DEV Community: Pavel Gnedkov

You never really know who you're getting when you're hiring directly from inbound applications

Pavel Gnedkov — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:54:09 +0000

That's why more recruiters are shifting their focus toward professionals who are already employed. But how can you tell whether someone is actually open to hearing about a new opportunity?

Hi! I'm Pasha Gnedkov, one of the co-founders of Hunt. It's a contact and resume search platform that aggregates millions of profiles from public sources, helping job seekers and employers to connect more effectively. While building Hunt, my team and I have spent years studying the challenges faced by both candidates and hiring teams. Along the way, we've gained valuable insights into how today's labour market really works. In this article, we'll explore why traditional hiring funnels are becoming less effective and where recruiters can find the most reliable candidates in 2026.

By the way! If you'd like to try Hunt, you can currently get 25% off your first month and receive 30 free resume unlocks. Just click here → Hunt.

Contents

Why Top Specialists Don't Always Search for Jobs Publicly
Why Poaching Talent Often Works Better Than Relying on Applications in 2026
Where to Source Candidates in 2026
Sounds Great, But Where Would I Find the Budget?
Conclusion

Why Top Specialists Don't Always Search for Jobs Publicly

Actively applying for jobs while you're still employed can be risky. In a company with a healthy culture, a manager who notices an employee exploring opportunities may see it as a chance to discuss career growth. Unfortunately, in a toxic environment, the reaction to this can be much harsher. Some companies may terminate the employee's contract before they've managed to secure a new offer. As a result, many experienced professionals avoid publicly applying for jobs. Instead, they take a quieter approach: they update their resumes and professional profiles.

For a recruiter, that may be a tell-all sign. If a specialist has taken the time to refresh their resume, update their skills, or revise their career history, there's a good chance they're seriously considering a move. And candidates who are already thinking about a change are typically much more receptive to outreach from recruiters.

Why Poaching Talent Often Works Better Than Relying on Applications in 2026

In the second quarter of 2025, Gartner surveyed 3,000 job seekers and found that 6% admitted to some form of interview fraud, including impersonating another person or having someone else participate in interviews on their behalf. Gartner also predicts that by 2028, as many as one in four candidate profiles could be fake or misleading. We've explored what the hidden cost of a bad hire is in this article.

Against such a backdrop, many employers are becoming more cautious. Rather than relying exclusively on inbound applications, they're increasingly targeting professionals who are already employed elsewhere. This acts as a guarantee that the candidate genuinely possesses the skills and experience listed on their resume and can apply those skills in a real business environment.

Where to Source Candidates in 2026

Monitoring resume updates can be a highly effective sourcing strategy, but it doesn't have to be chaotic. It's enough to focus on a few strategic "observation points”. Here's what I recommend:

Keep an Eye on Possible Talent Donor Companies
Identify organizations that employ professionals with the skills and seniority levels you're targeting. Whenever an employee there updates their resume it may be the perfect opportunity to reach out with a personalized message.

Track Layoffs and Company Changes
Leadership changes and failed funding rounds frequently create great opportunities for head-hunting. Based on our research, such candidates respond 30% more often, while hiring them ends up being 20% cheaper.

Filter Candidates by Tech Stack and Region
Suppose your team regularly hires Java developers across Europe. Why don't you keep track of specialists who've recently updated their resumes and match your preferred technology stack and location? The more recent the update, the stronger the possibility that the candidate may be willing to at least explore your offer.

Pro Tip: Pay attention not just to resume updates, but their frequency as well. The more actively someone is revising their profile, the more likely it is that they are seriously considering a career move.

Sounds Great, But Where Would I Find the Budget?

Quality sourcing tools can easily cost up to $5,000 per month. For independent recruiters and smaller hiring teams, a budget like that is simply unrealistic. That's why we created Hunt: a resume aggregator that combines many of the capabilities of premium recruiting platforms, but costs roughly 20 times less.

