Rufeda Ali

Rufeda AliSep 30, 2026

Job hunting in 2026 is a full-time job that pays nothing. Someone shared this on X this week, and it stopped me because it named something almost every job seeker I know is feeling right now. The exhaustion is not personal. The market has actually changed under people's feet over the last few years, and most of the advice being handed to job seekers today was written for a market that no longer exists. Here is what actually shifted, and why it matters more than most people realize. A few years ago, the average job posting drew about 115 applications. Today it draws 244, which means you are competing with more than twice as many people for the same role, and the ratio moved so gradually that most job seekers never registered it. On top of that, 87% of employers now use AI at some stage of hiring, so your first review is almost always a machine reading against a checklist rather than a person reading with judgment. And the interview-to-application ratio, which used to be 1 in 7, has dropped to roughly 1 in 33, meaning 30 applications producing nothing is not a sign that anything is wrong with you; it is the current baseline. Layoffs have compounded all of this. More than 950,000 tech workers have been cut since 2020, and the people who used to be considered safe hires are now competing for the same roles as everyone else. The uncomfortable truth is that the old playbook is not just outdated, but is actively working against you. Volume applications used to get results because postings were less flooded, referrals used to guarantee a real look, a good resume used to be enough to stand out, and none of that is true anymore. Every hour you spend running the old playbook is an hour you are not spending on what actually works now, which is building a specific presence in a specific space long before you need something from it. The job market is very different, and the people who understand the difference are the ones moving through it. Follow Rufeda; I share what I've learned about the U.S. job market and building a career as an international student.

Rufeda AliSep 28, 2026

This person was rejected by Google in 48 hours, but the exact same resume was selected by another company. So what was actually wrong with the resume? Getting rejected by a system in 48 hours feels different from getting rejected by a person, and it hurts in a different way. You’re left wondering if anyone ever saw your application, and whether the problem is your resume, your background, or something invisible the system flagged before you had a chance to make your case. Most of the time, none of those are the actual problem. The reason your applications are getting auto-rejected is almost never the content of your resume. It is the two or three questions you answered on the form itself before you uploaded it. Every ATS runs on knockout questions: work authorization, years of experience, location, willingness to relocate depending on the role. If your answer to any of these does not match what the role was configured to require, the system rejects your application before your resume is ever parsed. This is not a keyword problem, but a filter the recruiter set up to auto-decline anyone who does not meet the hard requirements. That is why the same resume gets a callback at one company and a rejection at another. It is also why rewriting your resume multiple times, which is what most people do when this happens, changes nothing. The rejection happened at the form, not the file. Once you understand that, the fix looks different from what most job-search advice tells you to do. Stop rewriting your resume every time you get rejected, and start reading the posting for its hard requirements. If a Google PM role wants 5+ years at a consumer tech company and most of your experience is enterprise SaaS, the form will filter you out no matter how well you write about it. Apply to fewer roles you are actually a match for, not more roles you are hoping to stretch into. And get referrals where you can, because on most modern ATS platforms, a referral routes your application into a separate queue that a recruiter is significantly more likely to open. Follow Rufeda; I share what I've learned about the U.S. job market and building a career as an international student.

Rufeda AliSep 30, 2026

If you had asked me a year ago, “What do you want to be known for?” I wouldn’t have had an answer. For a long time, I thought a strong career was one that was easy to explain. Mine hasn’t been. I started in healthcare, moved into product management, then customer success, and more recently found myself increasingly drawn to marketing, storytelling, and community. For years, I treated each transition as something I needed to justify. I wondered whether changing directions meant I was losing focus or moving further away from the kind of career I was supposed to be building. With some distance, I see those choices differently. Each one brought me closer to understanding the work I’m naturally curious about. Healthcare taught me to care deeply about the problems people experience. Product taught me to translate those problems into solutions and think critically about what should be built and why. Customer success brought me closer to the people using those solutions and showed me how differently value can be perceived, communicated, and realized. Marketing and community have added another dimension: how we position an idea, tell its story, create trust around it, and help the right people discover its value. That progression has shaped how I think about my career today. I’m less concerned with finding one title that neatly summarizes everything I’ve done. I’m more interested in continuing to work at the intersection of technology, people, products, storytelling, and community. That could lead me deeper into product marketing. It could mean building communities around technology. Someday, it could even mean building something of my own. I don’t need to have the next ten years mapped out to know what I’m moving toward. And that brings me to a question I’ve been reflecting on as part of LinkedIn's Next Gen Voices: What do I want to be known for? Perhaps it’s not one role or area of expertise. I want to be known for building a career with enough curiosity to evolve, but enough intention that every chapter contributes to the next. I used to think my pivots made my story harder to explain. Now, they’re helping me understand what the story has been about all along.