I have a job I'm happy with.Woods Ag said:
Figure out and reach out to the hiring manager directly. LinkedIn and Email. It's easy enough to figure out email formats and email someone directly. Be persistent and follow up every 3-5 days… at least 3x and then give it 2 weeks and follow up again. I may even call them, but you need to be prepared. If you're not used to cold calling then that may be rough
If you're apply thru a job forum you're asking to be thrown out. Consider yourself lucky if guy get hired through that route.
But cold-calling does not work. And I did try it. Unless you have either an industry connection or exceptional experience to back your resume up, your email gets ignored or they just tell you to apply through their company portal. It's not a tenable approach for entry-level job seekers.
"Hiring managers" rarely exist anymore. The hiring pool trimming is done entirely through committee in HR before anyone that has any idea what the words on your resume mean even looks at it. I'd get callbacks from HR for applications where I made it clear I'm disabled, but not the ones where I didn't. There's a reason for that.
The only reason I got the job I have now is because after graduating from A&M and seeing the horrible options that were offered to me, I found a specific job in the org and tailored my masters coursework to it. I found out later that HR would toss out any application that didn't have specific keywords in their course list, regardless of what the actual courses you took covered. As a result, the hiring pool for my job is artificially smaller than it actually is. And it's an industry wide issue.