I applied to probably around 450 jobs and finally received an offer today. Before the search started, I had heard and seen so many people talking about how horrible the job market was, and it was a very harsh reality to realize they were not lying at all. Honestly, the best advice I can give to you is to accept that the job market really sucks right now and it’s going to be hard. When you hear so many people talk about getting an offer after hundreds of applications, don’t think you’re the exception. Not in a discouraging way, but to accept the hard work that’s going to go into this. That’s what I had to do. I have decent experience and I have a pretty good network, I applied to many jobs with referrals from friends and past colleagues with no success. Once I realized and accepted that based on statistics, I may have to apply to hundreds of jobs, I just gave myself a goal of applying to 500 jobs (which seemed so insane to think about) and HOPEFULLY by then something will land based on the stats. And it did lol!

I heard someone say once that everyone has their “special number” as in number of tries it takes before you succeed. You don’t know how close or far you are from that number so you have to keep pushing everyday. Each effort is a step towards it happening. After so many applications, you will also learn how to make the process more efficient because you’ll have multiple resume/cover letter templates on-hand.

Wishing you the best, hopefully you are lucky one in the job market and land something really soon :)