When was the most recent time you tried this, and for what level of role was it? I believe this could absolutely be effective pre-2023, or for very high level roles. I don't think it's currently viable advice for ~Senior level engineers, who are currently competing against thousands of other applications, many of whom were generated specifically for the given role.
I’m not going to get into my specific work history in the spirit of trying not to put more metadata about myself out there, but I can confidently say referrals are still king and I have witnessed those results.
I have a hard time believing that the market is as dire as people say it is at least right now approaching 2025. I see peers who are getting laid off get back into jobs, it’s just taking a few months longer than it used to. It’s just not a magical hot job market like it used to be.
A good indicator is to look at Meta’s employee count. It’s down dramatically since 2022 but they still have more employees working for them than the last day of 2021.
Speaking as someone currently involved in hiring for Senior roles at my company: We have hundreds of resumes, most of which are garbage. We're not seeing a lot of evidence of large numbers of people working hard to tailor their resume to the role, so doing so would absolutely help you in our case.
Even more so, if we got a referral right now from within the company we'd absolutely skip them straight to the interviews. Dealing with resumes sucks right now as an employer, and we want to avoid that stage as much as you do.
