How to get a job in 2026

The job market right now is brutal. But not for the reason you think it is.

Most of the jobs you applied to this week were not real.

I don't mean fake like a scam. I mean the role got filled two months ago and the posting is still up, sitting there collecting resumes into a pipeline nobody is hiring out of. So you sent 40 applications, got 2 rejections and 38 silences, and now you're sitting there thinking something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You're playing a game where nobody told you the rules.

This is the whole process. Everything I'd do if I were the one trying to get hired right now. Finding roles that are actually real. What your resume needs to look like based on the size of the company. How to apply. Who to reach out to and what to say. How to read the data coming back at you so you fix the actual thing instead of guessing. Then interviews.

It's long. Read the whole thing, because every piece stacks on the last one.

Quick context on me

I've been a hiring manager and recruiter for over five years, mostly in tech. I've hired people into Google, Meta, Apple, a lot of the big places. And I've reviewed hundreds of thousands of applications.

Which means I've sat on the exact side of the table you're trying to get past. Resumes, portfolios, cold emails, all of it. When you see that much volume you start seeing the same patterns over and over. I can tell you in seconds what makes someone an instant yes. I can also tell you exactly what gets someone auto-rejected in four seconds inside an ATS before a human ever touches it.

And the thing I'm actually building is a way to get millions of people hired.

So this isn't a tips post. This is me talking to you the way I'd talk to a candidate I'm working with directly. Because the biggest thing I see people struggle with is not that they're unqualified. It's that they don't know how to present themselves and they don't know how to navigate the search.

That's it. That's the whole gap.

Five pieces. Finding the jobs. Presenting yourself. Applying. Reaching out to actual people. And running the whole thing as a loop that gets better every week. Then interviews.

Part 1: Find jobs that are actually real

Stop applying to jobs that don't exist.

There are two questions for every single job you look at. Is this real, and do I actually have a shot? If the answer to either one is no, you close the tab and move on. Never burn time on jobs that were never going anywhere.

How to tell if a posting is real

Posting age. If a job has been up for three months, four months, six months and it's still open, that is not a company desperate to hire. That's a pipeline. Something is broken in that process, or they're just collecting resumes.

Repost frequency. This is the big tell. If a role gets taken down and put back up over and over, that's a company that either can't close candidates or can't decide what they actually want. Either way you're walking into a mess.

Can you reach an actual person? At a smaller company that's the founder. At a bigger company that's the hiring manager or the recruiter. Somebody you can genuinely tap on the shoulder. If everything is walled off behind a form and there's no human anywhere near it, ask yourself how urgent that hire really is.

What just happened at that company? Did they raise? Did they ship something? Companies hire hardest right after money comes in or right after they launch something that's working. That's your window.

Now flip it. Have they had layoffs recently? Because if a company just came out of a round of layoffs, morale is low, the team is stretched thin, and that role is probably three people's work stapled together. That's information you want before you spend an hour on the application, not after.

And then: do you actually have a shot?

People always skip this one.

Is this a team that genuinely fits who you are? That comes from real research, not vibes. Look at who works there. Look at what they've shipped. Look at whether the people in that function came from backgrounds anything like yours.

If nobody on that team looks like a path you could have walked, that's real information to work off of.

This is exactly what I built Yara to do, and full disclosure, it's my tool so I'm biased. It scores how legit a posting is using hiring velocity, posting patterns, repost detection, all of it, and you just ask it in plain English. Reposted three times, up for four months, don't touch it, next.

Part 2: Present yourself properly

You've got the real jobs. Here's where most people immediately blow it.

They send the exact same resume to every single company. Same document, same bullets, 200 times. And you end up looking like everybody else in the stack. Nothing distinctive about you at all.

Just having a resume and firing it at a bunch of roles doesn't work anymore. And the number of jobs you applied to is not a metric. It has never been a metric. The only number that matters is how many high quality applications you sent.

So: shortlist. Five to ten of the best jobs daily. Not a hundred. Five to ten you actually want and actually fit. Then you tailor each one.

Your resume should change with the size of the company

This is the thing most people have never heard. It is not one resume.

Picture the person on the other end. Who is opening this, what are they opening it in, how much time do they have. The reader changes, so the document changes.

Under 50 people. Clean, simple, nice layout. That's it. A human is reading this, probably a founder, probably at 11pm. Make it easy on their eyes.

