I’ve been laid off since June and have not been getting responses from most of my applications other than denials. I have 10+ years mostly Ruby/React/JS. New just working on a side project (job listing scraper) but curious what is working well for you? Specific apps or strategies that lead to your hiring?
You're not going to like this. My plan for when I get laid off or fired is to get a help desk job, or even at job at Walmart. If you can't get responses for what you want, you might need to do stuff you don't want to. That's most people's reality anyways
Reaching out to everyone you have worked above, under, and beside is the best strategy (assuming you are not the kind of person people don't ever want to work with again).
To put it another way, with ten years experience a hiring professional might reasonably wonder why you are cold applying rather than working through a professional network. Or at least networking into the company org-chart before applying. [1]
And because any public job listing is going to be fire hosed with applications by people scraping, the hiring professional's job entails saying "no" on more than 99% of applications.
Therefore finding reasons to say "no" is mostly what they are going to do for very practical reasons. You might be a diamond in the rough, but being in the rough is almost certainly a good enough reason to not move your application forward in a saturated channel of applications.
Good luck.
[1]: If you identify someone within, reaching out and asking for an "informational interview" is a way of opening a conversation. An informational interview is where you can find out what a company is looking for in candidates. You need to be fly fishing, not chumming.
To put it another way, with ten years experience a hiring professional might reasonably wonder why you are cold applying rather than working through a professional network. Or at least networking into the company org-chart before applying. [1]
And because any public job listing is going to be fire hosed with applications by people scraping, the hiring professional's job entails saying "no" on more than 99% of applications.
Therefore finding reasons to say "no" is mostly what they are going to do for very practical reasons. You might be a diamond in the rough, but being in the rough is almost certainly a good enough reason to not move your application forward in a saturated channel of applications.
Good luck.
[1]: If you identify someone within, reaching out and asking for an "informational interview" is a way of opening a conversation. An informational interview is where you can find out what a company is looking for in candidates. You need to be fly fishing, not chumming.