The platform automatically monitors your target talent pools and notifies you whenever relevant candidates pop up or update their profiles. Here are some other tools that Hunt offers:

- Real-Time Candidate Data. Hunt retrieves information from public sources immediately at the moment of search.This means recruiters see only the most up-to-date information available: candidate's contact details, technology stack and skills, the current location of the specialist, and their most recent projects.

- LinkedIn Access Directly from Search Results. While using Hunt, recruiters can open LinkedIn profiles straight from candidate records and continue their research without jumping between multiple tools or risking getting blocked. This tool works even in regions where LinkedIn access may be restricted. Must be said: Hunt works faster than accessing LinkedIn through VPN!

- Search Across 20+ Data Sources. Hunt aggregates information from a wide range of platforms, which include LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, and many other sources. You can review a candidate's professional footprint all in one place without the need to switch between a dozen of browser tabs.

- AI-Powered Outreach Assistance. Hunt analyzes a candidate's experience and helps you craft an outreach message based on their real-life projects. A personalized e-mail like this doesn't look like mere spam and significantly improves response rates and candidate engagement.

At the moment, you can get 25% off and receive 30 free resume unlocks. Simply click Hunt to gain a month's worth of access at a discounted rate.

Conclusion

In 2026, recruiters are facing a growing challenge: hiring fraud. Some candidates misrepresent their identities, while others rely on third parties to complete the interview on their behalf. If a candidate like this makes it through the hiring process, the company is at risk of wasting thousands of dollars on a bad hire. As a result, many employers are changing their approach. Instead of relying primarily on inbound applications, they're increasingly focusing on recruiting professionals who are already employed elsewhere.

The challenge is that these candidates rarely announce that they're looking for a new job.

The only available sign that someone may be open to a career move is a recently updated resume or professional profile. Fortunately, tracking such changes doesn't require a collection of expensive recruiting tools. Hunt is more than enough! This tool:

Alerts users when relevant candidates update their profiles
Collects data across 20+ sources
Provides only up-to-date information

For a limited time, you can get 25% off and receive 30 free resume unlocks. Simply click Hunt to access the platform at a discounted rate.

Why Traditional Resume Screening No Longer Works and How IT Recruiters Should Source Candidates in 2026

Pavel Gnedkov — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:42:37 +0000

These days, all resumes are written by AI, and they no longer reliably reflect candidates' actual skills and experience. How can recruiters uncover the actual level of expertise behind the polished profile and identify candidates who are capable of succeeding in the company beyond their probation period? Read on to find out!

Hi! I'm Pasha Gnedkov, one of the co-founders of Hunt. It's a contact and resume search platform that aggregates millions of profiles from public sources, helping job seekers and employers to find each other more efficiently. In the process of creating Hunt, my team and I have spent years exploring the challenges faced by both the candidates and the hiring teams. Along the way, we've gained valuable insights into today's hiring market. Let's take a closer look at why finding truly relevant candidates has become so difficult, and what recruiters can do about it.

By the way, if you'd like to try Hunt, you can currently get 20% off your first month plus 25 free resume unlocks. Just click here → Hunt.

Contents

What Changed in Recruiting in 2026
Why Finding Relevant Candidates Is Becoming So Difficult
The Biggest Challenges in Finding Relevant Candidates in 2026
The Hidden Cost of a Bad Hire
How to Sort the Wheat from the Chaff at the Resume Screening Stage
How Hunt Helped to Streamline the Hiring Process and Save a FinTech Company $250,000: A Case Study
Conclusion

What Changed in Recruiting in 2026

In the first quarter of 2026 alone, AI-driven automation has displaced up to 80,000 employees across the tech industry. As more and more processes become automated, many executives start to believe that their company's hiring needs must respectively shrink as well. In response to that, many companies are reducing recruiting teams and cutting their hiring budgets. Some organizations are planning to reduce recruitment spending by as much as 20–40%.

