Most of us just keep editing them blindly without ever knowing what recruiters actually pay attention to.