200 applications, zero replies. The problem is rarely you.

When nothing comes back, the instinct is to send more. It almost never works, because volume was never the constraint.

A vacancy exists because something is broken: a team is behind, someone left, a market needs opening. The requirements list is just a rough attempt to describe who could fix that. Read it a second time and ask what breaks if the role stays empty for six months, then build your application around being the answer, not around ticking bullet points.

Your first reader has about 30 seconds and often isn't an expert in your field. They're matching your CV against a vacancy, not evaluating your career, so anything that requires guessing what you mean is a risk you can't afford. Lead with what you changed, not what you were responsible for.

Here's the part most people miss entirely: the channel matters more than another rewrite. A cold application through a job portal is competing with hundreds of near-identical submissions. The same application sent through a referral, or through a recruiter who works your niche, is a completely different conversation, and it's not a coincidence that referrals consistently outperform job board applications. Specialist recruiters for internationals, like Undutchables, exist for exactly this reason.

And if a company runs your CV through software before a human ever sees it, you're not imagining that either. Applicant tracking systems are standard practice, which is one more reason a generic CV sent to 200 postings underperforms 20 CVs built for 20 specific roles.

Silence isn't a verdict on you. It's usually a matching failure, and matching failures are fixable.