How to Actually Find a Job Now, and What Keeps You in It
Most people look for a job the way they were taught to. Open a job portal, search for a title, hit apply on everything that looks close enough, and wait. After a few weeks of silence they decide the market is dead.
The market is not dead. The front door is just the most crowded place in the building.
Every public listing now gets hundreds or thousands of applications, many of them generated in seconds, filtered by software before any human reads them. When you apply through a portal, you are one PDF in a pile that nobody wants to read. That is not a strategy. It is a lottery with very bad odds.
The people who get hired consistently are not playing that lottery. They are doing something else, and it is learnable. This article is in two parts. The first is how to actually find the job. The second is what really decides whether you get it and keep it.
Part One: How to Find the Job
1. Tell people you are looking
This sounds too simple to matter, and it is the step most people skip because it feels embarrassing.
If you are between jobs, post about it on LinkedIn. Say plainly that you are looking, what kind of role you want, what you have built, and what you are good at. Nobody can refer you to a job they do not know you want. Your network is not going to guess.
The embarrassment is not real. People between jobs are a normal part of every career, and the post you are nervous about will mostly be read by people who want to help. Some of the best introductions come from people you barely know, a friend of a friend who happens to be hiring or happens to know someone who is.1 You only reach those people by being public about it.
2. Build in public on LinkedIn and X
This is the one I would push hardest, because it compounds.
Pick a topic and start posting about it consistently. It genuinely does not matter much what the topic is. Cybersecurity, AI, design, backend systems, whatever you are learning or building. Post what you made, what broke, what you figured out, what surprised you. You are not trying to become an influencer. You are making it possible for the right person to find you.
Every post is a tiny bet with almost no downside and an uncapped upside. Most posts will do nothing. One of them will land in the feed of a founder who is hiring, or a CTO who has been looking for exactly the thing you just built, and that one post will do more for you than a hundred applications.2 You cannot predict which post it will be, which is exactly why you keep posting.
This is not theory for me. When we were building Sentient, an open source proactive companion, we posted about it constantly. Progress, demos, what broke, what we were figuring out. We were not posting to find jobs. We were posting because we were building, and we wanted people to see it.
Then someone reached out. They had been watching us work on the same thing, consistently, for a long time, and they asked whether we could build a similar kind of architecture for them in the real estate market. That conversation is how my current job happened. No application, no portal, no resume screen. Just a long trail of public work that the right person happened to see.
3. Build a community of your own
Posting builds a following. A following is people who watch. A community is people who talk back, to you and to each other, and it is worth far more.
Start small. A group chat, a Discord or WhatsApp group, a newsletter, a regular thread where people who care about the same thing can find each other. Share other people's work, not just yours. Answer questions. Introduce people who should know each other. The community forms around the topic, and you become the person at the centre of it.
With Sentient, the posting turned into a community of several thousand people across LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Those people became our first users, our testers, and the ones who told others about the project. That kind of trust does not come from any single post. It comes from showing up for the same group of people over and over.
A community is also what outlasts any one job. Companies change, projects end, but the people who know what you do and have watched you do it for years go with you. When you are looking for the next thing, they are the ones who hear about it first, vouch for you, and send you the message that starts it.
4. Hunt companies, not listings
Stop starting from job listings. Start from companies you would actually want to work at.
Find them where new companies show up. The YC startup directory, Product Hunt launches, and announcements of recently funded startups are all good hunting grounds, because a company that just raised money is about to hire. Pick the ones building something you genuinely find interesting.
Then find the people who actually make hiring decisions. At a startup that is usually the founders, the CTO, or an engineering lead, not a careers inbox.
Now do the thing almost nobody does. Build something small that relates to what they are building. A prototype, a feature they do not have, a tool that plugs into their product. Then send it to them directly with a short message, something like: "I built this because I found what you are building interesting. Here is a demo and a live link."
That message puts you ahead of nearly every application they will receive that week, because it is not asking them to imagine what you could do. It is showing them. Most founders will not reply. Send it to several. Even the ones that go nowhere leave you with another real project to show the next person.
5. Ask for referrals, shamelessly
Ask your friends to refer you. Ask former colleagues. Ask people you met at events. Ask them to help you get into their company, or a startup they know is hiring.
