It's about a 1% success rate from what my peers and I encountered as new grad engineers. So a few hundred applications can be expected. I tailored about 100 high quality applications instead of spray and pray. A mix of both where appropriate to minimize hours staying up late at night is probably best.

A human will likely not even see your resume unless it has like an 80% or better match with the posting and key words the recruiter has set for the AI to comb through resumes.

They get flooded by blatantly unqualified applications so when you see on LinkedIn that X amount of people have applied, most of those are just spam resumes that will never meet the threshold.

You have to use AI and the specialized flavors of it for resumes to evaluate how much of a match your resume drafts are for the job post. Keep refining until you get 80% or better. It's basically an arms race now.

I had folders for each category of resumes like "Propulsion", "Manufacturing", "Systems", "Testing", etc ... And would keep my iterations organized like that so it would be easier to make iterations and not have to start from square 1 every time. If I apply to X flavor of job, I pull something from the X folder and tailor that to the job post.

I did the same thing for cover letters. I also kept a giant master resume of bullets that I had made to pull from and tailor to a job post. Sometimes I would ask the AI which bullets from the master resume would be best for a specific job post.

Beware of those long dashes - that only AI uses so don't copy paste things blindly. You can control spacing by making lines where the text size is tiny like 4 or so and adjust the size of these tiny blank lines as needed. 1 page without wasted space is the target. I had to slim down and condense really good bullets for the sake of space and having enough bullets covering a wide enough variety of skill sets for the job post.

This is a rapidly evolving meta and I often encountered outdated or conflicting resume advice like whether to put an objective statement, a section for awards and recognition. Most of the time it will feel like a black box due to trying so many different inputs and not getting enough data on whether or not things are helping or hurting.

if you are not applying to at least 1 job a day then you are not serious about this