Here are the things you should not waste your time on otherwise you find out after months: LinkedIn or applying to vacancies. To get a real sense of what is going on try to talk to people who are on the hiring side like agencies and HR.

But not in the context of showing up as a candidate. The only thing that will work will be personal contacts. Join user groups and do something without the actual purpose of finding a job. Volunteer for things in an IT context.

You might say this will mean weeks to months of wasted activities, but believe it will be way better than weeks or months of applying for non existing jobs.

Here is a tip that I dont find unethical, call agencies but as in the role of a job offer not job seeker. Have a conversation, and you will then have the full picture.

I’ve had 3 jobs in the last 3 years. What didn’t work: cold applications mostly were a waste of time. LinkedIn has been a complete farce for job seeking.

However the last cold application did work, although it was to an agency rather than direct to the company.

It’s demoralising work applying for jobs. Good luck!

I'm a hiring manager. We post jobs on our website, along with LinkedIn and probably some others. We review applications from that, and interview and hire those people.

We get a lot of bots, but the software itself filters out 99% of that and then our recruiters filter out the rest. Referrals push candidates to the top of the queue for interviews, but otherwise it's literally just hiring people who cold applied to a job posting they saw online.

That's not to say it's not still terrible to be interviewing, just my point is, don't write off applying just because it sucks.