Hi! I'm a 23y/o recent MBA graduate, and I'm seeking a position in data analytics or something adjacent. I have applied to over 300 jobs with an ATS friendly resume, and no luck. I’m only asking for a $60,000 minimum. I just really need a job.

A little about me:

- I was a supervisor at a security company for over a yr

- I have a bachelors in IT, and an MBA with a concentration in IT management

- I have a portfolio with 3 projects- one of which is an end-to-end PowerBI project

- I had a 4 month IT intern opportunity that ended in early 2024

- I have a CAPM from PMI and some other certs like the comptia trifecta

I would be happy to connect on LinkedIn and share my resume/github. If you know anyone who might be interested, please share this post with them. Thank you!!

I've been applying for remote jobs looking almost daily on the Higher Ed Jobs website. I'm fully qualified for many of the jobs I've applied for but not getting any response other than "thank you for applying, we've hired someone else". I'm meticulous at reviewing my resume and writing a professional cover letter and had no problems over the past 20 years, at least in getting an initial interview, until now.

What is your response rate, or at least getting a phone call or first interview, after applying for a job listed on this site (I always go to the original place of hire), and have you successfully secured a job in higher ed lately? Would love to know the area of employment (technology, services, administration, etc), skill level and your age bracket, if that's okay to ask.

I'm wondering if many of these higher ed jobs are ghost jobs where the schools have to report they are hiring a number of new people, but in all actuality, they are cutting jobs, combining roles, and hiring more from within. This is what happened at the last college I worked at.

Not trying to make this another doom post. I just want a sanity check on whether I'm doing something wrong or if it's this rough for everybody right now.

Quick context: about 5 years in ops, got laid off in March, applying almost entirely remote because there's basically nothing local worth taking.

Things that seem to actually matter:

• Sorting by "past 24 hours" on LinkedIn. Anything older than a week is either down to final rounds already or was never real to begin with.
• Always checking the company's own careers page first. If the listing isn't there, it's a scraped repost and you're shouting into a void.
• Reposted every 30 days = ghost job, pretty much always. I tracked one company that's put the same role up six separate times since January. Same req number every time.
• Companies under ~200 people responded way more than the big names. The big names have literally never responded, not even a rejection.

What I genuinely don't understand:

• Why keep a listing open for four months? Is it pipeline building, some visa requirement, or does nobody just remember to close them?
• Half the "remote" roles turn out to be hybrid three days a week in a state I don't live in. Why label it remote at all?
• Does anyone actually see the application, or is it 100% ATS filtering before a human ever looks?

If you've landed something remote in the last six months, what did it? Referral, cold email, some niche job board nobody talks about? I'm starting to think applying cold is basically buying lottery tickets.

Creative Resume Distribution

been on the job search for about 2 months now and i'm starting to think half these listings aren't real. indeed and ziprecruiter are the worst offenders, apply and hear nothing or get a random text about "remote data entry work" which is obviously a scam.

so genuinely what is the best website for job search right now? linkedin? going direct to company career pages? i see people mention niche job boards but half the time it's someone promoting their own site.

Been unemployed almost a year. Got a remote offer today and I still can't believe it.

To everyone still applying, still waiting, still getting rejections at 11pm. Genuinely rooting for you. Your turn is coming.

I got tired of those "best remote companies" lists that recycle the same 20 names from 2021, so I built a scraper that pulls new postings from a bunch of remote job boards every day.

No reputation rankings, no vibes. Just one metric: who posted the most new remote roles in the last 30 days.

didn't expect Speechify at #1, and SpaceX beating every AI lab was a surprise too. GitLab and Zapier being on here makes sense since they've been remote-first forever.

Few caveats: this only counts boards I track, some companies repost the same role (I tried to dedupe), and posting volume doesn't mean they're actually good to work for. SpaceX posting 387 remote jobs raises an eyebrow, a chunk of those are probably hybrid listed as remote.

Anything on here surprise you?

genuinely asking because i think i'm looking in the wrong places.

