Getting Your Foot Through the Door
A strong CV, the right relationships, a public presence, and a strategy.
It’s been six weeks. You’re at your kitchen table, the spreadsheet open across the second monitor, 43 rows of company names and status fields that mostly read “sent.” The coffee next to you has gone cold. Outside, it’s the kind of grey weekday afternoon that makes everything feel like it has already been decided.
You’d sent tailored CVs for the roles you actually wanted. Written cover letters with real sentences in them. Two automated rejections came back within hours, the kind generated before anyone read anything. One recruiter reached out to pitch you a role at half your current salary. Everything else: silence.
You’ve been trying not to let the silence become a verdict. It’s the kind of effort that doesn’t look like effort from the outside, just staying at the table, keeping the spreadsheet moving. Underneath the routine, though, there’s something harder to name: the specific unease of doing everything right and feeling it go nowhere.
Then, just as you’re about to close the laptop, a Slack notification. A former colleague. ”Hey, we have a backend role opening up. I told my manager about you — can I put your name forward?”
You have an interview within the week.
There’s a version of job searching that feels rigorous and thorough. Optimise the CV, find the right job boards, apply consistently, wait. It’s a reasonable process, but it’s also how most applications end up in a pile that no one looks at.
The engineers who get interviews reliably are doing a few things well, and making sure those things reinforce each other.
The Four-Legged Stool
Getting from “I want a new role” to “I have an interview” requires four things working together.
Your CV is your document of record. It’s what a hiring manager reads when someone vouches for you. It’s what a recruiter uses to justify putting you forward. A strong CV doesn’t get you the interview on its own, but a weak one will lose it for you even when everything else is in place. (If your CV still speaks in tasks and responsibilities rather than outcomes and impact, The CV That Gets Callbacks is the place to start.)
Your network is how you skip the pile. The referral advantage is substantial: referred candidates are significantly more likely to get an interview than cold applicants — referrals account for roughly 72% of interviews despite making up only 7% of applicants. A warm introduction changes how a hiring manager reads your CV before they open it. The relationships that generate those introductions are built before you need them, not when you’re searching. Networking Isn’t What You Think It Is and Building the Right Relationships cover the how.
Your public presence is the leg that is most useful while your network is building up. Open source contributions, a portfolio of work people can find, writing that demonstrates how you think, a reputation in a community. A hiring manager who’s already read something you wrote, or used something you built, starts the conversation differently. They feel like they’re not evaluating a stranger. Your public presence also compounds in a way that a CV doesn’t: it keeps working when you’re not actively searching, and it creates the kind of weak-tie connections that lead to referrals you weren’t expecting. In a market flooded with AI-generated content, work that’s authentically yours stands out more than it used to.
Your strategy is how you direct your effort. Not all applications are equal, not all companies move at the same pace, and volume without targeting is mostly wasted time. Strategy is knowing where to focus, when to apply, how to track what’s moving, and when to cut your losses.
Each leg matters in its own way. A great CV submitted cold into a high-volume applicant pool can get lost. A warm referral for someone whose CV doesn’t hold up under scrutiny may go nowhere. A strong public presence with no strategy behind the search will produce interesting conversations that don’t go anywhere. These work when they reinforce each other.
Why the Pile Is Getting Harder to Escape
Most large companies use applicant tracking systems. These filter by keywords, format, and completeness before a human ever sees the file. An otherwise excellent CV in the wrong format, or missing the right terminology, may never surface. And even when it does, a hiring manager reviewing a role at a mid-size tech company might be looking at 200 applications for a single position.
AI has made the volume problem worse on both sides. Candidates are generating and blasting applications at scale; hiring managers who were already reviewing 200 CVs for a single role are now reviewing 500, most of them variations on the same AI-polished template. The signal they are looking for collapses. A recruiter who can’t tell one application from the next defaults to the shortcut that was always there: someone they know vouched for this person. The referral advantage has now grown.
The candidates who stand out are the ones who read as human. A CV with specific, personal impact that couldn’t have been written for anyone else. A cover letter that’s clearly about this company. These have a higher chance of cutting through.
Cold applications start at a disadvantage but a referral changes the math significantly. It moves you from the pile to a separate conversation, where the hiring manager is starting from the assumption that someone they trust vouched for you.
This is why your network is load-bearing in a way that most people don’t fully account for when they’re job searching.
The Coordination Layer
Knowing the building blocks is one thing. And then there’s running them in parallel.
Lead with reach-outs. Before applying anywhere you care about, check whether you have a connection inside. Former colleagues, people you’ve worked with on cross-functional projects, engineers you’ve met at conferences or online. A brief message (”I saw you’re at Company X — would you be open to a quick conversation about the team?”) sent before you apply changes how your application arrives. If there’s no connection, look for one or two degrees out.
