My jobhunting experience thus far has been filled with much despair, putting my resilience and mental health to the test. I decided to do something about it by putting my problem-solving skills to good use, and I started with revamping my résumé, a.k.a. the single most important tool for any jobseeker.
My Jobhunting Journey Thus Far
How It All Began
I moved to Spain in the summer of 2022 to join my husband, whom I married in autumn that same year. A month later after our wedding, I was issued my Spanish residence and work permit, which allowed me to officially embark on my jobhunting journey.
Looking back now at my old self, filled with much hope of joining the Spanish workforce and contributing to Spanish society, I shake my head and smile at how naive I was. I didn’t know then that it was going to take so much more than legal residence to even get interviewed for a remote job in the most elegant city in Spain.
Stumbling Through a Desert of Ghosts and Unknowns
Melquiades Aseron III Months into my jobhunting journey, I started noticing disturbing patterns, such as never hearing back from companies (as of writing, 47% of the job applications that I’ve sent out never provided any updates after the initial canned response). Even the ones that did send a rejection email were not any much better, as almost all of them were rejection emails that were merely the corporate versions of “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I met someone else” without any real feedback - including the ones from companies that I actually interviewed with.
The ones that did give some sort of feedback, all of them quoted location mismatch as being the reason for rejecting my application, except for one that gave real feedback that I was really craving.
A Drop of Humanity in the Desert
When you’ve spent months being ghosted or rejected outright, it takes a toll on you (I once got a rejection email within minutes of applying, a topic which I will discuss in more detail later on). A single rejection is one thing, but hundreds of rejections on a daily basis are an entirely different thing altogether - heck, I was even rejected for a volunteer position. It really made me question my abilities and self-worth.
Melquiades Aseron III That is why I got emotional when, after hundreds of rejections and ghostings, I received a call from the only recruiter to ever pick up the phone and very kindly tell me in her own voice and her own words the reason why I was no longer being considered for the position. She said it was because my experience was more aligned with an analyst position as opposed to a sales position (where, in recent years, Customer Success function has been lumped into). I cried for a solid five minutes after we hung up.
For the first and only time since I started jobhunting, I was treated like a human being with feelings, and not a mere resource to be collected and utilized.
Identifying the Problem
Clearly, there was a huge problem. My success rate was abysmal - out of nearly 400 job applications at the time, I had only managed to get face-to-face interviews (online and in-person) with just a handful of companies. The rest were what Redditors call “one-way screening interviews”, a hodgepodge of written questionnaires, video introductions, and practical tests.
This also meant that I had very little opportunity to practice my interviewing skills, and I regret to say that I fumbled through one in particular - after all, who can perform well after your self-confidence has taken a huge beating from hundreds of rejections and when everything seems to hinge on a single interview?
What I’ve Tried So Far
I am blessed to have a supportive husband who, in the midst of my despair, has never ceased to remind me that my failure in securing a job offer is not from my lack of trying. The efforts I’ve made are summarized as follows:
| I've Tried... | Reason | Result |
|---|---|---|
| ✓ Tailor fitting my résumé to specific jobs | To quickly demonstrate to the recruiter why I'm fit for the job, as it has been said that recruiters only spend an average of 6-7 seconds looking at each résumé. | ❌ For all the job applications where I spent at least an hour customizing my CV to fit the job description, I never heard back on any of them - not a single one. The worst was when I received a rejection email in less than 24 hours. |
| ✓ Setting up my own website | To establish an online presence for jobhunting purposes, and to give recruiters and hiring managers a chance to get to know who I am and what I'm capable of. | ✅ There was a slight uptick in positive responses after I set up the website. |
| ✓ Networking on LinkedIn | Reaching out to recruiters asking them to add me to their talent pool, and just connecting with new people in general. | 🟡 Made no headway in securing a job, but I did establish new connections! |
| ✓ Asking for recommendations from former colleagues and friends on LinkedIn | As part of an ongoing effort to establish my online presence, I asked former and colleagues to write me a recommendation on LinkedIn. | ✅ Their support gave me much-needed strength, and I am forever grateful that they did not abandon me in my time of great need. |
So What Was I Doing Wrong?
The near-complete lack of feedback from the jobs I’ve applied for means that I was and still am in the dark as to why I haven’t been able to get more interviews. I haven’t mentioned that the vast majority of rejection emails that I received were automated, sent from a no-reply email address. The ones sent from seemingly real email addresses never replied to my requests for feedback.
After some online research, I found that applicant tracking systems (ATS) are now used by virtually every company that can afford them.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)
These systems analyze résumés received from applicants and rank them according to how well they match the job description, thus giving recruiters and hiring managers the ability to summarily filter out applicants where the résumé match percentage is too low or - wait for it - too high.
