Messaged a hiring manager directly on LinkedIn instead of the portal and got a reply in ninety minutes

The posting already had 300-plus applicants by the time I found it. Found the hiring manager's name buried in a footer of the job post, sent one specific question about how their team splits ownership between two services I'd noticed in their engineering blog — no resume attached, no "please refer me." She replied same afternoon, said it was a good question and asked if I'd applied yet. Screening call was booked two days later. Doesn't feel like it'll scale to every application, but for the one role I actually wanted it worked better than the portal ever would have.