I'm not getting interviews. Applying more feels safer. Focusing my search feels risky. What if I miss opportunities?

This is a reasonable response when interviews don’t come through.

If backend roles are not working, try infrastructure too. If infrastructure is not working, maybe platform. Perhaps data engineering while we're at it.

The problem with this approach is that volume reduces how specific you can stay.

Why unclear direction gets filtered out

From the other side as a hiring manager, I receive a lot of LinkedIn messages from people looking for "any suitable openings" where the person's experience has little visible relevance to the work my team does.

Hiring decisions are made with limited time and people won’t do the interpretation work for you. You have to make it easy for them.

A critical signal underneath this is lack of preference. When someone shows equal interest across everything, it becomes harder to infer what they’ve actually spent time building judgment in.

Real experience forces you to form opinions. If you don’t express them, you look interchangeable.

Before you apply, you should be able to answer:
what role you are targeting,
and what in your experience makes that believable

The answers do not need to always appear as explicit statements, but the story should always be clear from how you present yourself.

Closing insight

Most people think they are competing on credentials alone. But if someone has to infer your fit under time pressure, you are competing on interpretation, not experience.

Whether you are writing a resume, sending a LinkedIn message, asking for a referral, or applying directly, your fit for it should be easy to understand.

What’s next

In the next issue, I'll break down how to make that story visible on your resume both for the people reading it and the systems filtering it