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You have rewritten your CV again. You have tailored the cover letter, checked it twice, and pressed submit with a small flicker of hope. Then comes the wait.
A few days pass. Then a week. Occasionally a polite rejection arrives, but far more often there is nothing at all: no reply, no feedback, no sign that anyone read what you sent.
If that is where you are right now, I want you to know how common it is, and how much it can hurt. When you care about learning, and want your work to help people learn better, being ignored by the sector you want to join can feel personal. It chips away at your confidence. You start to wonder whether you are too senior, not senior enough, too far from edtech, or simply not good enough.
In my work as a recruiter I meet capable people in exactly this place. They have sent dozens of applications and quietly concluded that the market is closed. So they start trying every direction at once: a different job title, a different part of the sector, another course, another CV template. They are not following a plan. They are looking for any sign of which way to go, and it feels as though the market has given them none.
Here is the part that is easy to miss when you are tired and discouraged: no replies is not the absence of feedback. It is feedback.
If you have sent a meaningful number of well-targeted applications and heard nothing, the market is telling you something. It is not telling you that you lack talent, or that edtech has no room for you. It is telling you that, as things stand, something between your application and the person reading it is not working.
That something can usually be changed. It might be how your CV presents your experience, how you describe where you want to go, which roles you are choosing, or how you reach the people who hire. The silence does not say which one. But it does say that sending more of the same, faster, is unlikely to produce a different result.
I would rather you hear that from me now than after another three months of sending applications into the dark.
Silence has become common, and the main drivers are volume and sameness, not a closed market.
Start with volume. In a study of 25 US recruiters by the CV-builder Enhancv, recruiters reported that postings can attract hundreds to thousands of applicants within days, and that many stop reviewing once they have enough suitable candidates. It is a small sample, but the point stands: an application that arrives late, or looks like every other one, may never be read closely.
Then sameness. A Robert Half survey of 500 UK hiring managers and 1,000 professionals, run in June 2026, found that 67% of hiring managers say AI-generated applications have increased the time it takes to hire. They described generic CVs and near-identical cover letters that make candidates hard to tell apart. Only 10% of the professionals surveyed said they use no AI at all when applying.
Two common beliefs deserve a second look.
None of this means the market is closed. One job board, EdTechJobs.io, counted 4,119 open roles across 367 organisations at the end of July 2026, and sales, customer success and marketing roles made up about 1,100 of them. That is one board's listings, not the whole sector, but it shows real demand for commercial and education skills.
One honest caveat. A single silence can have many causes: a role is paused, filled internally or withdrawn. In an April 2026 survey of 1,008 US workers by LiveCareer, 45% said an employer had stopped communicating with them during hiring. But one silence means little. A run of silence across many well-matched applications is a pattern, and a pattern is information.
Most people who tell me they are applying and hearing nothing have strong experience. The gap is usually in how that experience reaches the reader. Five places are worth checking, roughly in this order.
When nothing comes back, the natural response is to change something big. A new job title. A different part of the sector. A course, a certificate, a fresh template, another job board.
I understand the instinct. Doing something feels better than waiting, and feeling lost at this point is not a weakness. It is what happens when a search gives you no usable feedback.
But there is a cost. Every time you change everything at once, you lose the signal. You cannot tell whether the CV was the problem, the role you chose or the way you described yourself, because everything about your search is different. It also resets your story: each new direction needs a new CV, a new pitch and new contacts, so you never gather enough evidence on any one approach to learn from it.
A better approach is to treat your search as a small experiment. Pick one type of role. Use one clear version of your CV and LinkedIn profile. Send a set of applications, around ten as a rule of thumb, and watch what comes back. If replies stay at zero, change one thing and test again. If replies start to arrive, you have learned what works, and you can do more of it.
That is slower than a complete reinvention, but it produces something a reinvention never does: information you can use.
Where your search stops tells you where to look. This table is a starting point, not a diagnosis.
What you see
What it usually points to
Look at first
No replies to applications
Your CV, your positioning or the roles you are targeting
The top third of your CV, and whether you are applying for one clear type of role
Interviews, but no offers
How you communicate your experience, or role-specific and commercial questions
How you explain your experience and answer questions about the job itself
Unsure which roles even fit
Targeting and route in
Conversations with people doing the roles you are curious about
Then try this routine:
I am a recruiter, and I also work as a career strategist. That combination matters, because I spend my days on both sides of the hiring conversation.
I have worked across education and edtech for more than 15 years as a founder, recruiter and commercial leader. I built and scaled an education business over seven years before exiting it, and since then I have worked with edtech companies hiring across sales, customer success, product, partnerships and go-to-market roles. That gives me a clear view of what gets attention, what gets ignored and why strong candidates are often overlooked.
My career advisory work is for experienced professionals in education and edtech: people moving from teaching, education leadership or higher education into edtech, people already in edtech looking for their next role, people returning after a career break or redundancy, and anyone applying regularly without getting enough interviews. It is practical and market-informed, covering career strategy, CV, LinkedIn, job search and interviews.
There are three ways to work together:
One candidate who came to me had sent around 80 applications over five months and secured four interviews, but no offer. After a session, they understood what was wrong with their search and how to change it.
The aim is not more applications. It is a clear story, focused actions and someone in your corner.
If you recognised yourself in this post, you are not behind and you are not alone. The silence is not a verdict on your worth. It is a signal that something in your approach can be adjusted, and that is good news, because an approach can be changed.
If you would like help working out what to change, you can learn more about the Career Strategy Session or read about career advisory at RecruitHer. If you are moving from teaching into edtech, my post on one teacher's job search shows how focus, outreach and persistence worked in practice.
Emilia Kruszewska is the Founder and CEO of RecruitHer, an edtech recruitment agency that also offers career advisory to education and edtech professionals.
