Two recruiters found me on LinkedIn today, unprompted — a sign the profile work is starting to pay off, even if the roles weren't the right fit yet.
Day 11 was a fairly usual day in terms of preparation, but something interesting started happening from the changes I made yesterday.
I spent some time optimizing my LinkedIn and other recruitment profiles — adding the right keywords and making sure my experience and the technologies I've worked with were represented properly. Today, I started seeing some traction. Two recruiters reached out to me on LinkedIn.
The roles weren't aligned with my experience, but honestly, that's still a positive sign.
I wasn't applying to those roles. The recruiters were finding me.
That means the profile optimization is starting to work. Now the challenge is getting the right recruiters to find me.
And that's where I think the real difficulty of job hunting lies. Getting a recruiter interested is one thing; getting the hiring manager interested is another. A recruiter might like your profile and forward your resume, but the hiring manager ultimately decides whether your experience matches what they're looking for.
Right now, I'm seeing roughly 40% traction across this process. The goal is to keep improving that number by making my resume and profiles strong enough to work for both sides.
There's also the reality of recruiters going silent. Out of the recruiters I've interacted with, only some actually come back with an update. Others simply disappear, even when the role seems relevant. It's frustrating when you're waiting for a response, but I'm slowly learning not to depend on any single opportunity.
Keep the pipeline moving.
On the interview side, things are beginning to take shape. I currently have three assessments, two of which are relevant, and two potential interviews being discussed for next week.
My preparation, however, is slightly behind the target I set last week.
I had planned to complete around 50 LeetCode questions and several design questions. I've completed roughly 20–25 coding questions so far, mostly easy and medium problems around arrays, strings, and linked lists.
That's something I need to change.
For the next week, I want to move towards advanced data structures and, more importantly, go deeper into system design. Instead of simply learning more designs, I want to take the designs I already know and understand them deeply enough to handle variations of the same problem.
The interviews are already showing me where my gaps are.
Now the preparation needs to respond to those gaps.
Day 11 wasn't about a major breakthrough. It was about seeing the first signs that the changes I'm making are actually creating movement.
The profile is getting noticed. Now I need to make sure the right people notice it — and that I'm ready when they do.
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