u/ragsyme

i have been at my current job two years and lately been more interested in fixing the small daily frictions than anything else. just the stuff that makes the actual hours better.

things like finally setting up proper meeting controls so i stop fumbling with the mouse mid standup, or cleaning up how i move between tools without losing my train of thought.

curious what small changes people here have made that actually stuck. nothing life changing, just the stuff that quietly made things better long term.

At this point, I’ve stopped thinking of myself as a candidate and started thinking of myself as a salesperson with a quota.

I maintain a spreadsheet with the following columns for company, role, where I applied, what stage I'm at, when I last heard something, and when to follow up. If a company hasn't moved in two weeks and I've pinged them once, they go to a "low priority" bucket. Someone who responds quickly and communicates well moves up. It sounds cold, but it genuinely took the anxiety out of it for me.

The mindset shift that helped the most was accepting the fact that companies are not your only option. They're one prospect, and I am running a process too. I have bandwidth limits, too. Spending emotional energy on a company that goes quiet for three weeks is the same as a salesperson chasing a lead that stopped opening emails.

The thing I've noticed is that the companies worth working for tend to behave like good customers. They tell you what's next from time to time. They don't ghost. They respect your time because they know you're probably talking to someone else.

Am I the only frustrated candidate following this method? Is this a system everyone ends up building, or am I overcomplicating it?

I've been in the digital marketing field for 9 years. And I genuinely never thought I'd be writing something like this, but here we are.

I've been in active search mode for a few months now, and the part that's messing with me isn't the competition or the volume or even the rejections. It's the timeline problem. You get through a screening call, it goes reasonably well, and then you're just left there. No next step. No window. Nothing. So you follow up, and you either hear nothing or you get something like "we're still evaluating candidates" with no sense of when that ends.

Most of the time it ends with a rejection you weren't expecting because you had no signal it was coming.

I've had a few companies tell me on day one roughly what the process looks like, how many rounds, when they expect to decide, who's involved. Those are the three I stayed fully engaged with. The others got deprioritized by week two, not out of bitterness but because I had to protect my own time and mental energy somehow.

I don't think companies are doing this maliciously. I think most just haven't thought about what the absence of information does to a candidate psychologically. You're not managing my expectations. You're creating a vacuum, and I'm filling it with anxiety.

Is this a common experience right now? And for anyone who's been on the hiring side, is there a reason process transparency doesn't happen more consistently?

I've started believing this more and more.

The company that took 6 weeks to get back to me after my final round also took 6 weeks to approve my first expense report once I joined. I wish I could say that was a coincidence.

The signs were there the whole time. The scheduling kept getting pushed. Nobody could give me a straight answer on the timeline. The recruiter was apologetic but vague with their response.

I wanted the job so I ignored it. (still don’t know how to comprehend, maybe a mistake, maybe an experience)

Once I was inside, I understood what I'd actually walked into. Everything in the ogranization moved like that. Every decision required three people to sign off. Every process was detailed and thorough.

The hiring experience is basically a preview. Companies that move fast and communicate clearly tend to operate that way internally. Companies that go quiet for two weeks between rounds and then ask you to "bear with them" are also showing you something about the organisation.

I'm not saying slow hiring automatically means a bad place to work. But when you combine slow response times with vague communication and no clear next steps, that pattern tends to give a signal.

My 2 cents: Pay attention to how they treat you before you're on payroll. It's usually pretty honest.

Has anyone else had this play out, either direction? Where the process was a genuinely accurate signal for what the culture turned out to be?

I’ve tried a few AI presentation tools over the last couple weeks and most of them either export weirdly or force you into their own editor.

I already work in Google Slides with my team so I really don’t want to move everything into another app just to make a deck faster.

Main thing I need is something that can take rough notes or a doc and turn it into a usable first draft presentation. Doesn’t need to be perfect, just enough to stop me from spending 3 hours making slides from scratch.

Anything actually good for this?

The assignment wasn't small. It was a full strategy doc, two frameworks, KPIs, and a slide deck. They gave me four days and I spent most of two of them on it.

The interview before that had gone well, (at least I thought it had :/). The hiring manager said she was looking forward to seeing what I put together. I took that seriously.

I submitted it on a Thursday. Got a confirmation on submission. Still positive and my hopes are high. But…

Nothing after. Followed up after ten days, politely, just checking in. Silence. Followed up once more about two weeks after that.

Nothing.

The job is still listed. It's been seven weeks.

I've made a kind of peace with it, eventually. I told myself the decision was already made before I sent that last email, and there's something almost useful about accepting that. But the take-home sits in a folder on my desktop, and I don't really know what to do with it.

Do companies understand what they're asking when they send these? And has anyone actually heard back after the kind of silence I'm describing, or is it just done at some point?

