Stopped applying entirely for four weeks and it was the most useful thing I did in the whole search

I was around 140 applications in, mostly silence, and I'd started firing them off without properly reading the posting. The quality was gone. I just wanted the number to go up because the number was the only thing I could control.

So I stopped. Four weeks, zero applications. Rebuilt two projects properly, wrote about them, redid the resume with actual numbers in it.

Came back applying at about five a week instead of thirty. Three callbacks in the first fortnight. Small sample and I know it could be luck, but the volume approach was genuinely making me worse at this.