50 to 150. Mostly the same, but now there's real ATS software in the mix. Greenhouse, Ashby, whatever they're running. Keep it simple and clear. It doesn't need to be advanced. There's a process forming but humans are still doing most of the deciding.

Over 150. Now you switch. Always use the ATS-friendly templates, the boring ones. Serif font, standard sections, standard headers. There are specific format conventions for engineering, design, growth, and you follow them.

A company that size has a mature recruiting process, which means machines and screeners are in the path before a person ever sees you, and a beautiful custom layout is just going to get chewed up.

What they care about changes too

It's not just format.

A recruiter at a large tech company cares more about pedigree. Where you worked, where you studied, the names. That's the filter.

A company in the middle cares more about your work and your projects, but they're still leaning on pedigree as a proxy.

Startups and earlier stage don't really care about any of that. They care about projects and your ability to actually execute. Can you ship, have you shipped. That's the entire test.

Two more things on the document

Tailor your keywords. Pull the actual language out of the job description and make sure it exists in your resume, because at a bigger company that is literally what you're being matched against.

Do not send generic AI slop. This matters more every month. I can spot an AI-generated resume instantly. The blue columns, the sidebar, the same three bullet phrasings on every single one. It's blatant. And stay away from the templates with a headshot in the top left corner. It doesn't look good and at a bigger company it actively works against you.

What makes you stand out is projects. Real work sitting in the document, not just employment history.

And whatever you write, own the outcome. Not "responsible for." Not "helped with." What did you deliver, what happened because of it, what number moved. Lead with impact.

I wrote a full breakdown of the resume itself here, so I'm not going to repeat all of it.

Now the part that separates you: your work

If there's a website or portfolio field in that application, you fill it in. Every single time.

What's behind that link should be case studies of things you've actually done. Anything not under NDA, anything public that shipped where you have attribution. Design it clean and simple. Nothing fancy.

• Designers: show the process, not just the pretty final screens.
• Engineers: ship something public. A repo, a live tool, something someone can click and actually use. One real working thing beats ten bullet points.
• Marketing and non-technical: people think they can't do this and you absolutely can. The campaign, the numbers, the before and after, the launch you ran.
• Finance: a model you built, a teardown you wrote, a breakdown of a deal. That's your portfolio.

The point is showing that you do work, and that the work exists somewhere I can go look at it. Your profiles are part of that surface: here is what a recruiter actually sees on your LinkedIn and GitHub.

Yara generates the portfolio per company too, same body of work presented for that specific team. And I'll get to why that matters so much in Part 5, because it becomes your feedback mechanism.

Part 3: Actually applying

This part is short on purpose.

Apply fast. Don't spend an hour on an application. Applying is not what gets you through the door. The odds of a cold application converting on its own are tiny. It's table stakes. It's the thing you do so you're technically in the system, and everything else in this post is what actually gets you hired.

Keep it quick, keep it clean, tailor to the size of the company, drop your portfolio link in, submit, move on.

Two things will kill you on the way in.

Dumb mistakes. Don't name the file "resume for Google" and send it to Figma. Wrong company name in the cover letter, typos, grammar errors. That's an instant no and you will never find out it happened.

Rejections that have nothing to do with you. A lot of ATS setups auto-reject on hard requirements before a person is ever involved. Visa sponsorship, years of experience, location, a required certification. If a company has a strict no-sponsorship policy, nothing in this post overrides that. Don't read that rejection as a verdict on your work. It's a filter. Move on.

Part 4: Reach out to actual people

This is the one that changes outcomes. After you apply, you find a human and you talk to them.

But before you go cold, go warm.

Network first, every single time

Anyone who went to your school and works there. Anyone you used to work with. Old coworkers, friends of friends, someone two degrees out.

Most of these companies have a referral program and they pay real money for good talent. So there is an actual financial incentive on the other side to put you in.

One referral will do more for you than fifty cold applications.

If you don't have that, here's the map

You're going to burn shots on the wrong people if you don't think about this. You want the person with the highest likelihood of actually responding.

Those are starting points. What I'd really push you on is to funnel it down and figure out who is genuinely the single best person for your specific situation, then go to them. And line up backups, so you've got coverage when that one person goes quiet.

The message

Email them and message them on LinkedIn. Both, not one.

