Putting this together to share how I approached applications, resumes, and interviews.

This is not me trying to sound like an expert or teach one perfect method. This is just the strategy I personally followed, and it worked well for me.

The way I think about job search preparation is that there are two parts.

The first part is the pre-interview phase: selecting roles, applying early, tailoring the resume, and doing things that increase the chance of getting an interview.

The second part is the post-interview phase: preparing properly once interviews start coming in.

Part One: Pre-Interview

The first thing I used to focus on was selecting the right roles. My main principle was simple: Put effort only into high-probability roles.

Before applying to any role, I would ask myself whether this role actually had a strong chance of turning into an interview or a job opportunity for me.

I did not want to apply everywhere just for the sake of applying. I wanted every application to have a reason. So I would look at things like how closely the role matched my experience, how aligned it was with what I wanted, whether I could actually imagine a recruiter shortlisting me, whether the company made sense, and whether the role fit any constraints I had, like visa sponsorship.

The idea was not just, “Do I like this role?” The idea was, “Is this one of the best roles for me to spend serious effort on?”

-          Applying Early

One rule I followed very seriously was applying early.

I would usually focus on roles posted in the last 24 hours. Sometimes 48 hours is still okay, but I personally tried to stay within 24 hours as much as possible. This helped me a lot.

If your profile is aligned with the role and you apply very early, you can sometimes get a call directly without even having a referral. This has happened with me multiple times. The reason is that recruiters often start looking at applicants in the first 24 to 48 hours. They receive a lot of applications, and they may start shortlisting candidates very early. Once a few candidates are already in the pipeline, it becomes harder to stand out unless there is some referral or special situation.

Many of my interviews came from roles where I applied very early. Sometimes the role opened in the morning, I applied in the afternoon, and I got an interview call the same day or soon after. Of course, this will not happen in every case. Some roles have internal candidates or different processes. But overall, applying early made a big difference for me.

-          Applying to Fewer Roles

After filtering for roles posted recently, my second rule was to apply to only around 3 to 5 roles a day. I genuinely believe that anything more than that starts reducing the quality of your applications.

If you are applying to 10 roles in a day, I do not think you can properly evaluate every role, tailor the resume, think about the fit, and do the whole process with enough effort. What I used to do was look at all the roles posted in the last 24 hours and then carefully pick the best few.

I would evaluate each role and prioritize the ones where I felt the chance was highest. I tried to think from the recruiter’s point of view.

If they looked at my resume, would they feel I am aligned with the role?

I also looked at the company, the scale, whether I was applying only to startups or balancing different types of companies, and whether the role fit my requirements.

For example, if someone needs visa sponsorship, then they should ideally check that before applying. There are tools and research methods to understand whether a company sponsors or not. Otherwise, you may apply to 10 roles and later realize that 5 of them were never realistic for you in the first place.

So after this filtering, I would ideally have 3 roles that were strongly aligned, recently posted, and high probability for me. Then I would put all my effort into those roles.

Resume Strategy

Once I selected the roles, the next big part was the resume.

Resume tips that got me interviews at Meta, Perplexity, DoorDash, Match Group, and Dell.

After my last post about being open to helping, a lot of people reached out.

And one common question most of them had was around resumes.

So I thought I will compile my resume learnings here. This is more like what I found out after networking with recruiters, paying a few resume writers, and research + feedback from here and there. One common mistake I see is that people finish college, but their resume still looks like a college resume.

Education at the top, then a professional experience section that takes up maybe 30-40% of the page, and then everything else, projects, certifications, skills, tools, filling up the rest.

That structure makes sense when you're applying to college or when you're a fresh grad. But if you have work experience, that resume is working against you.

The goal is not to prove that you did the best project.

Because when a recruiter looks at your resume, they are mainly trying to understand:

Has this person done work that matches this role?

And they mostly look for that answer in your professional experience.

Let’s say a role needs SQL.

And your professional experience has no bullet point showing SQL.

But at the bottom, in your skills section, you write “SQL”.

Recruiters will not usually think, “Okay, this person wrote SQL in the skills section, so let’s consider this.”