As I dug deeper into the matter, I found that my original résumé, the one posted on this website, can’t be easily parsed by an ATS because it contains images and is divided into two columns.
This brings me to the point I mentioned earlier, where I received a rejection email within minutes of sending my job application - I attribute this to an ATS. The incident was shocking enough that I remember sending my application, moving on to a different tab on my browser to check something, and then going back to check my email - only to find an email rejection already waiting. If it weren’t so heartbreaking, it would have been hilarious.
Finding A Solution
Helplessness, anxiety, self-doubt, and despair - these are among the feelings I’ve felt ever since I started looking for a job. Mostly because of the things I’ve had to contend with just to get an interview - fierce competition in the job market, technological obstacles, the expectation to stand out.
Since I couldn’t really do much about the state of the job market, I could still do something about the technological obstacles, a.k.a. ATS, which could also serve as a way to stand out amongst other candidates. The best and only way to do that is to revamp my résumé by adding common keywords found in the descriptions of my target job role.
Gathering My Resources
Growing up in a lower middle class household, I learned to be resourceful through watching my parents raise four children on a humble combined income - and I was able to apply this life skill even in this situation.
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While I had almost zero information as to why I was being rejected by companies, I did have a wealth of information from the jobs that I’ve applied for, as I had meticulously tracked the link to each job ad. This was not the initial purpose of my jobhunting tracker, as it was originally intended to help me quickly pull up the job description, regardless of the website I applied on, should I ever get invited to an interview.
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In addition to the information, I knew that I have an ability to compile and organize raw data into a format that made sense, and crunch that data to extract useful information.
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Finally, I could rely on my ever-supportive angel of a husband, who’s always ready to lend a hand.
Defining the Scope
Since the objective was to identify keywords, I found that it was simply not feasible to extract keywords from over 400 job ads. In addition, I’ve applied for different types of jobs. Therefore, I had to settle on a specific type of job, i.e. Customer Success.
I still had to narrow this down, as I was still left with over 200 job ads. I decided that the best way to approach this was to select the jobs at the companies I wanted to work for, which dramatically shortened the list to just 12.
Putting Things Into Motion
Having identified the general objective of extracting keywords from a list of 12 job ads, I went to work.
Gathering the Data
This process was highly manual and repetitive, as I had to click on the link of each job ad in my tracker, copy each line of the job description, and paste it onto an MS Excel spreadsheet. I also took the opportunity to highlight lines in the job description that I could use as inspiration for my revamped résumé.
Even with just 12 job ads, the raw data came up to a total of over 800 rows.
Melquiades Aseron III Crunching the Data
I quickly realized that it was going to be difficult to go back to each row of data once I’ve encoded them, and that the best approach was to interpret each row of data and extract the keywords as I went along.
Also, as requirements listed on job ads vary widely, I had to decide on keywords and keep them in mind as I entered the data for other job ads. For example, a requirement in one job ad may read: “Making sure customers get the most out of our product and meet their business needs”, while another reads: “Ensuring they receive maximum value from our solution throughout their lifecycle”. These two lines may seem very different, but the keywords for them are “Customer Value”.
Melquiades Aseron III Other keywords were more straightforward, such as “(Product) Adoption”.
Melquiades Aseron III This was the most time-consuming and mentally draining part of this mini-project.
Analyzing the Data
Once I was done gathering and crunching the data, I finally came to the fun part - analyzing it.
I was surprised with some of the results, I didn’t expect “(Product) Adoption” to feature in 10 out of 12 of the job ads analyzed. I also didn’t expect “ARR” (Annual Recurring Revenue) to show up on just one company’s job ad.
Melquiades Aseron III It is worth bearing in mind that these results are skewed because the sample size is limited to the job ads that I was really interested in, and so the results don’t really reflect the true scenario for a majority of all job ads. In addition to that, I had to stop at some point because I caught myself spending more time on the analysis than necessary as I already had sufficient data to update my résumé. (Note: As the list of keywords was far too long, I had to trim it down, so the summary of keywords in the screenshot does not include all of them.)
My angel of a husband pitched in and performed his tech wizardry to convert the job descriptions into .json files, paid for an online AI tool (bless his heart) and used it to analyze the data so that we could validate my findings. The tool validated my findings to a good extent and also came up with observations of its own, but I ultimately decided to stick with my own data as I had trust issues with the AI tool when it started hallucinating at some point.
Renewed Hope
With the keywords generated from this mini-project, I was able to revamp my résumé by creating an ATS-friendly one and I have since sent it out to multiple companies.
The jury’s still out on whether it’ll increase my jobhunting success rate, but I have since received an email asking for a video introduction - a good friend gave me a great tip on how to make such videos on Microsoft PowerPoint, but I ended up using Apple Keynote because the MS Office version I’m using doesn’t have the functionality.