I applied to 150 roles over the past 3 months and may have heard back from 4 or 5. My confidence was really rock bottom. At some point, I stopped assuming I was doing something wrong and actually tried to understand how hiring works on the recruiter side by speaking with some of my recruiter friends.

These are the five things I learned from my research and from speaking with my recruiter friends:

1. The ATS filtered you before a human ever looked. Even today, most systems run on keyword logic that hasn't been updated in years. You can be genuinely qualified and still never surface. It's just how the queue gets managed at scale.

2. Recruiters are seeing 200 to 400 applications per role. At that volume, most resumes get about 10 seconds. (that’s surprising, honestly)

3. AI-optimized resumes have made everyone look identical. I spent weeks tweaking mine with Resume Worded and a few other tools. I saw a marginal difference at best. It turns out everyone else is doing the same thing, so the signal is gone.

4. Some of those postings were never really open. Some roles are already filled internally or posted to build a pipeline for a future role. Your application goes into a process that was never going to result in a call. I still apply anyway, but I think about this more than I used to.

5. Ghosting after a screening call usually isn't personal. Too many “maybes” in the queue, not enough time to close every loop. They feel bad about this, too. But can’t do anything about it.

The thing that actually changed my response rate was attaching something demonstrable to my applications. A real work sample or anything beyond the PDF. I am still figuring out the best way to do this consistently, but it's the only lever that's felt real so far.

What's moved the needle for you? Genuinely asking because I'm still in it.

I got only two callbacks out of 98 applications. Out of which one was a clear-cut rejection without feedback, and the other just ghosted me right after my phone screen call.

I want to be specific: most of these had a high LinkedIn job match score. I used Jobscan, Resume Worded, optimized my resume probably five times. And also optimized my profiles for relevant keywords.

At this point I'm questioning whether ATS optimization is even the right problem to solve, or if there's something I'm not seeing entirely.

If you've gotten consistent callbacks recently, what changed for you? Was it the resume, the channel, the type of role, or something else?

It's a genuine question because I keep going back and forth on this.

Half of the advice I have read on Reddit and spoken to multiple candidates in the same journey as mine blame ATS for every rejection. "Your resume never reached a human." Maybe, it's true.

But I also know people who got callbacks with pretty generic resumes and zero keyword strategy, so I am not sure how much of this is real versus a comfortable story we tell ourselves.

I've been through Resume Worded, tweaked my resume probably five or six times, tried to match job descriptions almost word for word. It still feels like most of my applications disappear into the dark.

What has actually worked for you in real practice? Did ATS optimisation change your response rate in a noticeable way? Or was something else the bigger lever?

I'd rather figure out where the actual problem is than spend another two weeks fixing something that might not be the bottleneck.

I've been applying for a couple of months now and haven't made it past an initial screening call. Most of what comes back is auto-rejection from LinkedIn or a company portal, with no context.

And it's not like I haven't taken any action to course-correct. I went back to my university's learning and development team, sat with mentors from the same industry, and we reviewed my CV thoroughly. We went deep, understood what a hiring manager would want to see, and then reframed my sentences accordingly.

Then I even tried going through a recruitment agency to get my CV in front of companies directly. That didn't move the needle either.

At this point I'm not sure if the problem is the CV, the roles I'm targeting, or whether any of it is even reaching a human before something filters it out. That last part is what I keep coming back to.

Has anyone actually figured out what changed their response rate? Not the usual advice. What worked for you specifically?

I'm not complaining about the job. It was genuinely a good one. Had a stable team, a decent pay structure, and comfortable working hours, which gave me work-life balance so much so that it didn't really put me under pressure to try or learn anything new.

Then I had a realization where I thought to myself that it's time for some change. Get uncomfortable and start applying in the job market. And that's when I realized what I had missed. The roles that would have been lateral moves two years ago are now expecting tool stacks that I did not touch in my previous job. An example would be AI native knowledge for media planners.

And the surprising part is that, while I was working at my previous org, I didn't feel the drift while the change was happening around me. But because I am in the job search field right now, I understand that benchmarks have moved widely, while I have not kept up with the pace.

So I have started using LinkedIn Learning, some courses on Udemy and Coursera to catch up. I have also tried to attend some AI workshops. But frankly, it's hard to know what to prioritize in this loud noise because everything feels so urgent, and the fear of missing out actually catches up sooner or later.

Has anyone else come back to the market after a long, stable stretch and felt this way? How did you figure out what to actually upskill on, and how long did it take before applications started going anywhere?

I grabbed dinner with a former coworker last night.

He was one of the 92,000 tech workers laid off last month in April.

The guy is brilliant. He spent the last five years architecting production systems.

He builds things that actually generate revenue. Most valuable to a company.

Yesterday, he finally landed a technical screen for a senior backend role.

He spent the weekend prepping to talk about system design and walk through his open-source contributions.

