Over about five months I applied to roughly 50 positions, almost all through LinkedIn, with a handful via Glassdoor.
No networking events, no warm introductions, no carefully crafted cover letters. Just a well-put-together profile, a clean CV, and a lot of scrolling through job alerts on Sunday evenings. I'd always assumed that breaking into a better-paid in-house Legal Counsel role would mean knowing someone on the inside, or at least having a former colleague put in a word. The process took around 150 days from first application to accepted offer, which felt agonisingly slow at the time. There were weeks where nothing moved at all, and I wondered whether I was pitching myself at the right level or aiming at the right sectors. Out of 50 applications I got three interviews, which sounds like a low conversion rate, but each one was for a role I'd read carefully and felt I could do well. I didn't spray applications around. I made sure my experience matched the specifics in the listing before I applied. The third interview process was where everything clicked. The role was hybrid, based in the UK, and came with a salary of £60,000, a meaningful step up from where I'd been. There were also travel perks built into the position that I ↓