Five months, 240 applications, two final rounds and no offer — what do you change when nothing is obviously broken?

Two final rounds in five months is not a broken search, it is a small numbers problem plus something specific happening at the end. Ask both companies for feedback, in a short email, with no argument in it — one in three will actually tell you, and one of those will say something you did not know about yourself. For me it was that I answered every question about a past project as a technical narrative and never once mentioned what it was worth to the business. Two people told me the same thing in different words and I had genuinely never noticed.

Record yourself answering the four questions you get in every final round and watch it back. I did this and discovered that my answers averaged something like four minutes, wandered into implementation detail nobody asked for, and ended without a conclusion. That is invisible from the inside and screamingly obvious on video. I cut everything to ninety seconds with a clear ending and my final round conversion changed within two months.

Disagreeing with the it-is-you framing that these threads default to. Two finals out of 240 applications means the problem is much earlier: your list is probably 200 companies that receive thousands of applications and 40 that receive tens. I rebuilt my target list around companies with under 300 employees that were not household names, applied to 60 of them over six weeks, and got five onsites. Same resume, same interview answers. The funnel was the problem, not the candidate.

Final round losses are usually a two-horse race, so at eight years in you are losing coin flips against someone with more direct domain experience. Narrow your targets to the domain where your last three years are the obvious fit, even if it feels limiting. Being the exact answer to one company's problem beats being a good answer to twenty.

Something that helped me and sounds like nonsense: I asked three people who had interviewed me and said no whether they would refer me somewhere else. One did. Rejection is not usually personal and the person who rejected you often has a colleague with a different requisition.

Change one variable at a time and give it four weeks. Otherwise in three months you will have changed everything and learned nothing about which change worked.