Ask HN: Those who have recently undertaken a job hunt, what was your experience?

It's brutal. I'm in a more selected field- cybersecurity & GRC governance & getting interviews has been scarce. I have deep domain expertise in GRC and am technical enough to challenge on technical roles or business operations roles & while I've sent out hundreds of applications, I've only had a handful of interviews or first round screening invites that I consider promising. I finally accepted a GRC position with a local company offering full-time remote work because most of the startup opportunities I was looking at were only hiring senior engineering (Which is fine, but indicative of the market).

Offered pay or benefits seem lower too. I've dismissed a few companies for being below my range & have seen others here say the same.

I have had two companies basically admit they have never had the outpouring of candidates they have had lately but I question the real value & experience of those candidates. When I'm looking at GRC roles, a fairly niche field, that have had 150 - 350 applicants, I can't help but feel the market is being flooded by juniors or maybe just resume-spamming tools.

I really believe companies are trying to be too picky because of the pure inflated applicant numbers. For example, one particular company refused to even consider me for the position because of a hybrid 3 day requirement imposed by their leadership. That's despite me having a shared military background with a current team member, again, deep domain expertise & project ownership, and an interest in the company so that I would have likely been on the lower of their salary range just to work with them. They are still hiring for that role so I'll be honest, I don't get it. Another company got to the interview with their internal recruiter (& of which I had been invited too by their Head of Application Security) and they then decided to list their must haves for the position in their first round, something which wasn't listed on the job post (and their must-have language requirement was a barely a familiarity note on the job post).

But all in all salaries seem lower, I saw a government Information Security Assurance role for 50k - 75k the other day, for 3 - 5 years experience-- I was making that at entry level with 0 years of experience. Heck, at that point I would take a junior SWE position which would probably pay more & then just go do either software engineering again or look outside of tech for management roles.

I don't know, all I can say is I'm not personally lowering my own standards just because companies are. I think my next position will see me entrenched awhile, until this job market changes or until I find my next unicorn role that meets my demands. Like someone else said here, it just isn't worth tailoring your resume anymore- the time commitment is too great & its all about beating the ATS system. Internal recruiters & HR barely understand our resume anyway, a fact which has made the first rounds a real pain. Case in point, the eventual position I accepted I interviewed with the CTO first-round & it was a much more productive interview for both sides then any of my other HR first rounds have been.

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Everyone is different. I'd love to be able to work for 5-8 hours per day consistently. I have the opposite problem that you're talking about. I do agree what you say is very important for many people.