In reality, however, a recruiter's workload hasn't become any lighter. Companies may be hiring fewer people, but the candidate pool has exploded. Mass layoffs have flooded the job market with thousands of new applicants. A single vacancy can attract 300 — sometimes even 800! — applications within just one or two days. As a result, recruiters are expected to review significantly more resumes while having access to fewer paid sourcing and screening tools. In many cases, they simply don't have the time to dig deeper and be able to tell exceptional candidates apart from those who only appear qualified on paper.

Ironically, it turns out these are precisely the times when recruiters need extra resources to sort the wheat from the chaff!

Why Finding Relevant Candidates Is Becoming So Difficult

Several factors have made candidate evaluation significantly more challenging in 2026.

Hiring standards have become more demanding
AI can now handle many entry-level tasks quickly and at virtually no cost. As a result, employers are no longer satisfied with candidates who possess only basic skills. They need highly skilled professionals who can solve complex, high-impact problems, and such specialists remain in short supply.

Junior candidates are inflating their experience
Many people still view tech as an easy industry to break into, with attractive salaries and low barriers to entry. As a result, the market is crowded with newcomers. To improve their chances of getting hired, some candidates exaggerate their skills, embellish project experience, and present themselves as more senior than they actually are.

AI-generated resumes make assessment harder
Today, almost everyone uses AI to optimize their resume: from highly experienced professionals to entry-level applicants. Using AI isn't inherently a problem by itself. The issue is that many AI-generated resumes end up looking nearly identical. They are designed to match keywords, pass automated screening systems, and appeal to recruiters, but often fail to reflect a candidate's real-world experience or capabilities.

When every resume looks polished and perfectly tailored, it becomes much harder to identify who is genuinely qualified for the role.

Hiring fraud is becoming more common
Some candidates have become increasingly sophisticated in gaming the hiring process. They join online communities where members help each other complete technical assessments, share interview questions, memorize answers, and collectively enhance their profiles. As a result, companies sometimes hire people whose actual skill level falls far below what was presented during the recruitment process. This problem is particularly noticeable in larger organizations, where performance during the probation period may not always be evaluated rigorously. Fraudulent candidates exploit these gaps, allowing them to collect a paycheck while contributing far less than expected.

References are not reliable
Candidates naturally provide references from people who are likely to speak positively about them. For example, former colleagues with whom they had strong relationships.

A new generation has entered the workforce — Gen Z.
Unlike many Millennials or GenX professionals, Gen Z workers are often less willing to accept workplace norms simply because "that's how it's always been done." They are less likely to tolerate poor working conditions for years in exchange for a possibility of future promotion, they are less attached to the idea of lifetime employment, and more willing to change jobs if a role no longer aligns with their expectations or values. Recruiters face greater uncertainty when estimating offer acceptance rates, long-term retention, and a candidate's level of commitment to a particular opportunity.

The Hidden Cost of a Bad Hire

Let's say you hire a specialist with a monthly salary of $3,000–$4,000. Three months later it becomes clear that they are not the right fit. You have to let them go and start the hiring process all over again. How much can a mistake like this actually end up costing the company?

Recruitment costs
These include the recruiter's time, sourcing and screening tools, and the hiring manager's time spent interviewing and evaluating candidates, then onboarding the new hire. Estimated cost: $3,000–$4,000.

Salary and payroll expenses
Over three months, the company will pay approximately $9,000–$12,000 in salary, taxes, and related employment costs.

The cost of lost productivity
A successful employee should generate significantly more value than they cost. As a rule of thumb, many companies expect an employee to create at least twice the value of their salary. If the role remains unfilled for another two or three months while a replacement is found, the business continues to lose potential revenue and productivity. Using the same salary range of $3,000–$4,000 per month, multiplied by the expected value contribution and the additional hiring period, the company can easily lose another $12,000–$24,000. When you add everything together, a single bad hire can cost a company anywhere from $24,000 to $40,000.

