I have an excel sheet entitled "application record" which currently has on it 103 entries, colour coded and kept as up to date with detailed information as I can achieve between working and various other commitments.
With a few notable exceptions they are all red with PFO next to them. One is beige (my employers who did not respond to my CV but realised after two months of me being there they genuinely did have it on file, I've seen it); and three are green as I have reason/hope to suspect that patience might pay off in the long run.
There are a further few on there which I have not yet tried for various reasons, and the bottom line is a well known mobile phone company where I used to work... I haven't gone there, yet, and hope not to.
I qualified last year from OAA integrated and genuinely want to try to do things the "traditional" way. If anyone wonders or cares, I haven't applied to RYR or EZY. I often question myself and don't plan to do it here.
What might be of interest is that I am responsible for CV filtering at my company. I'm not employed as flight crew, but do occasionaly get to keep my hand in, and know more than anyone else who is likely to come across a CV we receive. The company is a small operator, in the UK, with fairly unqiue requirements.
I see literally, hand on heart truth, five or six CVs a day, and four or five will be from low hours, newly qualified pilots. Without exception they are boring, dull and absolutely useless as a form of selling the person. I reply to everyone of them with a standard reply edited to contain the appropriate information. Usually once a week someone will have the gumption to call us about their CV, they get an extra pat on the back and shortlisted for non-flying ops jobs...there are about fifty people on that list and we expect to have three or four jobs. In seven months I have sent three CVs to our CP and all of them were experienced.
Now these figures are skewed slightly because of our requirements (we could almost certainly never take a low hours pilot on) and I dont have a magic solution to the problem and I am very much stuck in it with everyone else...but...what I would say is that if you are using CVs as your only form of job hunting it seems to me that you will need the patience of a saint, luck of the Irish, and a
miracle.