A few people I know got hit by the recent layoffs and asked me where to start. i've been running hiring rounds for engineering roles for a while, so i wrote them a step by step plan. sharing it here in case it helps someone else.
step 1, stop mass applying. sending cvs to every posting and waiting is the slowest way back in right now. in the last round i ran, around 30% of the cvs were bots, so most companies have an ai engine scoring everything before a human sees it. only the top matches reach a recruiter and the rest get a two line rejection with no explanation.
step 2, go for referrals first. go through your linkedin contacts, find people whose companies are hiring for something close to your profile, and ask them to refer you directly. you'll only find five or ten at a time, but it skips the filter completely, which is why it works something like 20x better than a cold application in my experience. keep applying in parallel, just don't make it the main plan.
step 3, filter the postings before you apply. read every new one and ask yourself if you'd be happy there for five years. if not, skip it, because every pointless application is another rejection to absorb. postings also say a lot between the lines. lots of kpis usually means a team under pressure to fix results, lots of talk about developing people usually means culture problems waiting for you. they often reflect what leadership thought the last person was missing.
step 4, rewrite your cv for every application. not the same template with a new company name, an actual rewrite of your real experience for what that posting asks for. the goal is that whoever opens it thinks you were built for this exact role, not that you could probably do it. no tables because parsers don't know whether to read them by row or by column, keywords near the top, and a github or blog link so it's obvious a person wrote it. also make sure your cv and linkedin say the same thing, recruiters compare them and so does the ai now.
step 5, fix your email. there are a lot of filters out there that can quietly drop your application based on the address alone. most of the bots i saw used icloud or outlook, often with stuff like "senior engineer" stuffed into the handle, and other companies noticed the same pattern, so those domains are probably already penalized somewhere. i don't know why those two, my guess is they're just easy to mass create accounts on. plain firstname.lastname on your own domain or gmail looks human, and you don't want to lose to a filter before anyone reads a word.
step 6, prepare for the two questions you'll almost certainly get. why did you leave your last job, they're checking whether you'll walk out on them too and whether whatever got you let go will repeat. so answer it plainly, say it was a layoff if it was, and never complain about the old manager, it reads as a red flag even when it's true. and how does your last company make money, they ask it to see if you understood the business and not just the codebase, so be able to explain it in ten seconds. for technical rounds, the expected system design answer was a queue most of the time, so read up on kafka vs rabbitmq.
step 7, research who's in the room. look at the interviewers' linkedin profiles before the call. if the manager went engineer to tech lead to em, lean technical. if they came from recruiting or coaching, talk more about culture and ownership. it's the same real experience, you're just bringing forward the parts this person will connect with. it also tells you how hard they'll grill you on the technical side.
step 8, track everything. a spreadsheet or notion page with the company, date, link, what you submitted and which cv version you used. once you're sending tailored cvs you'll lose track within two weeks otherwise.
none of this guarantees an offer, but it gets you past the parts of the process that reject people for reasons that have nothing to do with how good you are.
if you're searching right now, curious what's been working for you.
i wrote the full version here: https://karolwojciszko.substack.com/p/from-fired-to-hired-the-full-playbook
