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What to Do When You're Job Searching During a Tech Hiring Freeze

Published ยท Finch Team

Updated

The entry-level tech job market has tightened since the hiring surge of the early 2020s, and many large companies have cut back on new grad hiring.

That is frustrating, but it doesn't mean there are no jobs. It means relying on a few large companies and waiting for offers is a fragile strategy.

Here's what actually moves the needle.

Understand What "Hiring Freeze" Actually Means

When a company announces a hiring freeze, it means they've paused creating new open headcount. It doesn't mean every role at the company is frozen. Usually:

  • Backfills for critical departures still happen: if a team lead leaves and the team can't function, that role gets filled
  • Certain high-priority projects still get budget approval for headcount
  • Internship programs often continue even when full-time hiring pauses, because intern costs are categorized differently

A hiring freeze at a company that interests you is not the same as that company being completely closed to you. Check their job page. Look for recently-posted roles. A posting from two weeks ago means someone has active budget.

Also: a hiring freeze can change as budgets and business needs change. Some lift quickly; others last much longer. Staying in touch with recruiters at frozen companies (even just a brief note) can pay off when things change.

Where to Look Beyond the Obvious Companies

Large companies can freeze one organization while continuing to hire in another. Smaller companies, public-sector teams, and less visible industries may also have active roles that draw fewer applications.

Series A and B startups. Mid-stage startups with recent funding rounds are hiring. They need to deploy that capital into headcount. The roles are real, the growth can be fast, and the competition from other applicants is lower than at Google or Meta. Check Wellfound (formerly AngelList) and the YC job board.

Defense and government contractors. Cleared roles aside, many government-adjacent tech companies (think Palantir, Anduril, Shield AI, and their smaller equivalents) have been actively hiring when consumer tech has been frozen. The mission may or may not appeal to you, but the market is genuinely open.

Non-tech companies with tech teams. Banks, insurance companies, healthcare systems, logistics companies, and retailers all have large engineering organizations and many hire aggressively even when Silicon Valley is in a freeze. These roles often have less competition from other CS grads who are tunnel-visioned on pure tech companies.

Companies below the radar at your school. Your campus recruiting pipeline is biased toward companies that sponsor career fairs and information sessions. A lot of hiring happens outside that pipeline. Companies that hire CS grads but don't have a brand-name campus presence are worth seeking out directly. Finch's list of companies hiring students is one place to find them.

How to Find Open Roles When Job Boards Feel Empty

Job boards can lag a company's actual hiring status. A posting may remain visible after priorities change, while a newly approved role may take time to appear. This means:

  • A posting that's 3 weeks old may already have filled
  • Companies actively hiring may not have posted yet
  • The best signal of whether a company is actually hiring is a recent posting or a direct conversation

Better signals than job boards:

LinkedIn "People also viewed" + recent job posters. When you find one engineer who recently joined a company that fits your target, you can often find the recruiter who posted their role and check what else that recruiter is currently posting.

GitHub job postings. Some technical companies post jobs in their GitHub org or repo discussions before they hit LinkedIn. For smaller dev tool or infrastructure companies, this is worth checking.

Direct outreach to engineers at companies you want to work at. We covered this in detail in our referral guide, but the short version: one informational conversation with an engineer you've found on LinkedIn can tell you whether the company is actively hiring before you spend time applying. This saves you from sending applications into frozen pipelines.

What to Build to Stay Competitive During a Long Search

A hiring freeze can last months, so you may face a long stretch between active hiring waves.

Use that time to build credentials that make your next applications stronger, not to do more applications into frozen pipelines.

One fully-deployed project. Not a notebook. Not a half-built GitHub repo. A project that's running somewhere and that you can demo. The bar for "deployed" can be low (a free-tier hosting service, a GitHub Pages frontend, a simple API endpoint with a working demo), but a finished project generally gives you stronger evidence than several projects that never shipped.

AI and ML integration experience. Experience building a useful product with AI as one component can strengthen your portfolio. A RAG system, a small agent, or a thoughtful LLM integration gives you concrete engineering decisions to discuss. Coursework in ML is useful; a deployed project adds evidence that you can ship.

Open source contributions. This won't move the needle as fast as your own projects, but fixing real bugs in actively-used open source projects gives you something specific to point to and the network effects can be meaningful. See our open source contributions guide for how to approach this strategically.

The Emotional Reality of a Frozen Market

A slow job market does something specific to your sense of self-worth as a candidate that's worth naming: it makes you feel like the rejections are about you when they're mostly about the market.

Companies that are frozen don't reject you because you're not qualified. They reject you because they have no approved headcount. Those are completely different situations that feel identical when you're reading the email.

The way to protect yourself from this is to maintain a data-based view of your process. Track every application, every response, every stage you reach. If you're getting no recruiter screens at companies that are publicly frozen, that's not a signal about you. It's a signal about those companies. If you're getting recruiter screens and failing there, that's something to address.

Our job application tracker guide has a simple template for logging this without it taking more than 2 minutes per application.

What to Do If You've Been Searching for Several Months With No Offers

This is a harder question and it deserves a direct answer.

If you've been actively applying for 3+ months with no offers, the right moves are:

Audit your resume and your targeting. Are you applying to roles where you meet the stated requirements? Is your resume passing keyword filters? Get a real review from someone who's worked in tech recruiting, not just a friend who's also looking. Our ATS resume tips guide covers what to check.

Change the company profile you're targeting. If every application is going to large tech companies that are frozen, you're fighting for a very small number of available roles with a very large applicant pool. Shift focus to smaller companies with active hiring.

Consider a contract role. Contract-to-hire or straight contract roles exist even when full-time hiring is frozen. A 6-month contract doing real engineering work at a real company builds your resume, expands your network, and gives you a reference, all of which make your next full-time application stronger.

Give it a full cycle. The fall application season runs through November. The spring wave starts in January. If you graduated in May and you're applying in September, you're one month into one cycle. Keep going.

Hiring Freeze Job Search Checklist

Finding open roles:

  • Look at Series A/B startups on Wellfound and the YC job board
  • Check non-tech companies with large engineering orgs: banks, healthcare, logistics
  • Search LinkedIn for engineers who recently joined companies you're interested in, then find what the recruiter who placed them is currently posting
  • Ask directly in informational conversations whether the company is actively hiring before applying

Staying competitive:

  • One fully-deployed project with a working demo
  • At least one project demonstrating AI/ML integration if possible
  • Open source contribution with a merged PR you can point to

Managing the process:

  • Track applications, stages, and response rates in a spreadsheet
  • Separate "frozen company rejections" from "screened and rejected" in your data
  • If 3+ months with no progress: audit resume, change company targeting, consider contract roles

Staying sane:

  • Set a weekly application target and hit it: 10-20 applications per week is achievable
  • Build something during the search so you're not just waiting
  • The market is the market: your rejection rate from frozen companies is not your rejection rate

A tight market requires more volume, better targeting, and more patience than a normal one. Use Finch to keep finding roles without hours of searching: it picks 3 for your major every week, and its board shows who is still posting. The market will open again, and when it does, the candidates who kept their pipeline moving will be the ones with options.