Month 2: Double Down on What’s Pulling

Month one was about reading the funnel honestly. Month two is about concentrating. By now, the data is clear: one or two channels are doing most of the work, and the rest are noise. The move is not to try harder across all of them — it’s to drop the ones that aren’t converting and pour the saved hours into the ones that are.

Identify the channel doing the work

Look at every recruiter screen you’ve had in the last 30 days. For each one, write down how it started:

• Referral from an ex-colleague?
• Recruiter cold-outreach on LinkedIn?
• Your direct application?
• A conversation at a meetup or in a Slack community?
• A post you wrote that the right person saw?

One or two of these will dominate. For most senior SWEs, it’s referrals and recruiter inbound — with direct applications a distant third. For juniors, it’s often recruiter inbound via a polished LinkedIn. For domain specialists, it can be community presence (writing, conference talks, open source). Your mix will be yours.

Shift the time allocation

Whatever was pulling last month, do more of it this month — at the cost of the stuff that wasn’t. Concretely:

• If referrals are converting: ask for 3 more intros per week from different 2nd-degree contacts. Message former colleagues you liked but haven’t spoken to in a year. Re-engage dormant LinkedIn connections.
• If recruiter inbound is working: tune your LinkedIn to pull more of it. Clear headline, location visible, “open to work” signal on, recent activity (one post a week is enough).
• If direct applications are the only thing working: you’re probably targeting the right tier and your resume is actually fine — just keep the volume steady and invest the extra hours in prep.

The “nothing is pulling” case

If month one produced no screens and month two is looking the same, the problem isn’t tactics — it’s positioning. Run through this triage before you send another application:

1. Tech stack alignment. Are you applying for Go/Rust/ML roles with a resume that’s 90% legacy Java? Rebalance.
2. Seniority alignment. Senior engineers applying to staff roles often get passed over; juniors applying to senior roles always do. Check level fit by reading 5 real job ads carefully.
3. Industry shift. Ex-crypto, ex-adtech, ex-gaming engineers sometimes find the pitch easier in an adjacent industry (fintech, martech, devtools) than head-on. One sentence of reframing can change the read.

Run one experiment for two weeks — new resume framing, new target segment, new industry angle — and measure against the same four funnel numbers. You’ll know by the next check-in whether the new pitch works.

Don’t abandon what’s working to chase what isn’t

The most common month-two mistake is panicking and rewriting everything because “nothing is working” when actually referrals are converting fine and cold apps are the ones not moving. Kill the cold apps. Keep the referral engine running. Add one more channel on the side as experimentation, not replacement.

The healthy picture at the end of month two: the top 1–2 channels are 2–3x more active than a month ago, and there’s at least one onsite in flight. If that’s not where you are, month three is about structured diagnosis of what’s actually broken.