The message has one job: get a response. So it's short, it's specific to them and that role, it shows you actually did the research, it says what you can do, and it shows proof. What makes you distinctive.

Always share your work. Put the link in, and make it a tracking link so you know whether they even opened it.

One caveat: cold email filters will sometimes block or flag external links, so at bigger companies you might get eaten by that. At smaller companies you won't have issues. If you're worried, put the link on LinkedIn instead, where nothing is filtering it.

Then track and follow up

You need to know if it even got opened. If you're sending messages into the dark with no idea whether anyone saw them, you can't improve anything. Connect your inbox, get the reminders, follow up consistently.

Not once. Two to three follow-ups across a few days.

There are two ways to run the relationship side of this. One is very direct, where you put yourself in front of the person and ask for the shot. The other is you network your way up, building relationships in the space until the opportunity comes to you sideways. That one is slower and it compounds harder.

Do both. They're not in conflict.

Part 5: Run it as a loop

You could do every single thing above and nothing happens. What you do at that exact moment is the whole game.

The last thing I want is for you to send ten messages, get zero replies, and quietly decide you're not good enough.

That's not what's happening. What's happening is you have a specific problem in a specific layer, and you can find out exactly which one. All of this is data. Use it.

On that fourth row: a normal response rate is anywhere from five to ten percent depending on who you are and what you're going after. If you're sending ten messages, quiet is just the math. That's not rejection, that's a small sample.

Almost every problem in a job search is downstream of one particular layer. Once you know which layer is broken, you stop guessing and you fix the actual thing.

Part 6: Interviews

Research your interviewer. Every time, before every single call.

Here's why this matters more than people think. Say your interviewer is ex-Stripe. Stripe has a very specific methodology for how they interview designers, and that person is very likely going to run the process they were trained on. If you know that going in, you know the shape of the conversation before it starts.

If you don't research the interviewer, you show up unprepared, you feel unprepared, and you can't adapt in the room. Totally avoidable disadvantage.

Then the human part. Stay confident, be yourself, be sharp. And practice in a way that makes you genuinely uncomfortable.

I'll be honest, I've struggled with social anxiety myself, where talking to people has been genuinely hard for me. The only thing that ever worked was making myself extremely uncomfortable over and over. Talking to as many people as I possibly could. Practicing and practicing until it stopped being scary.

You also don't want to over-practice into sounding like a robot, where every answer comes out as a memorized paragraph. People feel that immediately and it reads as fake. Know your material and still sound like a person.

Record your calls. Something like Granola, so you can review yourself afterwards.

I want to be careful here, because there are real privacy concerns and I don't want to encourage the wrong behavior. Know the rules where you are and stay compliant. That recording is for you, for your own learning. There's another person on that call and their words are not yours to share around or leak.

Once you have it, you can feed it into Yara and it'll tell you exactly what you did well and what you did badly. Most people bomb an interview and never find out why.

The part that matters most

This is more general than tactical, but I think it might be the most important thing here.

Be confident in yourself. Know that you can do this.

This process is hard, and it feels genuinely jarring when the rejections come in and nothing is going your way. But it's an iterative process and you are in control of it. Every single thing in this post is something you can change.

So do not let four rejections or six rejections or however many you're sitting on right now become the story of who you are. Never let that be the core of your identity. It degrades everything downstream. It shows up in your interviews and it shows up in how you present your work. A lack of confidence is visible in an interview from the first thirty seconds.

Flip side: don't be so overconfident that you stop improving. There's a balance and you have to find it.

The market is difficult, that's true. And cold applying does not work the way you think it does anymore. We're not in the sixties where you walk in, hand someone your resume, and get a job. There's a flood of AI-generated applications hitting every single posting now.

So the way you compete is not volume. It's presenting yourself better than anyone else in that stack, reaching out to real humans directly with a genuine message, and iterating off the data instead of guessing.

Don't give up on the first thing that doesn't work. Just improve.

That's the whole playbook. That's everything I'd tell you as a recruiter if you were sitting across from me.

Everything here runs inside Yara.

Resources

• How to build a resume that actually gets you hired in 2026 — the full breakdown of the document itself, line by line.
• Free resume check — scores what a recruiter and a parser actually see, no account.
• The outreach templates above, one each for a founder, a hiring manager, and a recruiter.
• The resume structures above, for engineering, design, general tech, and finance.

Frequently asked questions