I think my interview/offer ratio is somewhere below 1%. One factor that you probably guessed is I have very low social skills, well documented in my psychological evaluation that I did to diagnose my ADHD.
I started learning programming about as a preschool kid, in the 8 bits era, then did some Visual Basic desktop apps, C, .NET, embedded C payment devices, vehicle plate recognition systems, backend of payment systems, android programming, etc.
Changing that much was probably a bad thing, as a senior any position I attempt I’ll be competing with people that is focused on the same stack for years.
All the best positions ask for fluent english and my pronunciation is not that good, and I’m 44 years old now.
There is no chance I’ll move up to management because of said social skills.
Keep your spirits up, and be mindful that there are tons of job adverts out there that don’t actually have a real job position to fill, and are only used by recruiters and consulting companies to harvest CVs and meet their internal quotas. 1% sounds about right
Now you mention it, maybe people with a better interview/offer rate are also doing a better job on not wasting time with positions they aren’t a great fit? I get interested when they ask me about things I used only a little before, so I end doing a lof of these
I suspect that some interviews are just to say they interviewed X people before they chose someone
Yes, that’s indeed a key factor. However, I should stress that some of these adverts simply do not have a position to fill. Recruiters post these ads, they go through candidates, sometimes they even line up some interviews, but ultimately they do not have a job to fill at all. In my experience this is the norm with staffing agencies.
If you’re applying for positions posted by staffing and recruiting agencies, I believe you should set your expectations so that you expect nothing to come out and, even though you should do your best when applying, you should take a fire-and-forget approach to them.