When I started teaching people how to get jobs without groveling, lots of them got nervous. “Won’t something terrible happen to me,” they asked, “if I don’t follow the rules? The job ad specifically said No Contact with the Hiring Manager allowed. You really want me to ignore that, and contact my hiring manager anyway?”
Look here, I said, in every company you’ve ever worked for, there were VPs and people walking around with the letter “C” in their title, right? Of course there were. Those people are executives. Do you know how those executives got their jobs? They sure as heck didn’t throw their resumes into Black Hole recruiting portals and wait weeks for a terse auto-response reply.