Hi everyone,

I'm at the stage I'm starting to look for other job opportunities, but naturally (like us all!) am finding that a lot of the jobs are very competitive so I'm rarely getting much progress for the jobs that I really want.

My background is Paralegal and Sales work and this question came to mind when I recently applied for a Paralegal role at DuckDuckGo: by the job description I felt like I had the relevant experiences and a unique cover letter, but given the role was probably quite attractive (fully remote, flexible working, relatively high salary for the position) I knew it'd be quite competitive and I was rejected pre-interview. I've had similar experiences of applying for what are likely highly competitive roles.

Perhaps it's a bit harder in my areas of expertise since I haven't really gained hard "technical" skills in the same way that a software developer would have, so a lot of the roles I'm looking at could probably be done by most people after some training.

I'm just curious, from any domain, if there are tips/tricks you've used when applying to a job role that you know is oversubscribed to give yourself a fighting chance.

For example, two things I've thought of came to mind:

1) Trying to contact an employee via LinkedIn to ask questions about the company (in theory, maybe this means your putting face to an application) - however, when I've tried this, most times I get no reply and wonder if it's counterproductive (i.e. maybe recruiters/employees just get annoyed that you're bothering them)

2) Creating some unique form of material of how I'd do the job (i.e. for the Paralegal job, creating a mini-booklet on how I would handle certain tasks at the company). I thought maybe this is a way of showing that you're willing to go "above and beyond" what a normal candidate would do: even if the work you produce won't be of any real value (naturally, the actual job in practice will be different to anything you can read online) - this is the type of thing I've thought of doing since I can't imagine anyone else would do this but there's no guarantee this would even be seen in my application (if I link it on my CV) so I wonder if it's even worth the time, particularly since it would be for every job that I really want.

TLDR: Just curious if anyone has found any ways of strengthening their application above the CV and Cover Letter for highly coveted/oversubscribed job roles that have been effective in helping you "stand out from the crowd" when applying?

Thanks for any suggestions and insights!