I've had SOME success, here's my tips after 50 days, 100 applications, 5 interviews, 2+ offers

In December I got notified that I would be laid off in a few months as the company was being bought out by a bigger fish. Long story short, like many of you, this consumed my life for about 2 months. However, I was lucky enough to get some interviews and even a couple job offers, so I wanted to share what I THINK worked for me.

Please note, I know I'm lucky, and I'm not an expert, I'm just sharing my experience in hopes that might help someone else.

A little background about me. I work in IT, I have a decent amount of experience, and I was looking for mid level management jobs, so this may not be as relevant for those of you fighting for those entry level jobs that somehow still require years of experience. Also, I've been on the other end of this, hiring people, as recently as last year.

In no real order...

#1 - Review the whole application before starting it
So much time can be saved if you just quick scroll through an application before filling it out. Sometimes you'll think you a job is suitable for you from the job description, but then theres a bunch of questions at the end that were not what you were expecting, or you find out its actually hybrid, or remote but only in certain states.

#2 - The ATS/AI nightmare, and knowing your audience
So I read through a LOT of people saying to just build your resume to get past the ATS/AI, stick to single column, use the same format as 99% of other people, and I don't think I agree. After some initial frustration and panic, I wanted someone independent to rebuild my resume and see if they could do better. So I went on Fiverr and had someone there rebuild mine for about $30 bucks. Personally, I hated it, it looked EXACTLY like every other resume I've ever seen, and everything was written so obviously for AI. I used it for about 20 applications, and so far its got zero hits. I rather quickly (maybe too quickly) went back to using my very human, two column, shiny and pretty resume that I built on Canva. YUP, two columns people! I think a lot of people on here would look at my resume and tell me it will never pass but here's the two things I think actually matter...
1 - What size company are you applying at? Because if they have less than ~500 people, there's a VERY good chance an actual human is reviewing your application and you should cater to the human eye, not the A-eye (see what I did there?). Speaking from experience here, at a small to medium sized business, its very likely someone from HR is doing some initial screening and passing along applicants to the hiring manager, OR the hiring manager might even be able to go in and review them all on their own. Now if you're applying at a mega corporation, you probably want to appeal more to the ATS/AI.
2 - There are a lot of websites that will check if your resume is ATS compatible, but I think a great reference point is whether or not the "auto fill from resume" works or not. Meaning, when you apply for a job, most places will have the option to auto-fill the application from your resume. If that feature is not working, or is not accurately parsing your resume into the fields below, you have a big problem. My pretty two column resume gets parsed correctly 90% of the time, so I'm sticking with that, and it seems to be working for me.

#3 - Multiple resume versions
As I was alluding to above, you should have a couple versions of your resume. If you're applying for 2 or 3 slighlty different roles, just have a version ready for each. And probably have one ATS/boring version for huge corporations, and one smaller/pretty/human version for small to mid size orgs.

#4 - Cover letters aren't worth it
It doesn't hurt, but IMO, theres a bunch of things more important than adding a cover letter. So unless you're switching careers or have something you really want to explain in a cover letter, or have all the time in the world, I probably wouldn't spend the effort here.

#5 - Portfolio website:
I took about 3 hours to build a "portfolio" website on wix.com, I have the privilege of not being broke, so I spent about $200 (think they had a sale), to get my name FirstLast.com, and then "vibed" it together based off my imported resume with their AI tool. But here's what I really want to share, the amount of traffic the site got was surprisingly good. Maybe it was getting scraped by AI as I applied, but after adding it to about 70 job applications I had around 50 unique visitors. These were direct visits, as well, people going straight to my domain, not through a web search or anything like that. I have no idea how much this really helped, but I did have one person in an interview reference it, and it appears to be getting viewed or scraped by almost half my applications. There's a bunch of ways to do this, and I can share more if people are interested.

#6 - Speed matters
Applying within the first day matters a lot. I know when I was hiring an IT person last year, we had so many applicants within the first few days that I rarely even saw the resumes of people that applied after a week. Again, I think this matters a lot more for smaller companies than larger companies. And I'm not saying you shouldn't apply to a job thats been up for 2 weeks, but I think being fast is better than being perfect. Don't put off applying for a job for 2 days because you want to get the perfect resume or whatever, just do it!

