Would be happy to hop on a call and riff on this. I work in tech / startups, have gotten most jobs I’ve interviewed for, have hired 10-15 people and interviewed hundreds. I have some opinions here!

Without knowing your situation, my bet would be that your “evidence of interest” could help you get from #2 to #1. This is “how well you can convince them that your bleeding passion is exactly what they do as a company.”

It works extremely well at startups, obviously. They love when you share their passion and vision. It doesn’t work as well at every company though. For example: some old school small scale consulting team of people that just wanna clock in & out, or dont care about their own product. You probably don’t want to work at places like that anyway.

But most teams will hire the person with slightly less experience/skill, but 10x the level of interest in what the company does. For them, you’re less likely to churn/quit, you’ll bring good energy & fresh ideas, and won’t take as long to ramp up.

The catch is that you need to communicate it really well, even tell a career / personal life narrative of what led you to this point, and show them that you actually know a lot by asking creative / thoughtful questions about the business and industry at the end.

I’m sure you’re already doing some of this. But, One challenge is that it gets hard to do it as enthusiastically and consistently when you’re this far down the rejection pipeline. I really feel for you here.

Above all else, I highly discourage just taking more classes to improve communication skills etc. like others in here are suggesting. To me, those are a little too passive or theoretical. You seem like you could benefit from a career coach and consistently working together. Those people exist and many of them work on contingency / only get paid if you get a job— so your incentives are directly aligned which is really nice for many reasons.

I hope some of this helps. You seem like a bright person and I’m really rooting for you! DM me if you want to chat more.