I kept a spreadsheet since mid-2023 and logged every single application that got a no or just got ghosted. The counter hit 500 yesterday, and the offer I finally signed came from a company I almost didn't apply to because the posting looked boring. Did anyone else's breakthrough come way later than the numbers said it should?
500 is wild but the part that stands out to me is the boring posting thing. In my experience the jobs that sound exciting on paper turn out to be a mess, and the ones that read like a phone book end up being solid. I bet there's something to that, like the boring postings don't get 800 applicants so your odds go up just from that alone. Add in a real person reading resumes instead of some keyword filter and it starts to make sense why the "should have worked" ones never did. Your mileage may vary but I stopped chasing the flashy listings after a while and it helped.