So check it, dude. The jobs you're responding to were written by people with bachelor's degrees in human resources or social work, who were taking fifteen minutes of the time of the people who will actually supervise those roles. They've shot them full of "must this" and "experience that" which the HR people barely understand and they've dumped them on a dozen sites where tire-kickers from North Dakota apply so they can tell the unemployment office they've sent out resumes. The flacks who read these resumes have already let the algorithms filter out everything that doesn't match their requirements to a T (they don't understand those requirements anyway so it's safer for everyone) and of the stuff that does? They're selecting based on dumb shit like "I hate people from Georgia."

I'm a small firm. I can fob off my HR on Indeed and Square. I have another service that does my retirement and my wife runs payroll. I had a fuckton of contempt for HR before I had employees. Now? Hoo boy. Lemme tell you a story from the Golden Age of Employment, back when a top-ten in-state engineering program was $1800 a quarter and starting salary was $60k. I found a gig in the paper. I looked them up on the Internet, which was a new thing. I called up the guy who would actually be my supervisor, we had a good chat, and he said "too bad so sad now you need to talk to my headhunter." Went to the headhunter's office and they tested me on my filing, my typing and my 10-key. Ended up turning down the job because the headhunter was gonna take like 30% of my salary for 9 months. Said headhunter proceeded to offer me receptionist jobs for the next 2 years because apparently my filing, typing and 10-key scores set some kind of record.

That's back when things were functional.

You're clever, you come across well, you have a fresh'n'shiny degree from a premier program. You need to look at this a different way. Poke around on Twitter, LinkedIn, PRNewswire, wherever. Find shops that do interesting shit, in the bay or elsewhere. Figure out who at those companies is doing the interesting shit, or at least be able to target the department. Then CALL. Do not email, do not text, do not message on LinkedIn. You will be working for people in their 40s and 50s, and we, as a group, are aghast by how fucking incapable the median GenZer is at interacting with their fellow humans. Not all of them, certainly! But the resume pool you get from Indeed or whatever is filled to the gills with barely-functional favored children who prefer to have their parents drive them to their interviews at the age of 24. We've had a couple who have assumed their mothers will sit in the interviews WITH THEM.

Be up front, be direct. "I read this thing in X, it looks like you guys are doing interesting stuff. I need a job and I figured I'd ask if you might have room in your organization for me." This will go one of three ways: (1) The organization will be too hidebound and hierarchical to accommodate anything outside the rigid strictures of HR and you will have lost nothing (2) The organization will have no openings (or be too hidebound) and the guy you're talking to will go "hmm I got nuthin' but you should talk to my buddy Louie at Spacely Space Sprockets..." (3) the guy you're talking to will go "hmm let me think about that" and proceed to figure out what his organization looks like with a recent grad (aka bargain) in some new role that frees up a dozen other things.

This will also be a lengthy process with a low success rate, but it also puts down a footprint in a small industry. You will be polite, you will follow up after a couple weeks, you will keep your LinkedIn up to date, and you will be honest about where you are willing to relocate to and whether it makes sense to remote. You will have a well-polished resume that fits on a single page (current resume trends are "let it all hang out" because HR employees are the worst humans in the structure, actual supervisors don't have time for that shit) and you will give it freely.

Allow me to be perfectly clear: There is absolutely no honor or utility in adapting to a custom so deeply and thoroughly broken as the modern hiring process. You will get a job by going "nice company you have here, I think I'd like a job" until someone says "...yeah okay that works for me." I'll go one further - based on what I've seen and the trends I've observed, it will work this way for the duration of your career. Get used to it, get comfortable with it, and accept that employment is a partnership. You're giving up a big chunk of your life so you should get a big chunk of their money. They aren't doing you a favor, you aren't "lucky to have the job", you have skills, they have money, it works out in their favor, don't ever forget that.