A job search can eat every hour you give it and still leave you feeling like you should have done more. There's always another listing. Another cover letter to tinker with. Another person telling you to network, as though you hadn't considered speaking to humans.
My suggestion: decide which applications deserve your attention before you start spending it.
Some roles are worth researching carefully, tailoring your application for, and finding someone to talk to about. Others look plausible enough to apply for, but don't deserve your entire Tuesday. Give those a smaller time budget. Make sure the application is accurate and relevant, then send it.
You can take the search seriously without giving every opening equal custody of your brain.
Give your applications different time budgets
1. Targeted applications
Start with the roles that deserve a closer look.
Let's set aside the idea of 50 applications for now. Start by finding fewer than 10 that really engage you. This number can be as low as one, but this bucket of applications needs to feel interesting to you so that the effort gives you some sense of vitality, rather than draining it. For each:
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Read the job description like a detective. Highlight the specific skills, tools, and language they use. Mirror that language in your resume and cover letter — not because you're gaming the system, but because you're showing you actually read the posting.
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Research the company beyond the careers page. Read their recent press releases, their LinkedIn posts, their Glassdoor reviews. When you reference something specific in your cover letter — a product launch, a company value, a challenge they're facing — you give the reader a reason to believe you've thought about this particular job.
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Find a human connection. Before you apply, search LinkedIn for someone at the company who's in the department or role you're targeting. Send a short, respectful note: "Hey, I'm exploring roles in [area] and saw that [Company] is hiring for [role]. I'd love to learn more about what it's like working there — would you be open to a quick 15-minute conversation?" You'd be surprised how often this works. A conversation can help you understand the role. It doesn't automatically make that person an advocate, so give them room to decide whether an introduction makes sense.
Does this take more time per application? Yes. The point is to give the roles you care about a considered application, then learn from the response.
2. Not-targeted applications
For roles that meet your needs but don't merit extensive research, set a smaller time budget. Tools can help with the drafting; you're still responsible for what you send.
Think of 80/20 as a starting heuristic: put most of your effort into a smaller set of promising roles. Adjust the split to your circumstances, rather than treating it as a proven formula. Concretely:
- Use AI to tailor your resume. Cover letter, too! Check every claim, date, and skill against your actual experience before sending — and if you want an extra layer, play the AI off each other: pass one to another and say "how do these edits look given the job description?" Pro tip: you can use this approach for your targeted applications, too. Just give it a more thorough review before hitting send.
Frankly, that's the whole advice — don't burn out applying to literal hundreds of roles. Use your real energy on the ones that make you excited, then soothe the part of you that feels you need to send more out by investing very little, efficiently-spent time on many at once.
After a couple of weeks, look at what happened. Which roles produced replies? Which conversations helped you understand the work? Where are you spending hours without learning anything? Adjust the mix. If you need income urgently, “interesting” may mean a viable job that pays the bills. That belongs in the plan, too.
Make your experience easy to understand
Hiring processes vary. Some employers use automated screening, including rules based on application answers. Make your relevant experience easy to find, use the employer's terminology where it accurately describes your work, and answer screening questions honestly. Keyword stuffing won't substitute for a relevant example.
There are a few key spots where I see folks need to update their resume:
Show that you get it, not just that you did it. Use numbers you can explain. Then show the decision behind them: what problem were you solving, what did you change, and why? “Redesigned the onboarding flow to reduce the handoff friction our support team kept flagging” tells me how you understood the work. If you can also show the result, better still. It demonstrates presence of mind — that you understood the problem, not just the task.
Make the connection clear. Use the posting's terms when they accurately describe your experience, then give an example. “Cross-functional collaboration” doesn't say much by itself; explaining how you got support and engineering to agree on a handoff does.
Make the summary earn its space. As a hiring manager, I skipped summary blocks and went straight to the job history to see the arc. If a short summary explains a career change your job titles don't, it may earn its space. If it just says you're a results-oriented professional, I'd give that space back to your experience.
Show you can learn, not just that you know things. In a market this volatile, companies want people who can handle ambiguity. If you've navigated a reorg, pivoted a project, figured out something nobody taught you — highlight that. Not the credential, but the story of how you figured it out. The ability to learn and adapt is the single most valuable thing on your resume. A great outcome without a reflection of how you got there looks like a fluke. A great outcome with the thinking behind it shows a pattern.
Connect with people who know the work
"Networking." Yuck! The term and its connotations are unpleasant at best — for our purposes here, let's just say "connecting with other people who just happen to work somewhere you might like," because that is honestly the best way to approach it anyway.
A useful introduction gives someone context your application may struggle to convey. It still doesn't guarantee an interview. And a conversation that helps you rule out the wrong role can be useful even if it never produces a referral.
So, how do you connect with people when you need a job, without it feeling blegh?
Reconnect honestly. Reach out to former colleagues, managers, and classmates. Ask how they're doing, and be straightforward if you're looking for work. You don't need to disguise the reason for the conversation; you do need to take an interest in the person you're having it with.