Segment your list. Your target companies are not all equal. Some are dream roles where you’d invest serious effort. Some are good options where a referral would make the difference. Some are volume plays. Treat them differently. Your time and energy are finite; spend them where the expected return is highest.
Research the companies you actually care about. For your top tier, generic applications are a missed opportunity. Before you write a word, understand the company: what problem they’re solving, where they are in their growth, where the pressures are likely coming from. Read their engineering blog, recent product announcements, anything their founders or leaders have written publicly, any corporate news about them. The goal is to arrive already thinking in their terms and demonstrating you’ve understood their actual situation. A cover letter that addresses their specific problem, rather than describing yourself generically, signals that you think in how your credentials apply to their context context, essentially helping them decide but with your narrative on the table instead of theirs.
Run a weekly audit. A job search without a tracking system will quickly become noise. Each week: what’s active, what needs a follow-up, what’s stalled and can be deprioritised. A simple spreadsheet with company, role, status, last contact, and next action is enough. The goal is to keep the right conversations moving without losing track of where things stand.
Time your applications. Roles posted more than two to three weeks ago are often close to filled or frozen. Roles posted in the first few days are the best opportunity. Setting up alerts for companies you’re targeting means you can move quickly when something relevant opens.
The Realistic Timeline
A job search is a second job, and treating it as a weekend activity tends to produce weekend-activity results.
Effective searches take two to three focused hours a week, in deliberate blocks rather than scattered throughout the day. Consistency over intensity.
Expect the process to take longer than you’d like. An average search from first application to accepted offer, even a well-run one, spans multiple months. Companies move slowly, decisions get delayed, headcount freezes happen. Resilience here is practical, not motivational: stay consistent, don’t interpret silence as rejection, and keep your pipeline wide enough that no single opportunity becomes make-or-break.
The Rejection
Rejection is worth thinking about more carefully. If the message about your skill gaps is clear and you care about it, the logical next step is to work on that missing skill. But what if almost everything went right but you still didn’t get the job?
The framing that’s too easy to jump to is that a rejection means something went wrong — that you weren’t good enough, or prepared enough, or that you said the wrong thing. This is almost never the full picture. Your skills, your experience, the way you think, the things you care about, the pace you work best at — all of these fit some environments well and others badly. A company at a particular stage, with a particular strategy, and a particular team already in place is not a generic slot waiting to be filled. It’s a very specific one. And fit is a two-way question that neither you nor they can fully answer from the outside.
When a company doesn’t move forward with you, that’s often a reasonable answer to “would this person and this environment work well together?” It’s not primarily a verdict on your ability. It’s closer to a compatibility signal — and sometimes that signal is doing you a favour.
None of this means you shouldn’t learn from rejections. The goal is still to collect enough data points that patterns become clear: are you getting interviews but not offers? Are you not getting past the application stage? Each outcome tells you something different about which leg of the stool needs work. But the learning is tactical, not existential. Look for what to improve in the process. The rejection itself says less about your value than it does about the specificity of fit.
There’s also luck. A role closes the week before you apply. A hiring manager leaves mid-process. A headcount freeze lands on the exact team you were talking to. None of this is visible to you, and none of it reflects on your preparation. Experienced job-seekers know this; first-timers often don’t. Run your process well, stay consistent, and don’t let slow progress become a story about yourself.
Putting It Together
The job search playbook, run well, looks like this:
Clean up your CV so it speaks in outcomes, not tasks. This is your foundation.
Audit your public presence. Is there anything a hiring manager can find that shows how you think? A project, a post, a contribution. If not, this is worth investing in — even one well-written piece or a public repo does work over time.
Map your target companies to people you know, or people you’re one degree from.
Reach out before you apply to any role you care about.
Apply with targeting, not volume. Fewer, better applications beat a spray-and-pray approach.
Track everything so you always know what’s active and what needs attention.
Audit weekly and adjust based on what’s moving.
When you get to the interview, the work shifts again. That’s covered in Interviewing for Business Impact: once you’re in the room, what matters is demonstrating that you understand the business problem, not just the technical requirements.
Take a look at your current job search, or your preparation for one. Is your CV showing impact, or listing responsibilities? Do you have two or three people who would genuinely refer you somewhere? Is there anything public that shows how you think? Do you have a target list, or are you reacting to what appears on job boards?
If any of those have a gap, that’s where to start. One leg at a time, then all four together.
References
Employee Referral Statistics — Zippia — Aggregated data showing referrals account for 72% of interviews while making up only 7% of applicants
Networking Isn’t What You Think It Is — Internal: the mindset and approach behind building the referral relationships this post depends on
Building the Right Relationships — Internal: practical guide to building and maintaining the network that generates warm introductions
The CV That Gets Callbacks — Internal: covers the CV leg of the four-legged stool
Interviewing for Business Impact — Internal: what to do once the referral gets you in the room