A referral moves you from the pile to the conversation. The person reading your resume now has a reason to read it properly, because someone they trust put their name next to yours.
Most people do not ask because it feels like imposing. It is not. Most companies actively want referrals, many pay bonuses for them, and your friend is often glad to do it. The worst outcome of asking is a polite no.
6. Apply through portals, but do not depend on them
I am not saying never apply through job portals. Apply, but treat it as the background activity, not the plan.
Mass applying is the most common strategy and usually the least effective one. It is a volume game, and volume is exactly what everyone else is also doing, now with tools that can fire off hundreds of applications a day. If portals are the only thing you are doing, you are competing on the one dimension where you have no advantage at all.
7. Tune your resume for every single role
When your resume does get read, it gets skimmed, often in a handful of seconds.3 So it has to make its point immediately.
Keep it to one page. Two at the absolute maximum, and only if you genuinely have the experience to fill them. Nobody reads the third page, and the length itself signals that you could not decide what mattered.
Then change it for every role you apply to. Not a light touch, a real rewrite of four things.
Your projects. Keep only the ones relevant to this role. If you are applying for a backend role, your frontend portfolio site does not need to be there. Select, do not list everything.
Your experience. Same idea. Keep the experience that speaks to this job and cut or shrink the rest. Your resume is not your biography. It is an argument for why you fit this one role.
Your language. Use the words the job description uses. If they say distributed systems and you wrote backend infrastructure, change it. If they emphasise ownership, describe what you owned. This helps the software that filters resumes, and it helps the human who reads it see themselves in what you wrote.4
Your skills. List the skills this role asks for that you actually have, and drop the ones it does not care about. A wall of twenty technologies reads as noise. Eight relevant ones read as a match.
Yes, this takes more time per application. That is the point. Ten tailored applications will beat a hundred identical ones.
Part Two: What Actually Matters
Everything above is tactics. Underneath the tactics, there are three things that decide how your career goes, and they come in a specific order.
First: Recognition and a Following
Recognition is what gets you noticed. It is what makes a founder reply to your message, what makes a recruiter reach out before you ever apply, what makes someone forward your name when a role opens up.
This is why creating content and building a community matter so much. Your skills are invisible until someone can see them. Content is how you make them visible at scale, a following is the audience that content builds, and a community is what turns that audience into people who actually know you and will speak up for you. Recognition opens doors. It gets you into rooms you would never reach through a portal, and sometimes, like it did for me with Sentient, the door opens from the other side.
But recognition alone only gets you through the door. It does not get you the offer.
Second: Proof of Work
Once you are in the room, what gets you hired is proof that you can actually do the job. Your past projects, the things you have built and shipped, the problems you have solved that someone can look at and verify.
This is what turns attention into an offer. A following without proof behind it is just noise, and people see through it quickly. When someone looks at your profile after a post catches their eye, they need to find real work there. Projects you can demo. Code they can read. Things that exist.
The good news is that the first part feeds this one. When you build in public, you are building your proof of work at the same time. Every project you post about is a project that can get you hired.
Third: Quality of Work
This is the one people forget, because it only matters after you have the job. It is also the one that matters most in the long run.
Recognition gets you in the door. Proof of work gets you the offer. The quality of your actual work is what keeps you from getting fired, and what gets you promoted, trusted, and recommended for the next thing.
No amount of following or impressive projects protects you if you cannot deliver once you are inside. And the reverse is also true: people who consistently do excellent work build a reputation that turns into recognition on its own. Colleagues remember them. Managers recommend them. The loop closes, and the next job starts to find them instead of the other way around.
The Short Version
Traditional job hunting is not completely broken, but it is the most crowded and least effective route you have.
Tell people you are looking. Build and post in public, about anything you genuinely care about, and grow a community around it. Go after companies directly with something you built for them. Ask for referrals without shame. Treat portals as the background. Tailor a one page resume to every role.
And remember the order underneath all of it. Get recognised, so people notice you. Have proof of work, so they hire you. Do excellent work, so they keep you.
The job market rewards people who make themselves easy to find and hard to ignore. Both of those are within your control.