Hiring mistakes can also have a direct impact on a recruiter's reputation within the company. You may lose the trust of your team leaders, the candidates that you suggest may get scrutinized more closely, and you might be asked to introduce additional interview rounds or approval steps. If poor hiring decisions become a pattern, a recruiter may see their bonuses reduced or promotion opportunities delayed, if not get their contract terminated.

How to Sort the Wheat from the Chaff at the Resume Screening Stage

So it turns out, if recruiters want to protect both their reputation and their results, simply filtering resumes is no longer enough. Traditional screening allows too many irrelevant candidates to make it to the interview stage, wasting recruiters' time. Today's hiring professionals need tools that help them look beyond what's written in a resume and evaluate a candidate's actual career history and credibility. Just as importantly, a tool like this needs to be accessible not only to large companies but also to smaller teams with limited hiring budgets.

Here's how that process works with Hunt.
Step 1: Initial Screening and Candidate Outreach
When a recruiter opens a resume in Hunt, the platform automatically calculates how closely the candidate matches the role based on skills and experience. At the same time, Hunt provides three key credibility indicators:
- AI Detection
It flags resumes that appear to have been generated by AI.

- Edit History
It tracks changes made to a candidate's profile over time and highlights unusual patterns (for example, a candidate presented themselves as a junior engineer six months ago but is now applying to a job as a senior specialist).

- Professional Connections
It shows who the candidate has worked with and identifies professional connections that recruiters can reach out to through LinkedIn.

If no major warning signs are detected, the recruiter can prepare an introductory outreach message using a predefined template.

Step 2: Interview Preparation
Let's assume the candidate accepts the invitation to an interview a few days later. At this stage, Hunt's advanced anti-fraud analysis comes into play. The GPT-powered Interview Questions widget automatically compares all archival versions of a candidate's resume, identifies inconsistencies, and generates targeted questions for the recruiter. For example: "In the April version of the resume, the candidate listed only basic Kubernetes knowledge. Yet in the current version, they claim experience running Kubernetes in production environments. Ask them what had changed in the course of a month and how they gained that experience."

Manually reviewing the revision history of hundreds of candidates is unrealistic. Hunt does the heavy lifting by highlighting discrepancies and providing recruiters with concrete talking points before the candidate can proceed to the technical interview stage.

Step 3: Verifying References Beyond Curated Contacts
At the same time, or after the interview, the recruiter can use Hunt's Who They Worked With feature. Candidates naturally provide references from people who are likely to speak positively about them. To help recruiters gain a more objective perspective, Hunt identifies actual colleagues from the candidate's previous projects through LinkedIn. This makes it possible to gather independent feedback and reduce risk in situations where a candidate's resume appears flawless but the hiring team still has some concerns.

Step 4: Preparing a Briefing for the Hiring Manager
If the interview goes well, the recruiter needs to hand the candidate over to the hiring manager. Rather than spending hours manually compiling notes and writing summaries, recruiters can use Hunt's automated candidate briefing tool. The platform consolidates into one document the whole communication history, interview notes, and edits to the resume. The result is a comprehensive, personalized summary for those responsible for decision-making.

Important: Hunt can locate a candidate's LinkedIn profile. The system tracks both the frequency and nature of their profile updates. If a candidate's professional history has been revised unusually often, you will be made aware of it before investing your time in interviews.

For a limited time, you can get 20% off your first month and receive 25 free resume unlocks. Simply click here -> Hunt to access the platform at a discounted rate.

How Hunt Helped to Streamline the Hiring Process and Save a FinTech Company $250,000: A Case Study
A fintech company based in Russia has shared with us its experience using Hunt to improve hiring outcomes.

The company had been trying to fill a Senior Backend Developer position for more than six months. Hiring managers were conducting up to 15 interviews per week, yet none of the candidates made it through to a successful hire.

The company decided to introduce Hunt at the resume-screening stage. As a result, every candidate went through three additional layers of verification.

