Job Searcher Got Offer After 2 Years and 2,000 Apps: What Worked

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joseph Leemon, a 44-year-old from Rochester Hills, Michigan. His previous employment, offer, application count, and identity have been verified by Business Insider. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I was laid off from my last job on October 3, 2023. On October 4, I updated my résumé and redownloaded all the job apps.

Since then, I’ve applied to roughly 2,000 jobs.

I sought outside counsel from recruiters or others in managerial positions. I also tried out three résumé-writing services, spending hundreds of dollars on them with no results. I also used ChatGPT, but I really didn’t like what I read from it. My résumé got to the point where it just sort of felt like some random keywords that were hopefully going to be caught by the ATS system.

My last job was as an agent services specialist at a real-estate tech company. I wasn’t looking for anything too far out of my previous job scope, but I was looking for something more in the operational space or at the managerial level.

On September 10 of this year, I was finally lucky enough to apply to a support specialist role with an IRA firm that accepted me. My first day is on October 27. While it’s not a managerial position, there’s a possibility of moving up, and it’s the most I’ve ever made annually.

Here’s how I finally got an offer:

I opened my search to hybrid roles

For almost my entire search, I had just been applying to remote roles because of my home situation. My wife, who works as a grant writer, has to drive an hour plus to the office three days a week, and my daughter is in pre-school in the mornings on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Around mid-September, I shifted my thinking and started applying to more hybrid roles amid the big back-to-office push. I applied to about 30 hybrid roles since then. My new job will be in-person two or three days a week, about 20 minutes from where I live.

Until that point, I didn’t know if I was even applying to real positions. I was just throwing applications out there. I felt like there was a better chance of hybrid jobs not being fake because they at least wanted to see your face sometimes. So, I think my advice to others would be not to just click and apply. Go to the websites and make sure it’s real.

I leveraged existing connections

Honestly, I think the reason I got the interview was because I previously worked with the recruiter who contacted me for the current job. She left about a year and a half before I did, but she remembered me.

Everybody talks about networking, but you need to have those existing connections, and I was lucky I had this very slim one to get my foot in the door.

I’m lucky that I didn’t burn a lot of bridges in my past jobs, but even reaching out to former colleagues seemed untenable in a way, because the place they’d be working wasn’t hiring. So how much help could they give me?

I didn’t network a ton throughout the job search, and if I could do my job search again, I would be really intentional about who I was networking with.

I think a lot of it was luck in this case. If the person I used to work with in a very light capacity didn’t recognize my name and didn’t see that my last job was her last job, who knows how much longer I would have waited?

Don’t give up

I was feeling very low in August and the beginning of September, thinking that I might have aged out of the job market, even though I’m going to be just 45 in November. I thought, what’s this going to look like for myself and my family?

My wife and I were both lucky that we’re good with money and have saved a lot. But we live in an upper-middle-class area in Michigan, and things are expensive, especially with inflation. We were getting real close to selling a car because, while we have savings, the savings were meant for our child, and weren’t supposed to be used for decades. We’re also trying to adopt a second child, so the situation was really starting to add a lot of stress.

Throughout the two years, my job search ebbed and flowed. I would apply to about 50 jobs a day, but then spend two weeks not applying at all because I was so down about the process. I think it’s OK to take time off from the job search to recharge — I did that multiple times, and it really helped.

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