Instead, they dropped him into a shared coding doc.

They asked him to solve a dynamic programming code that he has not thought about since his college years. He completely froze. Understandably.

He stumbled upon a force solution. But, unfortunately, he ran out of time.

An automated rejection email hit his inbox this morning. 😞

Hearing him talk about it was just exhausting.

He is applying for senior roles where algorithms feel completely irrelevant to the day-to-day work.

Yet he is still forced into this endless LeetCode grind just to prove he can code.

For the experienced devs navigating this frozen 2026 market right now, how are you actually proving your skills? Are you just submitting to the LC grind or pushing back and asking for take-home tasks instead?

He is completely burned out, and I honestly did not have any good advice to give him.

I knew ATS was a thing. But I didn't know it was this particular kind of evil…. 😞

I spent the last few weeks actually digging into how these parsers work instead of just blaming them.

And I found a few things that I didn't expect. Those are:

• Dates without months apparently flag as an employment gap in some systems.
• Skills inside a table or columns often get pulled out garbled, or not at all.
• Fancy resume headers can cause the parser to swap your job title with the company name.

The correction is to use the most boring format imaginable:

• Have a single column.
• Use standard fonts.
• Have plain text headings.
• Mirror keywords from the actual job post because the parser ranks on exact matches.

I tried Resume Worded and Jobscan to check my resume against a few listings. Both were useful in different ways, but neither told me about the date formatting thing until I went looking.

What's interesting is that some companies are quietly moving away from resume screening altogether. Skills-based hiring is becoming a real thing (or maybe the thing), where you take an assessment or complete a short task before your resume even comes into the picture.

A few companies I applied to (MNC and startups) recently had this upfront. Honestly, it felt less nerve-wracking than wondering if my date format killed my chances. (still being ghosted, but its a story for another day)

So now I'm not sure which problem to actually solve. Optimize the resume for ATS, or find roles where the resume matters less to begin with.

Has anyone actually tested whether fixing ATS formatting moved the needle? And have you come across more companies doing skills-first screening lately?

At some point, I stopped telling people I was job hunting. This fatigue came to me after proactively looking for a job for about a year, asking my network to refer me for various roles, and applying through LinkedIn, Indeed, Naukri, etc. And I honestly stopped telling people because it was getting really difficult for me to tell them that I was doing everything that's in my control:

• reaching out to people
• customizing CVs for that particular role
• performing and submitting the assignments that were given to me with full sincerity still failing at some place which I didn't know what at that time. Now, however, I feel I have some answers, and I'm listing them down for you.

Here's what I actually learned after way too many applications and a lot of humbling silence:

1. Spraying 50 apps a day gets you nothing. The ATS voids about 75% of resumes before a human ever sees them. Therefore, target the right kind of keywords that match the job description, because I feel that works better than submitting your CVs en masse.
2. AI-assisted resumes are getting flagged now. Do you use ChatGPT to polish your resume? Some screeners are catching it and deprioritizing it. I have been hearing this. There is no data to back this, so I would recommend making some minor changes to the bullet points in your CV to humanize the language. 
3. Easy Apply is mostly a trap. I tracked some applications. I feel, generic blasts got about a 1% response rate. That's not a pipeline, that's noise.
4. The "posted today" filter on LinkedIn is lying to you. Change the URL to 3600s to filter for posts from the last hour. First applicants get more meaningful attention.
5. Skip the 10k-applicant postings. Try to find roles with fewer than 200 applicants, posted within the past 1 to 2 weeks. Less competition = more attention. (can still go wrong here) 
6. ATS hates synonyms. "Cross-functional collaboration" and "working across teams" are not the same thing to a parser. I’d say mirror the job description exactly.
7. Tables and graphics tank your resume. Single column, clean .docx or PDF, no textboxes. 88% rejection rate for anything fancier, from what I've read. Only if you’re submitting to an ATS. It’s a different case if you submit to a human. 
8. Quantify or get ignored. "Managed a team" means nothing. "Led a 5-person team to 38% pipeline growth" gets read. This tip is more suited for someone with over 5 years of work experience. 
9. Network before you need to. One message to a past colleague at a company I wanted in at got me further than 200 cold apps. Referrals move differently; at least you get a response. 
10. Skill assessments upfront changed something. I started using platforms where you complete a short AI-graded assessment before applying, 15 to 20 minutes. Instead of hoping a recruiter reads my resume right, my skills went in front of the role.

What moved the needle for you? Genuinely asking because I don't think there's one universal answer here, and I'm tired of advice that sounds good but doesn't help in today’s dynamic scenario.

I'm running video ads for a B2C SaaS product in the hiring space.

It's a dual-sided platform targeting both employers and job seekers, so the messaging varies quite a bit depending on the audience.

I have a few ad scripts ready, and now I need to actually turn them into video ads.