1. Screening for Unusual Activity
Hunt analyzed current resumes against archival profile data and tracked how candidates' experience had changed over time. The results were revealing: approximately 30% of applicants appeared to have somehow gained an additional three to four years of experience within the previous six months!
These profiles were flagged and filtered out before reaching the interview stage.

2. AI-Use Analysis
The platform also identified profiles that appeared to be generated entirely by AI, with little or no evidence of human customization. This helped recruiters distinguish between experienced professionals who had spent time analysing the job listing and then thoughtfully tailored their experience to fit the requirements and candidates who'd simply submitted generic AI-generated templates optimized to pass through screening systems.

3. Independent Reference Search
Instead of relying solely on the references provided by candidates, recruiters used Hunt to identify former colleagues from previous projects and employers. In several cases, these conversations uncovered that some candidates were difficult to work with, while others appeared to have not been involved in the stated team projects.

The outcome
After just one month of using Hunt, the company managed to cut the number of unproductive interviews in half. The conversion rates from interview to job offer have increased. More candidates successfully passed their probation period and remained with the company long-term. Over the course of three months, the company estimates that Hunt saved more than $250,000 in hiring costs for a single role.

Conclusion

The recruiting market in 2026 is full of paradoxes: there are more applicants than ever, yet finding the right candidate has become increasingly difficult. Faced with intense competition, candidates exaggerate their work experience, optimize their resumes for automated screening systems, and, in some cases, collaborate to game the hiring process.

At the same time, increased automation has created the perception that hiring requires fewer resources. Many companies have reduced recruiting budgets and downsized talent acquisition teams. As a result, recruiters are expected to evaluate more candidates while working with fewer tools.

To remain in demand in this new reality, recruiters need affordable solutions that do more than analyze resumes. They need tools that help uncover candidates' real professional experience. Hunt can address these challenges by:

Detecting AI use in a resume
Identifying inconsistencies and potential work experience inflation
Helping recruiters gather more objective feedback from former colleagues

As a result, recruiters spend less time on unsuitable or potentially fraudulent candidates and can focus their efforts on genuinely qualified professionals, thus improving hiring efficiency and increasing the likelihood of successful hires.

Interested in trying Hunt? For a limited time, you can get 20% off your first month and receive 25 free resume unlocks. Simply click Hunt to access the platform at a discounted rate.

“I’m Sick of Endlessly Applying to Jobs!” How IT Professionals Can Find Work in 2026

Pavel Gnedkov — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:00:27 +0000

A senior backend developer with eight years of experience and a strong tech stack has been looking for work for three months. Every day, he sends out 10–15 applications. His result so far: silence and rejections.

Thousands of specialists are in the same position right now. Everyone seems stuck in “open to work” mode: from juniors to mid-levels and seniors alike. It looks like the traditional application process has just stopped working.

Hi! I’m Pavel Gnedkov, one of the founders of HUNT. It’s a platform for contact and resume search that aggregates millions of profiles from open sources and helps candidates and employers to find each other. While building HUNT, my team and I have taken a deep dive into the challenges faced by both job seekers and hiring managers and we’ve gained some insight into the current state of the market. Let’s take a closer look at how to find a job in IT in 2026!

By the way, if you’d like to try our service, you can get 40% discount for one month, just click here → Hunt.

Contents:

Why Job Applications No Longer Work
What Career Consultants Advise
Tools for Direct Outreach to Decision-Makers
LinkedIn Alternatives: Spoiler – They’re Not for Everyone
What to Do You When You a Specific Decision-Maker
Conclusion

Why Job Applications No Longer Work

Just a couple of years ago, mass-applying to jobs seemed like a viable strategy. A developer with 10+ years of experience and a strong tech stack could expect 5–10 interview invitations from 100–150 applications, but with the rise of AI, the situation has changed dramatically for two main reasons:

1. Candidates use AI to generate resumes and applications. By 2025, more than half of job seekers were already writing their resumes with the help of AI tools. Employers note that these texts often feel generic, are not tailored to specific roles, and fail to reflect a candidate’s real experience. As automated applications flood companies with hundreds of nearly identical resumes, recruiters often end up choosing candidates almost at random from the 20–30 submissions that came in first.