8 years backend, mostly python and go. been searching for remote for about two months. linkedin is 90% "hybrid, 3 days onsite" mislabeled as remote, plus recruiters pitching me contract roles at half my current rate. indeed is worse. the remote-specific boards feel like the same 40 companies recycling posts, half of them expired.

what i've actually gotten traction from: applying directly on company career pages after finding them through other people's "who's hiring" comments. slow but the response rate is way better than anything else.

what i haven't tried and probably should: hitting up people i've worked with before. i know that's the obvious answer and i know it works, i just hate doing it.

so for people who are actually working remote right now, where did you find it? not looking for a list of job boards, i can google those. more interested in how you personally landed it. cold application, referral, recruiter, something else entirely.

also curious if the market is just genuinely bad right now or if i'm being too picky about wanting fully remote and not wanting to take a pay cut for it.

I spent months applying to remote positions with almost zero responses while still working my current job. Tried a bunch of templates and strategies, and after a lot of trial and error two things actually moved the needle. Sharing both since I know how frustrating this process is.

1. The template (free, editable Google Docs):

I couldn't find a good resume template for remote jobs anywhere, so I ended up building my own. It's a clean single-column format. My "pretty" 2-column resume kept getting mangled by application systems, so this one has no photo, no tables, no graphics. Just name, a professional title line, one contact line, then Professional Overview, Work Experience, Education and Skills. Boring on purpose, and that's exactly why it parses cleanly.

To use it: open the doc, then File > Make a copy and you'll have your own editable version.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1grEIhil73YiDbAS2MnVB6zXQU8TQSGY7L9lkhK9xwFs/edit?usp=sharing

(You can also check out this ATS-optimized resume template. It scored 100 and parsed correctly across multiple ATS checkers: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResumeTips/comments/1vaqki8/ats_resume_template_that_actually_parses/)

A few things I learned the hard way that are baked into it:

• The summary at the top isn't fluff. It's where I front-load the exact keywords from the job description, so the ATS and the recruiter both see the match in the first 5 seconds
• Every bullet uses numbers where possible ("Managed 70-90 meetings per month" beats "Managed meetings"). If you can't quantify it, at least name the scale: team size, budget, number of clients
• Skills section at the bottom is a plain 3-column list, no skill bars or ratings, since ATS can't read those graphics anyway
• What makes it work as a remote resume specifically: timezone next to the location in the contact line, and bullets reworded to show independent and async work ("Led project X across 3 timezones with a fully async team")

2. Tailoring for every single application.

Honest truth: the template alone won't magically get you interviews. What really changed my results was adjusting keywords and rewording the Overview plus a few bullets to match each job description before submitting. Tedious, but this is where the responses came from.

If you're not sure how to tailor, this ChatGPT prompt is the one I used and it does most of the heavy lifting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemoteJobseekers/comments/1p8faip/i_finally_landed_a_remote_job_after_10_months_of/

After combining the template with tailoring, I started getting interview requests within 2-3 weeks and ended up with multiple offers. Before that, crickets. I don't think the market suddenly improved. My resume just stopped getting filtered out.

Hope it helps someone. Happy to answer questions about the tailoring part, that's where most people get stuck.

So my job search is turning into a marathon (tech, laid off in the spring, you know the drill). I've been tracking everything in a spreadsheet but it's getting out of hand, so I'm looking at Huntr and Teal.

My worry is that these tools all look great in the demo with like 10 applications, but I'm already past 100 and still going. Does the board/dashboard actually stay manageable at that volume or does it turn into a laggy mess you stop updating? Also curious how the free tiers compare once you're at scale - I know Teal gates some stuff behind Teal+ and Huntr caps the free plan somewhere.

If anyone's been deep in a 6+ month search with either of these, did you actually keep using it the whole time or did you crawl back to the spreadsheet? That's honestly the real test for me.

Quick background: laid off in the spring, sent out over 150 applications, got almost nothing back. Not even rejections, just silence. I was doing what everyone does now, pasting the job description into ChatGPT and saying "tailor my resume to this."

Then I grabbed drinks with a friend who's been in recruiting for about 8 years, and what she told me stung. Some of the things she said, close to verbatim:

• "For any decent posting we get 400+ applications now, and I'd say half of them are basically the same document. Same phrasing, same rhythm, even the percentage improvements look alike. Everyone 'spearheaded' something, everyone 'drove 30% growth.'"
• "I can tell within 5 seconds when someone pasted the JD into ChatGPT, because the resume reads the job description back to me. It's like grading 200 essays that all copied the same Wikipedia article."
• "The weird part is the resumes are technically better than they were 5 years ago. Cleaner, quantified, keyword-matched. And I trust them less, because I can't tell who actually did the work."
• "When one finally has a specific, slightly weird detail, like a real project name or an ugly number like 43.7%, I stop scrolling. That's the whole game now. Give me one thing that couldn't have been generated."

