A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job

For example, I consult, and while in principle I could attempt to sell anyone with authority to write a check on consulting engagements, I don't. If I meet someone at a party and he says "I don't have a website but..." there is no possible end to that sentence whatsoever under which he is a good prospect for business in the near term. If you want a Rails programmer? Nope, sorry, I'm probably not your guy. If you're a software company with $10k in the bank, you can't afford a formal engagement with me. Strongly qualified leads for me tend to, e.g., have over 10 employees, profitable software businesses with revenue in the millions to tens of millions, multiple opportunities for things I can do for them, a business model which suggests ample opportunity for positive ROI at the rates I charge, and some reason to have personal trust for me.

To the extent that I do active sales work (e.g. flying out to a city to meet with your CEO, creating proposals, etc), I focus my active sales work on qualified leads, rather than "any business I could possibly think of."

Applying this to a job search: he's sending resumes to places which are not hiring. That isn't a strongly qualified lead. That's like me soliciting five figure checks off every passerby in Ogaki Station. Total waste of time.

I sent out 15 highly targeted applications and got a 100% response rate. All of them were polite, mostly manually written rejections. I got one interview that went nowhere. That's when I decided I'd be better off starting my own business.

Email me (in my profile) if you want to talk and bounce some ideas around and make life better.

I agree that zero responses to 100 letters and resumés mean that something is wrong with the letters or resumés. But the author claims to be researching and tailoring, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there.

Certainly that amount of research and work could be spent on building 'on spec' relationships with relevant companies.

EDIT:

> At this point, you're probably wondering why I'm not looking at retail, restaurant, or coffee shop jobs. The truth is that I am, but due to my resume, experience, and other such things, these places assume I'll leave as soon as something "corporate" pops up.

Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs.

Others have a CV reaching back 5+ years at that age.

Don't put that much time exclusively into uni unless you intend to stay in science or aim for a cushy cubicle job that hires on the premise of paper-planes.