2. Companies automate initial screening. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) scan resumes for keywords and filter out “irrelevant” candidates before a human ever sees them. According to some estimates, up to 75% of candidates are screened out at this stage. Those who make it to the interview are often the ones who packed their resumes with the right keywords – even if, instead of real work experience, the document contains a recipe for making pelmeni.

In March 2026, a Belarusian developer published a resume that, instead of providing detailed work experience, meticulously described how to cook pelmeni. He artfully “seasoned” the text with relevant keywords, and the algorithm rated this “resume” as nearly perfect for a frontend developer role. In one week, the CV appeared in recruiters’ search results 825 times, and even earned the author an invitation to a job interview. The recruiter managed to spot the blunder only during the interview itself.

Hiring has turned into a war of the machines: automated applications bombard ATS filters, meanwhile the software automatically rejects them. In this reality, the strategy of “apply 20 more applications” delivers nothing but diminishing returns. To break out of this cycle, you need to reach a real human. But how do you do that?

What Career Consultants Advise

Career experts and mentors increasingly advise against waiting for a job opening to show up publicly. Many roles are filled long before they ever reach job boards: through internal referrals, direct outreach, and personal networks. That’s why a more effective strategy today isn’t applying to postings, but reaching out directly.

Instead of responding to job listings, candidates are advised to proactively contact decision-makers directly to find relevant opportunities.

How it works in practice:

Why it works:

- Bypassing filters:
At the first screening stage, resumes are often rejected for mere formalities: missing keywords, mismatched years of experience, or a tech stack described using “wrong” wording. Many candidates end up tailoring their resume for systems instead of presenting their real strengths.

- Demonstrating your value:
Hiring managers think differently from automated filters. They care less about ticking off boxes and more about who can solve specific problems. A direct message shifts the conversation from “Do I pass the filters?” to “Here’s how I can help with your project.”

Before you can message a decision-maker, though, you have to find them. That’s where things get interesting!

Tools for Direct Outreach to Decision-Makers

The first thing that comes to mind is using good old LinkedIn. A paid subscription gives you advanced search, visibility into who viewed your profile, and most importantly, InMail — messages you can send to people outside your network.

Additional credits can only be purchased in bundles of 10. A credit used to cost $3, but the price increased sevenfold to $21 in 2021.

That said, InMail has two major drawbacks for job seekers:

- Low response rates:
According to various benchmarks, fewer than 10% of InMail messages receive a reply.

- Limited project-level search:
LinkedIn is great for finding people by title or company, but much less useful if you want to identify projects based on a specific tech stack, technology, or problem space. Filtering by people gives you “Senior Engineer” and “Software Developer,” but that doesn’t tell you what a team is actually working on right now.

At the same time, the platform actively limits automation: sending too many connection requests in the first 24 hours can be treated as spam, and the recommended limit for new accounts is no more than 10–15 connection requests per day.

LinkedIn Alternatives: Spoiler – They’re Not for Everyone

When users hit LinkedIn’s limits, they start looking for alternatives. There are plenty of tools on the market. Here are a few:

- Apollo.io.
A database of 265M+ contacts, with search by tech stack, team size, and funding rounds, plus automated email sequences. Free plan: 5 mobile credits and 10 exports per month. Paid plans start at $49/month billed annually.

Downside for job seekers: The tool is built for large-scale sales campaigns. Finding one specific tech lead often means manually filtering a database designed for lead funnels with hundreds of prospects.

- Lusha.
A browser extension that pulls email addresses and phone numbers directly from LinkedIn profiles. Free plan: 40 credits per month. Paid plans start at $22.45/month billed annually.

Downside: Lusha doesn’t help you find people, it only helps with the profiles you’ve already found. You still have to identify the right person yourself first.