Right now, I'm using ChatGPT for image generation and Canva for text animation and transitions, but honestly, the output quality isn't where I want it to be.

I've been looking at a few options:

• Seedance for AI video generation.
• Remotion + Codex (i am sceptical since i am not a super technical, yet)
• Replit crossed my mind, too

For voiceovers, I am using Eleven Labs, which I think I will continue using.

Anyone here who's made video ads for a B2C SaaS product? What tools are you using?

Would be grateful to have your recommendations.

I’m running video ads for a B2C SaaS product in the hiring space. 

It's a dual-sided platform targeting both employers and job seekers, so the messaging varies quite a bit depending on the audience.

I have a few ad scripts ready, and now I need to actually turn them into video ads. 

Right now, I'm using ChatGPT for image generation and Canva for text animation and transitions, but honestly, the output quality isn't where I want it to be.

I've been looking at a few options:

• Seedance for AI video generation. 
• Remotion + Codex (i am sceptical since i am not a super technical, yet) 
• Replit crossed my mind, too

Anyone here who's made video ads for a B2C SaaS product? What tools are you using? 

Would be grateful to have your recommendations. 

I'm running video ads for a B2C SaaS product in the hiring space.

It's a dual-sided platform targeting both employers and job seekers, so the messaging varies quite a bit depending on the audience.

I have a few ad scripts ready, and now I need to actually turn them into video ads.

Right now, I'm using ChatGPT for image generation and Canva for text animation and transitions, but honestly, the output quality isn't where I want it to be.

I've been looking at a few options:

• Seedance for AI video generation.
• Remotion + Codex (i am sceptical since i am not a super technical, yet)
• Replit crossed my mind, too

Anyone here who's made video ads for a B2C SaaS product? What tools are you using?

Would be grateful to have your recommendations.

I've wasted a lot of tailored resumes this year. Polished cover letters, hours of research, customized applications sent into complete silence.

After getting burned too many times, I started screening job postings the same way employers screen candidates. Here's what I look for now before I bother applying.

Red flags I skip:

1. Posted 30+ days ago, especially anything labelled "urgently hiring." If it were urgent, it'd be filled or job applications would have been closed.
2. Company announced layoffs recently, but is suddenly flooding job boards. Check their LinkedIn or news before clicking apply. Or just a classic Google search usually helps.
3. No salary range. Sometimes it's just a pipeline collection exercise. I have come across  this a lot. There are so many companies that are doing this, and sometimes I feel it's like applying in the void
4. Description is vague enough to apply to five different roles. "Dynamic environment, collaborative team, results-driven mindset" tells me nothing about the actual job.  If I had to put a number on it, nine out of ten times, this would be someone who's kind of not serious.  Or we might get an assignment and then not hear back.
5. Not listed on their own careers page. If the company doesn't show it internally, it's worth questioning.  This has a dual site. They probably missed listing it on their website, or it may have taken some time, and it's only listed on LinkedIn.

I also started using LinkedIn's "Applied" insights and Indeed's "Actively reviewing" badges as rough signals, though neither is foolproof.

I have been experimenting with a few other approaches too, things like leading with a skill proof upfront rather than waiting for a screen.  

An example would be: since I am a marketer, I will audit a few ads or a landing page and send them some corrections.  

I am curious if others have found ways to cut through the noise on platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, or Handshake.

What's your process for filtering before you apply? Anything I'm missing here?

I've been venting to a friend who works in talent acquisition at a mid-size ad-tech company.

Asked her bluntly: why does it feel like applications just vanish? She was surprisingly honest.

Here's what she said: (sharing just key points)

1. They're getting 200 to 400 applications per role. She said there's no human way to review them all... And most get a 10-second skim at best.
2. The ATS is doing most of the filtering before she even sees anything. If your resume doesn't match the exact keywords the system is looking for, it gets flagged down regardless of how qualified you actually are. She admitted the keyword logic in their system is probably outdated.
3. AI-polished resumes are making things worse. Everyone's using tools to optimize their resumes now. So everything looks the same. She said she's become numb to "results-driven professional with a proven track record." She'd rather prefer some numbers over vague statements. (I feel she's echoing an entire industry)
4. A lot of the job postings are aspirational or already internally filled. The role gets posted anyway. Your application just feeds a pipeline that was never really open. tbh, i took this with a pinch of salt. i still apply to companies with a bit of enthusiasm.
5. Ghosting after screening calls isn't personal. Too many "maybes" in the queue, not enough time to close every loop. She felt bad about it but said it's just the reality right now.

The honest takeaway: She said the candidates who stood out lately were the ones who came in having already demonstrated something. A portfolio, a test, a real work sample. Anything that wasn't just a PDF.

Anyone else had a candid conversation like this? Would love to hear what you've been told.