Be a person first. Ask how they're doing. Be curious about what they're working on. This is perhaps the most understated piece: people like to talk about what they're up to. If you don't know someone directly yet, open with a note that you'd like to hear about their experience at X place, or you're interested in the work they're doing — genuine interest and curiosity is hard to come by, so if you got it, use it.
Networking gets a bad reputation because people treat it like a transaction — "I'll share an article so you'll owe me a referral." That's gross. Just be a person who's interested in other people. The relationships that actually help your career are the ones where nobody's keeping score.
Be specific about what you're looking for. "I'm open to anything" is not helpful. "I'm looking for a product operations role at a mid-size SaaS company, ideally in a company that values mentorship" — that's something people can actually work with. When someone knows exactly what you want, they can spot opportunities and make introductions.
Use your alumni network. Your college or grad school alumni association is one of the most underused job search tools in existence. Alumni are disproportionately willing to help other alumni. Find out if your school has a directory, a Slack group, or a mentoring program. Use it.
Take care of yourself (seriously)
This one isn't a job search tactic. It's a survival tactic.
Job searching in a bad market is emotionally brutal. The rejection — or worse, the silence — takes a toll. I've seen smart, accomplished people start to internalize the market's dysfunction as a personal failure. It's not. But knowing that intellectually doesn't always help when you're staring at another boilerplate rejection at 11 PM.
A few things that help:
Set a daily time limit on job search activities. Two to three focused hours is more productive than eight scattered hours of anxious scrolling. After your allotted time, close the laptop. Jobs will still be there tomorrow.
Track your inputs, not just your outcomes. You can't control whether you get an interview. You can control how many applications you send, how many people you reach out to, how many informational interviews you schedule. Track those numbers. They're the ones you actually have power over.
Talk to someone. A friend, a coach, a therapist — whoever you trust. Job search isolation is real, and it compounds. Don't let the search become the only thing in your life.
Move your body. I don't care if it's a run, a walk, or aggressive vacuuming — life's as extreme as you want to make it. Give yourself a break from the screen and a chance to do something that feels good. Aggressive vacuuming also gets you a cleaner floor.
Consider the non-obvious moves
When the traditional path is jammed, it's worth looking at the side roads:
Contract and freelance work. These can provide income and relevant experience while you look. Check the pay, benefits, workload, and end date on their own merits. A possible permanent role is a possibility, not part of the offer unless it's actually agreed.
Smaller companies. Look beyond the names everybody recognizes. Investigate whether a smaller employer has work that fits, enough stability for your needs, and a manager you'd want to learn from. Company size alone won't tell you whether hiring will be easier.
Adjacent roles. Look at work that uses your strengths under a different title. A product manager might find interesting business operations work, for example. Check whether you'd want the actual job, rather than counting on it to become a different one later.
Upskilling with intention. I'm not talking about collecting certifications for the sake of it. I'm talking about filling a specific gap that's showing up in job descriptions you care about. If every role you want mentions a tool or skill you don't have, invest in learning it — then document that you've learned it. One well-chosen course beats five random ones.
A word about "settling"
There's a version of job search advice that frames everything as a quest for the One Perfect Role — and anything less is failure. That's not how careers work.
Careers are circuitous. They surprise you. The job you take to pay the bills for six months might introduce you to a manager who changes how you think about leadership. The "step down" into a smaller company might turn out to be the most interesting work you've ever done. I've seen it happen dozens of times.
So: it's okay to take something that meets your needs right now, even if it's not the dream. That's not settling — that's being practical. You can make another move later. You will make another move later. Almost everyone does.
At the same time, you don't have to lunge at the first offer that lands in your lap just because the market is scary. There's a difference between "this isn't perfect but it's solid and I can grow here" and "I'm taking this because I'm panicking." Trust yourself to know which is which.
Both of these things can be true at once: you can be flexible about what your next role looks like and have standards about how you're treated, who you work for, and whether the environment is one where you can do good work, reasonably.
One more thing: don't compare your timeline to anyone else's. The person who landed a job in two weeks had a different network, a different industry, a different set of circumstances. Your timeline is your timeline.
Pete's blessing
Here's Pete's blessing: you have permission to be angry at the market and still play the game. You can acknowledge that the system is broken — that ghost jobs are disrespectful, that AI screening is dehumanizing, that "we decided to go with another candidate" emails at 2 AM are absurd — and still show up tomorrow with a strategy.
Being frustrated doesn't mean you're failing. It means you're paying attention.
This week, pick the roles that deserve your attention, set a time budget for the rest, and reconnect with someone whose perspective you value. Give yourself a plan you can revise, rather than an application quota that keeps expanding.
If you want help figuring out your next move — whether that's a new job, a career pivot, or just a plan to survive the search — that's what I do.
Let's make work suck less.
Want more career change guidance? Check out the full career transition handbook.