Apply less, but better.

95% of job applications I receive look more or less the same. They usually read like this:

Hi Adrian, I am excited to apply for the position at your company. With my X years of experience in Y, I am confident I would be a great fit.”

AI made these generic applications even worse as they became more verbose and repetitive.

The bar to stand out is low because many people don’t even read the full job posting. I recently added a sentence at the bottom of the job posting saying: “Go to our website, check out the product demo, and tell me what you think our biggest technical challenges are.” Maybe 5% of applicants actually added an answer to that in their application. Those who did and sent a thoughtful answer almost always got a first interview, regardless of their experience level.

Show, don’t tell

I’m not saying you should do hours of free work for every application, but being selective and applying for companies that you genuinely care about can pay off.

Take this as inspiration: someone built an autonomous wildfire tracking system that pulls NASA thermal data, processes satellite imagery, and scores its own predictions against real fire reports.

I’m pretty sure if that person applied, they’d get an immediate interview because the side project proves domain knowledge and a passion for the problem, which are all things that make you stand out. You don’t need to build something like this for every application, but being able to show off a domain-relevant side project puts you in the top 5% immediately.

Here’s an actual example of a such a job application I recently received. The candidate references a relevant open-source project, lists specific technical challenges from previous roles, and explains how that could apply to us.

Going deep like this is also very helpful for the first interview:

• I have code to review in advance
• We have a ton of things to talk about. It’s a totally different starting point than “so, tell me about yourself.”

I’m aware this approach will mostly work for startups where the leadership or founder team still reviews the applications, and not some generic HR system filter. Spending a weekend deeply engaged with the problem space your company operates in can get you very far though.

This should also be encouraging to people early in their career or switching fields. When code is cheap, you can demonstrate that you can think about hard problems and communicate clearly.

One thoughtful application will beat 20 generic ones.
Apply less, but better.