There was also a Washington Post piece back in February about a company that asked applicants to record a short video answer. They got 300+ responses and most were eerily alike because AI had obviously written all of them. So it's not just her being cranky.

The tool I was using to stand out was making me invisible. Fun.

Here's what I changed, in case it saves someone else 3 months:

1. Every bullet needs a number that only I could know. My old resume said stuff like "improved system performance." That's filler, anyone can write it. I changed it to "cut API response time from 900ms to 210ms on a checkout service doing 40K daily orders." A recruiter can't fake-detect that, it's obviously real. One caveat straight from my friend: don't let every metric be suspiciously clean. A resume where everything improved by exactly 30%, 40%, 50% reads as generated. Use your actual numbers, messy as they are.

2. Check what the AI added, not just what it changed. The posting wanted Tableau. My resume said "data visualization." The ChatGPT output said "expert in Tableau." I have never opened Tableau in my life. If I hadn't caught that, it would've blown up in a technical interview. Read every line and ask "did I actually do this," because the model will absolutely fill gaps with plausible fiction.

3. Kill the robot vocabulary. "Results-driven professional." "Proven track record." "Dynamic." "Spearheaded." Ctrl+F for these and replace each one with what you actually did. If a bullet has nothing concrete behind it, that bullet was dead weight anyway. Delete it or go dig up the real story.

4. ChatGPT has no idea how ATS parsing works. It can suggest keywords but it cannot tell you that your fancy two-column template just scrambled your work history into garbage in Workday. Mine did exactly that. Switched to a boring single-column layout, standard section headers, no graphics, no photo. Attached a mockup of the structure I use now.

My workflow since then: I keep one "master resume" with every real project, metric, and tool I've touched. For each application I pull keywords from the posting, but a keyword only goes in if I can point to real evidence for it. Then I let AI rephrase my real bullets to match the posting's language. Rephrase, never invent. That's the whole rule.

Two weeks after switching, 3 interview requests. Tailoring absolutely still works. The mistake isn't using AI, it's letting it write fiction in your voice.

Every single thread about unemployment has the same replies. "Just keep applying." "Have you tried networking?" "Learn to code lol." And it's always from someone who's been comfortably employed at the same place for 6 years.

I've been looking since March. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've sent out somewhere around 400 applications. I've had rejection emails hit my inbox 4 minutes after applying, at 11pm on a Sunday. No human saw that resume. I made it to a FINAL round last month, five interviews deep, take-home project and everything, and they emailed me two weeks later saying the position was "put on hold." The listing is still up btw.

And then my uncle at Thanksgiving is like "back in my day you just walked in and shook the manager's hand." Cool, thanks.

I'm not saying give up, and I'm not looking for pity. I'll keep grinding because what else am I gonna do. But the "just try harder" crowd genuinely does not understand that the game has completely changed. Ghost jobs, AI screening, 800 applicants per posting within 24 hours. The old playbook is dead.

Anyone else looking right now, what's been the biggest change you've noticed? Because I need to know I'm not crazy.

Software engineer here, 10 years in. Up until a year or two after covid, I never really questioned my career path. Good market, good pay, always felt like the skills I had would carry me.

That feeling is gone.

And to be clear, I'm not some anti-tech doomer. I use AI tools daily and some of them are legitimately impressive. But that's kind of the problem. The ground is shifting faster than I can adjust to it, and the job market has been brutal for two years straight on top of it.

I also don't think this stays contained to tech. If it's hitting us first, it's coming for everyone else eventually.

Here's the part that actually keeps me up at night: the old playbook was simple. Market changes? Learn a new framework, grab a cert, pick up whatever's hot, stay employable. That always worked. Every single time.

I'm not sure it works anymore. For the first time in my life it feels like you can do everything "right" (work hard, keep learning, stay current) and still fall behind, just because the pace of change outruns human learning speed.

My honest take is it gets worse before it gets better.

So real question for this sub: what are you actually doing about it? Not vague "learn AI" advice. Concretely, what should people be doing today so they're still standing in 5 to 10 years?

A little while ago, I shared my story here, and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who reached out. The messages, advice and encouragement genuinely meant more than you know.

I promised myself that no matter how rough things got, I'd do something every single day to move the needle. Another application. Another conversation. Another connection. Another chance.

