It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing approach though. No one is going to blame you for buying day to day shoes.

Tried both, tried a normal resume and a resume with an ATS-focused layout, tried AI-based tools meant to help you improve your resume, and a few other things, and after more than forty applications in six months, what finally got me an interview and then very quickly an offer was an internal referral from a friend/ex-coworker. For context, I am a software engineer.

Fun fact: the average response time after submitting an application was 48 days.