This is key when applying. You have to find a way in which your resume meets the employer directly. You have to bypass HR, particularly the employee relations people or anyone adjacent to it. Mass-applying on LinkedIn or Glassdoor or Indeed or wherever could lend yourself towards being found by headhunters hired by companies who could give you jobs directly, but depending on a multitude of factors (like your occupation or race), you might need to take a different approach. That was my case, and I ended up with a bonus and a job very close to where I live that wasn't even listed publically. All the headhunter had to do was just regurgitate what was on my resume to the manager directly; she didn't have to understand it or add her own personal input. In this case, like you said, connections, particularly PMs or higher-ups. I had to learn this after I got my entry-level job
Simply applying is just going to bundle you in with hundreds of other applications and you'll be quickly rejected, regardless of whether you edited your resume to tailor to their wants or not.
And that speaks to the lack of communication, both on the human resources front and the potential employee's front. This is the result of raising a generation that isn't communicating with each other, and the pandemic, on top of the woke shit, is partial to that.
I can't speak in regards to the tech industry, though, because that's a special kind of fucked, with dumb shit like artificial intelligence reading CVs, ghost jobs, an abundance of software engineers and just the laziness and incompetence of HR. Talking with HR is like hearing chicken scratch. Talking to them made it clear that we were talking from two completely different worlds.
And it sucks. Just imagine going to college and racking mountains of debt up for a job that is null and void in a few years.
