I think marketing of any kind, including job seeking, is a lot more than most people expect, like 25x more work most of the time. In any normal workplace people hate looking at resumes and interviewing and really feel desperate for it to stop so, if you can stand out, people do respond.

I don't think my experience is transferable, but to me a good job search looks like this:

I spent about 2 years trying to sell people on a vision I had that could have changed enterprise software. And it didn't work out. My wife was angry at me, and then on Jan 1 I rolled my car which left me unhurt but carless.

My wife was really skeptical but my plan was to use my product ideas and the demo parts I had laying around to build an AI that would help me with my job applications. This was when if you told people you were working on AI they thought you were a crackpot or a throwback to the 1970s. My first application was to an AI startup and talked about the AI I made to process job applications and... I got the job.

To be fair I've had other job searches that have gone on for about a year and required a lot of the plain ordinary job-application grind or intensive political work behind the scenes to get the right subunits of a large institution to find the funding to hire me.

I am seeing a real intensification of "FOMO-ism" lately around AI, like a lot of people seem to think that if they don't get ChatGPT to write a seemingly insightful blog post AI in the next 30 seconds they can enjoy being poor for the rest of their lives.

I can't tell you how to be unique, but I can tell you that when so many people are barking up the same tree the rewards of doing anything else are greater than ever.