I got hired on as a 1099 to help implement some "Facebook clone but for your company's internal intranet" because they specifically needed a US citizen to do it for "compliance reasons" (energy company)

After coming to terms with their... questionable software stack (Apache on Ubuntu in which they rented AWS bare metal to then run ESXi???) they asked me if I knew anything about Azure, so they could broaden their cloud support

I had their entire stack transliterated and ready to run within hours the same day (their app really could just be on a VPS somewhere)

Despite this, I was told I'd have to apply for their Sysadmin job the same as anyone else. Okay. Fine

It later came back that I was pruned from even being shortlisted because "you don't have any Azure experience"

I ported your entire stack to it in mere hours but I guess not!

no one could give you an internal reference, or you couldn't shout out to a manager "hey I applied holler at HR"?

The ATS doesn't give a shit but asking the right person means you bypass it completely. Did you piss someone off or something? Fail to ask?

username to post correlation

I know right? One recruiter told me that they wouldn't interview me because I didn't have experience with Shopify. What kind of bullshit is that? What worked for me is putting as many keywords as possible and using ChatGPT to write what you did at your previous job. It's best when sprinkled with some hallucinations.