#7 - Jobright.ai
This is my new favorite site for aggregating jobs from all the other boards. I do NOT use their auto-fill addon or their premium service. I'm not saying its bad, I just don't think its necessary. However, I have consistently found a lot more relevent jobs through this website than any other. Upload your resume, and it will make recommendations, and it will try to tell you how well suited you are for a job, and what your resume might be missing. But don't be discouraged if it says you're way off the mark, JObright thinks my resume is pretty meh, and it always tells me to add crap even though its there. So maybe my resume isn't as ATS friendly as I think, but keep in mind Jobright is also trying to sell you a service!

#8 - Save questions and answers
If you get an application with a question that you spend more than a couple minutes on, just save it to a google doc. There's been a bunch of times where I spent 10 minutes giving a detailed example of work I've done, only to need almost the exact same thing on another resume the next day. All of this repeat work can be soul crushing, so save them so you can modify and re-use them on the next thing.

#9 - When you can start? 2 weeks
This is a complete THEORY, but whenever it asks when I can start, I always push it out 2 weeks from the current date. In my head, this implies I have a job that I want to be respectful of and give notice to. I have no idea if this is true, but if I was recently let go I would 100% imply that I still have my current job, and I would imply that I want to be respectful and give them notice.

#10 - Why are you looking for a job?
Lucky for me, I have a good reason as my company was purchased by a larger company and a lot of managers were marked as redundant. You don't need to two IT managers just like you don't need to two HR directors. My situation is completely honest, but I may encourage others to use my same story whether its honest or not.

1. We were purchased by a bigger org, and some positions are considered redundant.
2. I have a job with them until X date to help with migrations, but "probably" not past that unless I'm willing to take a pay decrease or move into a different role.
3. My current and future boss both see my value and are fighting to keep me, but I was not part of the initial buyout, so they have to find headcount for me that currently does not exist.
   ^ In my case, these are all true things and I could provide references to prove it if I had to, but so far people seem really responsive to this story and its something you might be able to stretch the truth on if you were recently laid off.

#11 - Change your tactics
If you've applied to 100+ jobs with no interview, change your resume/application. Whether you think its good or not, just try something different for awhile and see if you have better luck. If you're getting a bunch of interviews, but not making it past at least the first 1-2 rounds of interviews, get someone critical to coach you on interviews. Don't be stubborn, don't assume you're doing things right, and be willing to adjust your approach even if its just for a weeks worth of applying.

#12 - Salary questions
Sometimes a job will ask you to specify a salary, so here are my suggestions.

1. Always stay in their listed salary range. If they dont give one, check glassdoor, or try to go on the lower end of industry standard. If you make a good impression, you can negotiate a higher salary later, but if you don't get an interview, you never get a chance. They might say "well you said you only wanted X amount when you applied" and you can say something like "well I recently received X offer" from another company i've since been speaking with.
2. Pay close attention to wording. "Desired income" you might put a little higher, "Required income" strongly implies you won't consider any less, so you really don't want to overshoot the mark. If they let you give a range, do what they do, and make it broad AF.

#13 - Interviewing questions
This is really basic, but if you do get an interview, make sure you have questions ready to ask. And don't be like "you answered all the questions I had". This is a failure on two parts, 1 it seems like you're not thinking critically, and 2, you miss the chance to talk about something you know. If I'm an expert on something in the field, I'm going to ask you directly about that thing, because regardless of your answer, its going to give ME a segue to show my expertise. Similarly, if a job description says they use X product that I'm an expert on, and they didn't bring it up the whole interview, I'll ask "what do you use for X", even though I already know the answer, I want the opportunity to show them I know that thing. You don't want to be overbearing, but asking questions can really help you steer conversations into the things you know, instead of just letting them bombard YOU with questions that you may or not have good answers for.

Well, that was quite a brain-dump, but hopefully this was coherent enough to be helpful. Good luck to all of you, and stick at it!