Job hunting in 2026 as a medior software developer

Insights from my jobhunt campaign from September 2026 as a medior backend software developer based in Estonia looking for remote/hybrid salaried/b2b contract opportunities.

tldr

• Submit your application as fast as possible: 1 to 3 hours after it's posted is good, 24 hours later is likely late.
• Monitor job/HR portals which get JDs before LinkedIn does.
• Increase the likelyhood of your application being viewed by following-up on the 3rd business day to companies who haven't responded.
• LinkedIn's 'EasyApply' feature proved to be a complete waste of time.
• Engage in multi-touch outreach to multiply your conversion rate.

Hot take/observation:
ATS systems are non-deterministic!
Applying again after being rejected has lead me to my greatest positive result.
Consider rejection messages as hot leads, especially because getting any answer is uncommon (10 to 20%).

Your mileage may vary:

• Tailoring your ATS-optimized resume to JD may have an impact.
• The absence or presence of cover letters has had no impact on my results.

LinkedIn's EasyApply feature

Actionable takeaway:

• Do not bother using EasyApply, look to apply directly with the employer.

Your mileage may vary:

• EasyApply may be useful in a 'multi-touch' strategy.

Context:
Most JD I found were on LinkedIn.
Around 70% of the JD I found were using LinkedIn's 'EasyApply' feature.
I ran around a total of 170 applications, of which around 120 used EasyApply.
Of those, I got zero replies: none positive, none negative.
This contrasts starkly with the results I got from the remaining ~50 applications which used a typical hiring portal: I got 20, that's a huge and significant signal.
EasyApply must not be considered as a job application.
If you tell me you applied to a job, but all you did was press the 'EasyApply' button, my data shows it's as if you didn't apply at all.
Don't fool yourself.

Flooded job descriptions and supply saturation in specific geographic areas

Actionable takeaway:

• During my job hunt, I decided to filter out these countries:
  • Bulgaria - bad wages
  • England - high competition, often geoblocked, requires clearance paperwork, noticable absence of remote/hybrid work
  • Finland - high competition
  • Hungary - bad wages
  • Italy - high competition, bad wages
  • Poland - bad wages
  • Portugal - high competition, bad wages
  • Romania - bad wages
  • Spain - high competition, bad wages

Your mileage may vary:

• I don't apply to JDs with around 80 applicants or higher.

Context:
Here is the distribution of countries I applied to.

On a map, that looks like this:

As you might have noted, lots of effort went into countries I have now decided are not worth it, such as the UK.
By the way, I also applied 8 times to USA companies.

With that in mind, if I ever need to job hunt again I'd focus my efforts more like this, including perhaps North America?

Increasing your speed to lead application

Actionable takeaway:

• Reply to a JD within 24 hours, ideally between 1 and 3 hours after it's posted.
• LinkedIn JDs appear on their platform typically a few days after it's posted on the original platform, so find those and monitor them closely.

Context:
It is my experience, in this job hunt and in life that the quicker you are to seize an opportunity the more likely you'll get it. Think of the housing market, if you're looking for a place to rent in a saturated market, there is NO chance you'll get what you want if you show your interest 3 days after the listing is posted and the first potential tenant visits have happened.

Did you know some countries reply more often?

Actionable takeaway:

• Optimizing your initial reply rate is better than applying to more jobs.
• Unless you can't find other JD to apply to, don't spend effort on flooded markets/countries, they reply 2 to 5 times less often.
• Improve your ROI by focusing on countries who reply more often.
• A rejection message is a hot lead, you must press on and follow-up/apply again.

Context:
My base reply rate (positive and negative) is between 9 to 13%.
The pie chart below makes clear 87.9% of applications got no reply.
Of course, I bet this can be improved if I stopped using LinkedIn's EasyApply feature right away.
I actually got 4 positive replies, but I generated these graphs two days before the end of my 'campaign' and I can't be assed to regenerate the SVG.
This puts the positive reply rate to 2.5%, roughly, and thats not counting another 2 positive replies I got - but they were poorly qualified (my bad) so I'm not counting them.

Where I found things got interesting is that some countries' culture really don't bother letting you know you've been rejected!
The minimum sample size for a country to appear colored is 3 applications, so take that as you will.
I see an inverted corrolation between market saturation and reply rate for these countries.

On the other end, we see countries which seem to be more courteous, noticably Germany and Hungary (applause).

A third of your applications might not even be seen.

Actionable takeaway:

• 27% to 47% of my total applications were not viewed at all, there is an opportunity here to increase conversion rates!
• Increase your application visibility by sending a follow-up to each company who hasn't replied to you by the 3rd business day after applying.
• Don't use LinkedIn's EasyApply: it's a waste of time.

Context:
The following chart illustrates of the companies who reply how long it takes them to reply.
I see that after the 5th day, 80% of companies have processed my application.

However, this is not the full story. Actually this peek around the 3rd to 5th day is cause by end-of-week applications.
The HR managers go on weekends, then handle the application on the next open business day.

In truth, the distribution of replies look like this, with MOST companies actually answering in no more than 2 business days:

• Business day 0-1: 27%
• Business day 2: 67%
• Business day 3: 73%
• Business day 4: 80%

So, how do I know if my applications got seen or not?
I followed this procedure:

1. LinkedIn's job-tracker shows a 'viewed' status on non-archived job listings. So I counted those.
2. Match your LinkedIn applications with the rejection e-mails. And I counted those too.
3. Finally, for the portion of applications which had no replies at all and no 'viewed' signal, I just ran a guestimate and assumed 30% to 60% of those applications got opened.

Some useful filters to set up

Actionable takeaway:

• Do not pigeonhole yourself into only applying to Junior or Medior positions.
• Filter out hard-language requirements: requirements above B1 seem non-negociable (in my experience).
• LinkedIn's workplace filter is untrustworthy, so don't apply any filter on that! Accept all (remote/onsite/hybrid) and run your own filtering using AI or something.

Your mileage may vary:

• Don't apply to JDs with 80 applicants or more.
• Don't apply to JDs older than 24 to 48 hours.

Context:
First of all, LinkedIn is replacing all their deterministic search queries with "AI-enhanced" results.
I haven't found it helpful, and believe it's just a ploy to keep users longer on their platform and despair at how difficult LinkedIn is making it to find jobs.
So, search filters on LinkedIn are being removed, and becoming useless for people who want to search with precision.

That aside, automating the selection of jobs (that's also what LinkedIn is fighting against) is doable.
You'll quickly have ideas for filters, but the following stood out to me during my exploratory and iteration phase.
How you filter them out will be up to you, again, LinkedIn (or most platforms) don't expose or have these capacities.
I use LLMs for most of these, even for workplace type detection, because the JD is the source of truth, not LinkedIn's metadata.

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