The 2 principles I stick to are.

1. Job hunting is a numbers game, just like any sales job. Don’t take rejection personally, just move on to the next one.
2. Don’t get excited about a job until you have a signed contract. Just apply / interview, and forget about it until the next stage happens.

Number 2 is hard to do sometimes, but worth doing whenever possible.

I spent about a year looking for a job (senior management in cybersecurity), and had basically ZERO luck until I got wise and did the following. Had a new role within 4 months afterwards.

1. Take your resume, and expand it 10-20x into a massive document listing every single project, accomplishment, or skill you can think of that could ever be potentially relevant in a new role.
2. Every time you apply to a new job, copy the job posting into a ChatGPT conversation, and have it edit your resume to a 1-2 page document that only includes the experience most relevant to the job posting, and to rewrite sentences to use the exact terminology from the job posting where appropriate.
3. Once you have the custom resume, use ChatGPT to generate a custom cover letter to include as well.

These 2 changes will cause your resume to get assigned a higher “relevance score” by the AI tool their HR or recruiting team uses to weed through the 400+ applications they receive, which means you’ll be at the top of the list of names that gets delivered to first human in the process (the recruiter).

You’ll actually start getting callbacks and phone screens at that point, which gives you a fighting chance. The rest is up to you.

There are paid services that’ll do this for you (like Teal), but you can do it yourself and with more control as long as you have access to ChatGPT. If you can generate a completely customized resume and cover letter in less than 2 minutes, you can pump out 10 high-quality applications in less than half an hour per day.

Edit: I see you’re getting a 40% response rate. You may be setting your sights too low if that remains consistent. If you’re applying for roles that are a solid step up form where you’re at, you would expect closer to a 10% response rate.

5 apps with 2 responses, and locally? You’re doing really well. Seriously. It sounds like you are qualified enough to get what you want, and the number of responses already is a very good sign.

Small rant:

My experience: a Ph.D., two years applying through Indeed/LinkedIn/directly, several rounds of professional development to overhaul networking approaches/resumes, maybe 150 applications, and I maybe hear back in a couple months with a form letter rejection. The few interviews I’ve had were either a company looking for a unicorn (or just lying about a position), something that lead to a task-based assessment, or a goddamn AI-analyzed one-way interview which is the biggest red flag.

Tl;dr it’s really bad out there, and you honestly have great results so far, even if it doesn’t seem like it! All the best to you, and I hope you find something you’ll enjoy.

Apply for Civil Service jobs.

You won’t get hired quickly, but the jobs come with great benefits and strong unions.