- RocketReach.
Search by name, company, and title across 700M+ profiles. Free plan: 5 searches per month. Paid plans start at $39/month billed annually.

Downside: Works well when you already know a person’s name. If you’re searching for “backend team tech lead at Company N,” results can be weak, and data accuracy drops noticeably outside North America.

- Hunter.io.
Finds email addresses by company domain, with a database of 400M+ addresses. Free plan: 25 requests per month. Paid plans start at $34/month billed annually.

Downside: Once again, Hunter finds email addresses, not people. Without a specific name, it’s more or less useless.

There's a shared problem with all four tools: they assume you already know who you’re looking for, or that you’re operating at scale with large contact lists. For a job seeker trying to identify a specific decision-maker from scratch — without a name, only a company and a role — that’s an extra step none of these tools are capable of taking.

What to Do You When You a Specific Decision-Maker

There are tools built specifically for finding contacts and running highly targeted personalized outreach. Most of them, however, are designed for large-scale campaigns: build a huge database and send as many emails as possible. For someone looking for one or two relevant projects, that often means paying for features they don’t need.

For focused outreach, you can use HUNT. The service pulls data from multiple public sources, structures it into a usable format, and surfaces contacts for the people you’re trying to reach. The result: less time and money spent, and more direct outreach to teams where you can genuinely add value.

Why it works:

Aggregates data from 20+ sources in real time.
Analyzes work history, projects, and professional networks — from ResearchGate to GitHub and beyond.
Helps identify decision-makers online through public profiles and links their available contact details in one search result.
Includes a browser extension: you can open a profile in LinkedIn, click a button, and get an email address or Telegram contact. Works in Google Chrome, Yandex Browser, and Opera.
Scout™ is a dedicated mode for tracking newly surfaced specialists based on criteria like company, stack, or role, so you don’t have to search manually every time.

Important: Hunt does not sell or store other people’s personal data. It aggregates information from public sources, organizes it into a convenient format, and helps you find relevant contacts — it is not a closed commercial data broker.

Currently, new users can receive a 40% discount on the service. Simply click here → Hunt to get one month of access at a reduced price.

Kirill, Lead DevOps
I thought that, with my experience, I’d find a job quickly, and was very surprised that I couldn’t find one for six months. Hunt helped me reach the CTO directly. It turned out the company was just planning to open the position but hadn’t published it yet. I went through the interviews without unnecessary AI filters.

Olivia, Head of Sales
For me, a job search is like a sales funnel. Sitting and waiting for someone to respond to your application is ineffective. I started out by making a list of 15 companies where I’d be interested in working. Then, using Hunt, I found direct contacts of decision-makers, and out of 15 messages, I received 8 responses. One of them turned out to be my current job.

Sandar, Senior Product Manager
I was looking for a very specific project where my experience with payment gateways would be useful. Simply applying to product roles didn’t make sense to me. Through Hunt, I found the right manager, got direct contacts of decision-makers, and out of 15 messages, I received 8 responses. One of them turned out to be my current job.

Conclusion

Over the past few years, the job search has turned into war of machines: AI generates hundreds of near-identical resumes and floods employers with them, while ATS systems scan for keywords and filter out up to 75% of applicants. In this new reality, random — and even systematic — applications just stopped working.

If you want results, you need to reach a real human being. Better yet, a decision-maker rather than a recruiter.

What you can do instead:

Build a list of target companies and projects instead of waiting for the “perfect” vacancy to appear on a job board.
In each company, identify the decision-maker: a tech lead, Chief Technology Officer, product owner, or department head.
Use tools for targeted contact discovery.
Send personalized messages about their challenges and your relevant experience beyond generic “please consider my resume” outreach.

If you want to test this approach in practice, start small: pick 3–5 companies, find decision-makers there through Hunt, and send one thoughtful message to each instead of dozens of applications disappearing into the void. For the time being, you can get access to our service with a 40% discount. Simply click here → Hunt to enjoy one month of access at a reduced price.