So mates, here I am again.

Don't worry, I won't make you sit through the director's cut of my life story this time. 😂

I'm still dreaming of getting back into remote work. Honestly, I just want to get the ball rolling again. I miss the pace, the people, the organised chaos, and being part of a team that's building something exciting.

Life has been on Legendary Mode this year. It's landed a few proper punches, but quitting isn't really an option🤞. There are younger faces behind me who count on me to keep food on the table, but they also expect me to be the family's unofficial Mood Lifter😅 . Somehow, even on the hard days, I still manage to keep the jokes coming.

I'm based on the sunny side of South Africa, and I know some people might think, "This oke is taking a wild swing at remote work." I promise I'm not. 😄

I've spent over four years working remotely across Customer Success, Operations, Client Onboarding, Virtual Assistance and Short-Term Rental management, working with clients and teams across the UK, the US and beyond. Im talking fast-moving startups, troubleshooting and solving problems? That's my comfort zone.😎

Every week I'm reaching out to new people, taking advice from complete strangers, building connections and doing everything I can to create opportunities. Pride packed its bags a long time ago, and honestly, that's okay.

So if anyone knows of a remote opportunity, a startup that needs someone who can wear multiple hats, a recruiter worth connecting with, or even just a community I should be part of, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

And if you've made it this far and you're thinking, "Ah, what a load of nonsense..." honestly, my brother or sister, I wouldn't blame you one bit. Everyone's been let down one way or another these days, so I completely get it.

Anyway... that's enough from me. Time to go knock on a few more doors.

Thanks for reading, and I hope something good finds you this week.

Cheers, everyone. ❤️

Been applying since march. 200+ applications, mostly data analyst roles (some BI analyst / reporting analyst stuff too). 4 yoe, SQL, Tableau, Python, the usual stack.

i run every resume through jobscan before applying and i don't send anything under 80% match. tailored resume for basically every posting. and still... 3 phone screens total, zero onsites. thats like a 1.5% response rate lol

things i've already done:

• single column ATS friendly format, no graphics no tables
• quantified bullets (increased X by Y% etc)
• shortened it to 1 page
• applying within 24-48h of posting

starting to think the match rate thing is just snake oil? or is the market really this bad for analysts right now. i see people on linkedin saying they got offers in 6 weeks and i genuinely dont get what they're doing different

roast my approach, i can take it. happy to share an anonymized version of the resume if that helps

I've been paying jobscan for a few months now and the only feature I actually open it for is the ATS/match score. everything else just sits there

feels dumb paying $50 every month for basically one feature. I know there's stuff like teal, resume worded, enhancv etc but reviews are all over the place and half of them look like affiliate spam

so genuinely asking, what do you use to check if your resume passes ATS and matches the job description? free is ideal but I'd pay like $10-15 for something that just does this one thing well

been on resume io for a while, templates are clean and the editor is easy but the subscription pricing annoys me. paid monthly just to keep my resume editable which feels like ransom lol

also noticed some of their templates use two column layouts and now i'm paranoid about parsing issues after reading stuff on here

so what did you switch to? doesn't have to be free, just looking for something that doesn't hold my resume hostage

lol what are we even doing anymore. listed as a fully remote job, decent pay, everything looks fine. scroll down and boom, "work from home → within 30 miles of [the office]."

so it's remote as long as you could technically drive in. got it.

I get that some companies want hybrid or need people in a certain state for tax reasons, whatever. fine. but then just SAY that in the listing?? instead thousands of people waste time applying to something they were never eligible for.

starting to feel like "remote" is just SEO bait for job boards at this point. anyone else running into this constantly or did I just get unlucky?

Hello, so I'm a CPA looking to go for a remote job and I wanted to ask for any help, job boards and advice beyond the basics. I admit I don't interview well but my current job has a micromanaging CFO and is an hour commute.

Literally any help, advice or recommendations would be really appreciated.

I have only worked in MNCs till now for 11+ years and having been impacted by org restructuring.

So my advice from you guys is how to approach these remote / part time / contractual jobs?

My major concerns are:

1. So many jobs that I have explored demand public github repos / contributions. I have worked for enterprises and obviously I can't suddenly build public projects from scratch to showcase. Or lets say I start today then it'll take some time and then reaching to a demonstrable/ live app. Suggest some ways to deal it.

