How to stand out in a crowded tech job market

Why great fits still don't get interviews

Most senior technology roles are not hidden. They are public postings, and a Director or VP opening can attract hundreds of applicants within a couple of days.

By the time a recruiter opens the role, they're looking at a queue sorted by the applicant tracking system, from best fit to worst. They spend a few seconds deciding whether a resume deserves a closer look, and only a small group ever reaches the hiring manager.

So if you're applying to roles you're a great fit for and still not hearing back, you're usually not underqualified. You're invisible. The five steps below are how we get senior leaders seen.

1. Position yourself around one problem you solve

The most common mistake we see is a broad resume. It feels logical: a generalist profile should open more doors. In practice, hiring managers aren't looking for someone who can do a lot. They're looking for someone who has already solved the exact problem sitting on their desk.

Anyone reading your resume or LinkedIn should be able to answer three questions within seconds:

• What problem do you solve?
• For what kind of company?
• At what scale?

"Led cloud migration using AWS, Kubernetes and Terraform" tells a reader what you worked with. "Led a 300-person engineering organization through a cloud transformation for a global financial services business" tells them the level you operate at. Show your leadership and its business outcome, not your tech stack.

Our guide to writing an executive resume covers the structure in detail.

2. Apply only where you're a close fit

When the market is crowded, companies can hire an exact match. If a role asks for a Director of Platform Engineering and DevOps in financial services, and you're a general software engineering leader from B2C SaaS who "also knows operations", you're unlikely to be the exact match they're waiting for.

So narrow the target to roles where your background is an unusually strong fit, and apply quickly when they open. Twenty well-matched applications will do more for you than two hundred where you're vaguely qualified.

3. Find the person who owns the hire

An application sitting quietly in an applicant tracking system rarely lands an interview on its own. Submit it, because that's part of the process, and then find the people responsible for the role: the hiring manager, the recruiter, or the executive the role reports to.

The job description usually holds the clues: the department, who the role partners with, who it reports to. Company size tells you how many layers sit between the role and its owner. Our step-by-step guide shows how to find the hiring manager for any posting, even at a stealth-mode startup.

4. Write a message about their problem

Hiring managers receive plenty of generic messages. The ones that get answered are about the hiring manager's problem, not the candidate's career. Keep it to four parts:

1. The problem they're actually hiring to solve, read from the job description.
2. The two or three things you've done that solve it, in a similar environment.
3. Enough proof to believe you: the scale, the team and the result.
4. An easy next step, such as asking them to pass your profile to the recruiter.

Our guide on what to write to the hiring manager walks through two full examples.

5. Follow up, and keep the pipeline moving

Most replies come after the first message, not from it. Follow up when you don't hear back, and keep track of every conversation so nothing goes quiet by accident.

Keep applying and reaching out even when you're close to an offer. Your first offer isn't automatically your best one, and having options is what gives you room to choose.

Watch the video

The video above walks through the same ideas. If you'd rather have someone run all five steps for you, that's what our team does for senior IT, Data, Product and Engineering leaders.