{"id":125784,"date":"2025-10-16T12:28:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/125784\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T12:28:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T12:28:13","slug":"job-searcher-got-offer-after-2-years-and-2000-apps-what-worked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/125784\/","title":{"rendered":"Job Searcher Got Offer After 2 Years and 2,000 Apps: What Worked"},"content":{"rendered":"

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

I was laid off from my last job on October 3, 2023. On October 4, I updated my r\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/a> and redownloaded all the job apps.<\/p>\n

Since then, I’ve applied to roughly 2,000 jobs.<\/p>\n

I sought outside counsel from recruiters or others in managerial positions. I also tried out three r\u00e9sum\u00e9-writing services, spending hundreds of dollars on them with no results. I also used ChatGPT<\/a>, but I really didn’t like what I read from it. My r\u00e9sum\u00e9 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Here’s how I finally got an offer:<\/p>\n

Related stories<\/p>\n

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Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n

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Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know<\/p>\n

I opened my search to hybrid roles<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Around mid-September, I shifted my thinking and started applying to more hybrid roles amid the big back-to-office push<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Until that point, I didn’t know if I was even applying to real positions. I was just throwing applications<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I leveraged existing connections<\/p>\n

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

Everybody talks about networking<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

Don’t give up<\/p>\n

I was feeling very low in August<\/a> 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?<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Throughout the two years, my job search ebbed and flowed. I would apply to about 50 jobs a day, but <\/strong>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 \u2014 I did that multiple times, and it really helped.<\/p>\n

Do you have a job hunt success story? We want to hear from you. Reach out to the reporter via email at <\/strong>aaltchek@insider.com<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>or through the secure-messaging app Signal at aalt.19.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joseph Leemon, a 44-year-old from Rochester Hills, Michigan. His…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[176],"tags":[79,18,19,17,227],"class_list":{"0":"post-125784","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-jobs"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}