I posted jobs in the monthly thread a few times. I tried to respond to everyone who seemed real and then schedule at least a phone intro and screen. Some observations from the other side that might help applicants increase their response rate:

1. The majority of application emails I received obviously had not read the job description. They applied with a resume that didn’t have any relevant experience or, if they had experience, didn’t explain it in the resume. If you’re applying to a job, send a resume that shows why your experience is good for the job you’re applying for.

2. Check your email. I would say that most of the people I responded to either never followed up or waited weeks to respond. Of those who scheduled calls, many were no shows. This no-show rate was higher on HN than for my other job postings.

3. Make it easy for the hiring manager to believe you’re a real person and you are who you say you are. This will make some people angry, but when hiring remote you get a lot of scam applicants, overemployed people, and I even know one friend whose company accidentally hired two North Korean people pretending to live in the US. Do yourself a favor and make it easy to believe you’re real. Spend 30 minutes making a LinkedIn profile and updating it right before your job search (and then never check the site again if you prefer). Make sure your resume states the same location you tell the hiring manager. Use the same phone number everywhere. Make it easy to verify past employment even if you have to do a little extra work. There are so many scam applicants that you can easily get filtered out if something looks a little bit off.

4. Do not submit an AI resume and AI application letter! Hiring managers see these all day long and can recognize them. Do not fall prey to the social media wisdom that nobody reads your resume or that you need to use AI to write it because AI will read it. These AI written resumes are exactly what all those scam applicants use and it makes you hard to differentiate.