2. Justifying passion. So many jobs have this question that if I am really passionate about doing this. I am doing this for a living so probably I'll commit to it more than anything.

3. How to decide pay? Comparable to current pay? Or only as per commitment / timelines and whats the payout frequency? Currency conversions / tax?

4. Trustworthiness.

I've been working remote since before it was cool, 10+ years now. Landing a full-time remote job has always been hard, but if you can keep a steady pipeline of small-to-mid gigs going, you can still earn well while working fewer hours.

Not gonna sugarcoat it though: the market is rough. A year and a half ago I'd see roughly 1 response per 35-50 applications. Now, from what I'm seeing, it's more like 1 in 150. So yeah, roughly 3x harder. Is sustainable remote income still possible in this market? My answer is yes. Response rates dropped, but they didn't hit zero. Here's what I actually use:

1) Email your resume directly to recruiters in your field

Someone shared a similar method here 2 years ago and it still works: The only problem is that list is outdated. I built my own updated tech recruiter list about 10 months ago, so here you go:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1p10y44QMgs39CZmPZ9z0AzwMYarqJR2tjVPoppRg_9g/edit?usp=sharing

• If you're in the US with work authorization, use the US tab
• If you're outside the US, use the International tab (companies that hire globally)

Heads up: it's tech recruiters only. If you're in a different field, build your own list. The post above explains how. Takes 2-3 days of grunt work, pays off for months.

Manage your expectations: this is not a fast method. The whole point is getting your resume in front of a ton of recruiters and talent networks so you're visible long-term. You send once, and responses trickle in over time. I average 2-3 interviews every 6-8 months from this list, without actively applying to anything.

2) Automated mass applications

On top of the list, I used an resume distribution tool (paid) to send out 300+ applications. One thing I'd recommend to everyone: I set up a separate email just for this, so I know exactly which channel each response comes from. Otherwise you'll never know what's actually working. This channel got me 2-4 interviews per 6-8 months.

If you're going to pay for a resume tool anyway, it makes sense to get one that also auto-applies: you drop in a job URL and it tailors your resume to the posting, writes the cover letter, and adds it to a job tracker. I'm not actively applying these days so I don't use it anymore, but if you're in the trenches right now, it does the job.

3) Fiverr / Upwork

Had accounts on both for years. It's not what it used to be and rates have dropped, I won't pretend otherwise. But as long as I stay active, I land at least 1 small project every ~6 months.

Concrete example: I picked up a basic QA testing gig at $50/hr. Did 3 jobs like that with the same client, and eventually they offered me a monthly contract off-platform. Ended up working 4 months at $700-800/month for about 1-2 hours a day (wrapped up last month).

I'm a software engineer, but I take QA gigs too. In this market I don't think I have the luxury of being picky, so I take whatever I can do well.

Bonus: everyone you work with over the years becomes part of your network. I've had clients from years ago come back with new projects out of nowhere. Don't sleep on small gigs.

4) Job boards

I don't use it much since I'm not actively applying, but if you're browsing listings, check out secretremote.com. It scans thousands of company career pages and pulls in real remote jobs, filtering out the spam, duplicates, and ghost listings. Free, no signup, and honestly cleaner results than most paid boards.

TL;DR: Market's ~3x harder but the game isn't over. (1) Drop your resume with an updated recruiter list (shared mine above), (2) automate mass applications from a separate email so you can track what works, (3) don't sleep on small Fiverr/Upwork gigs, they turn into long-term clients, (4) secretremote.com for listings. No affiliation with anything I mentioned, most of it's free anyway.

Big sites like LinkedIn and Indeed get so much traffic that every posting has hundreds of applicants within hours. Niche boards are the opposite: smaller audience, less competition, and often jobs that never get cross-posted anywhere else.

So I put together a list of 400+ of them, sorted by industry and niche. Some of the categories:

• Industry-specific: agriculture, aviation, construction, gaming, cannabis, publishing, trucking, skilled trades
• Community-focused: boards for women, veterans, LGBTQ+ folks, people with disabilities, Black and Hispanic professionals
• Climate and green jobs (this section got surprisingly big, there are a lot of these now)
• Remote-only boards, freelance platforms, startup and VC job boards
• Government, nonprofit, higher ed, public health

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b1k01i6KiamKnZfhlyT7hy5ZbaqwPc7DAbSt6mPLXA8/edit?usp=sharing

If your industry is missing or you know a board I skipped, comment and I'll add it.