2. Every bullet should be built for the role (actual concept of tailoring)

If you have 12–15 bullets across your experience section, every or most bullets should somehow connect to what that role is asking for.

And this also means you cannot get too attached to a bullet just because it sounds impressive.

For example. Say you presented to the C-suite at a big company. That is a great achievement.

But if the role does not care about presentation-heavy work, and it cares more about technical analysis, then that bullet may not deserve space on that version of your resume.

A resume is not a list of your best achievements.

It is the most relevant version of your experience for that job.

3. Resume Design

One small thing on the design side, and this is more useful if you have a good eye for design.

You can't really change much on a resume if you want it to pass ATS. No colors, no heavy formatting. But within those limits, you can still make it look noticeably cleaner than most. Spacing, font sizes, how much breathing room is between sections, all of that is up to you. Two people writing the exact same content, one of them will just make it look much better.

A resume should look pleasing to the eye.

There are many things you can try for example. some people may have a summary, some may not. Instead of a boring summary, someone might use a strong one-liner and that might work better if it catches attention and starts a conversation.

The point is not to over-design it. The point is to make your resume stand out in the crowd.

-          After you apply, the creative part

So at this point you have picked 3 roles carefully, applied early, tailored your resume properly. That whole process takes real time and effort. Which is exactly why applying to 10 roles doesn't work, you can't do this properly for 10 things.

The focus is not on reducing effort, automating resume tailoring or saving time. The focus is on giving the best effort to the few roles that actually matter.

Now after this much if I still have some time left in the day, I'd think about what else I could do to increase my chances for these specific 3 roles.

I'm going to leave this part open-ended on purpose, because there's no one right answer here. Whatever everyone is doing right now is probably already oversaturated. Cold emailing used to work. Now everyone does it, so it doesn't stand out the same way.

What I'd suggest is actually thinking about it for yourself. Maybe you're reaching out to someone on LinkedIn with a message that's genuinely thoughtful and specific to that role. Maybe for one of those three roles you actually prepare something, a small practical sample, a short piece of work that shows you've thought about what they're doing. Something that when someone sees it, they're genuinely impressed you took the time.

What matters more than any specific tactic here is that you're spending that remaining time thinking, what can I do that actually makes me different from every other applicant for these three roles?

Part two - Post interview

Interview prep

Most people don't prepare for interviews because they think they're already good at them. I was that person for a long time.

I'd been through hackathons, presentations, group discussions, I knew I could hold my own in a conversation. So I never really sat down to prepare for interviews specifically. I figured I'd just answer the questions well.

That changed when I went through the Meta RPM interview process. That whole thing lasted 2.5 months, and during that time I was preparing 8 to 10 hours every single day. I wrote out answers to every behavioral question I could find. I refined them daily, not just wrote them once but kept coming back, rewriting, finding a better way to say the same thing. I recorded myself. I listened back. I did mock sessions with someone multiple times a week.

And the gap between the answers I was giving before all of that versus after, it was massive. Like my old answers had no chance against what I was saying after weeks of refinement.

The "tell me about yourself" question

You know it's coming. It's in every single interview. So why not have an answer that's genuinely great?

Most people answer it on the fly. But if you spend 3-4 weeks actually working on that one answer... refining it, saying it out loud, recording it, doing it in a mock session, the answer you end up with is completely different from what you'd say without any of that.

Articulation is a skill. The same story can land completely differently depending on how you tell it. You can always make it hit harder.

Behavioral questions in general

There are maybe 5 to 9 behavioral questions that come up in almost every interview, just phrased differently each time. Things like "what's a piece of critical feedback you've received" or "tell me about a time you had to work through a conflict." If you know your story for each of these, you can actually adapt them across different questions as they come up.

What made the difference for me was the consistency of the practice. Not preparing once and feeling ready. But coming back to the same answers every day, finding a better word here, a cleaner transition there, making it sound more like yourself.

If you're already expecting interviews, or even if you're not yet, start now. Spend a specific chunk of time each week on just this. Work on your "tell me about yourself" until you listen back to it and feel like yeah, that's actually good. That's the bar.