I graduated in 2001, the dot com bust, took a year and a half to get a job, and that was partially based on a previous degree in biology. This advice is based on my experience from 20 years ago, so I hope it is still relevant.
I was sending out a lot of CVs treating it more or less as a full time job. In the UK at the time the job center would pay for postage for applications, though these days paper applications are a lot less common.
Places that accepted CVs got a lot lower responses than big corporations with their long winded online forms that took a couple of hours or more to fill out, with the usual crappy questions of "give an example e of when you displayed leadership qualities" and the likes. Keep a note of your responses, as after a few, it becomes a lot less effort, as you have probably answered a similar question in a previous one, and can just copy paste with a little adjustment.
Get some interview practice and get good at that. Looking back I was pretty down after a while saying things like "I'll take anything at this point" when I asked why I wanted the job. True, but not what potential employers want to hear. Think of it from the employers point of view and what they want to hear. Again, practice helps and you get better with time.
I got a couple of temporary jobs one for pretty minimal wage but that made a huge difference actually having some real world experience on my CV in terms of getting invited for interviews.
Have some code that you can show people. Build some example projects. I would advise spending some time building a more comprehensive project one time to show that rather than doing a crappy throwaway project from scratch for each interview - something I still seem expected to do after 20 years of experience. The hiring process in this industry sucks and is very exploitative in this way, happy to waste candidates time like this.
I was sending out a lot of CVs treating it more or less as a full time job. In the UK at the time the job center would pay for postage for applications, though these days paper applications are a lot less common.
Places that accepted CVs got a lot lower responses than big corporations with their long winded online forms that took a couple of hours or more to fill out, with the usual crappy questions of "give an example e of when you displayed leadership qualities" and the likes. Keep a note of your responses, as after a few, it becomes a lot less effort, as you have probably answered a similar question in a previous one, and can just copy paste with a little adjustment.
Get some interview practice and get good at that. Looking back I was pretty down after a while saying things like "I'll take anything at this point" when I asked why I wanted the job. True, but not what potential employers want to hear. Think of it from the employers point of view and what they want to hear. Again, practice helps and you get better with time.
I got a couple of temporary jobs one for pretty minimal wage but that made a huge difference actually having some real world experience on my CV in terms of getting invited for interviews.
Have some code that you can show people. Build some example projects. I would advise spending some time building a more comprehensive project one time to show that rather than doing a crappy throwaway project from scratch for each interview - something I still seem expected to do after 20 years of experience. The hiring process in this industry sucks and is very exploitative in this way, happy to waste candidates time like this.