Don't pay much attention to what Sokoloff said. In theory, he's kinda right, but that's not how it works in the real world. And I don't know if you and him/her live in the same area/country.
I've had a rough time looking for jobs, due to 2 main reasons: not getting it right when adapting the resume to a job posting. Many ATS just discard resumes that doesn't have the exact words that they use on the job posting. Even if you are saying the same thing with different words...
The other was the phone interviews, made by a HR person looking for who knows what. For most applies that I did, I didn't get a phone interview. After phone interviews, didn't hear back.
I only got 2 technical interviews for like, 100 applications. One was for the job I'm currently in, the other I declined because I got the job offer to my current job. Both I got through recommendations, even if the people recommending me didn't know me. But they looked at my resume and put it stray to the HR manager for them to talk to me.
I also had a friend (not in IT) that was not getting anything. I told he to look for recommendations. She went to LinkedIn, found someone that worked or used to work at a company she wanted to go, and talked to the person, got recommended, and got the job.
