How the heck do you get interviews when there are 100s of applicants for every job?

[ReallyBadEyeDeer]

That's not even an exaggeration. The roles I'm applying for have typically 100-700 applicants.

I've become much less picky over the 2 years I've been applying and am now going for anything that I have relevant skills for so not even super desirable roles. But still- insane competition.

A few recruiter friends of mine have said those 100s will typically be wittled down to just 10 to interview. Which isn't me - in 2 years, I've had 3 interviews. The rest I'm not even making it through the cv deluge, despite being very experienced and tailoring my cv to each application. I've also had my cv assessed and apparently the format etc is good.

So how the heck do you stand out? Does it basically come down to networking? The 3 interviews I have had, have all involved someone I knew in some way. I really struggle with the whole posting constantly on LinkedIn etc though.

And I totally agree with the whole MBA thing

It's elitist. And so expensive.

Even PMP is too expensive!

It's also a chance to tell they why you want this job in particular, you start off by saying, "thank you so much for your time, I'm really excited to see this post advertised as it fits all the criteria I'm looking for in a job......"

Show them you are interested. I interview people in my role and this is a way of getting me interested in a candidate.

I had the same experience, and I was massively over qualified for most of the roles I applied for on LinkedIn.

Every interview I got was via a mutual contact, including the job I ultimately got. One of the other processes I went quite far in admitted they took the job ad down after 3 days as they were inundated with CVs and so only considered the applicants that applied in that time frame. I was only included based on a recommendation