Sent out applications for months with no luck, finally changed one thing and it worked

This matches my own path almost exactly. I spent two years doing hardware bring-up work with almost nothing on paper to show for it, and my resume was basicly a list of employers and dates. When I finally sat down and rewrote it, I added one line per project describing what the thing actually did, like a motor controller I had written in Verilog on a Xilinx board, and the callbacks started coming in within a couple weeks.

One thing that helped me beyond the resume itself: I put a few of my hobby designs on GitHub with the testbench and a short readme explaining what each module did. Two of my interviewers brought those projects up directly, and one said seeing actual source code beat reading another bullet point claiming I knew RTL.

Also, small and finished beats big and half-done. My first posted project was a basic SPI interface, nothing fancy, but it worked, was documented, and I could answer questions about every line of it. That matters more in an interview than some ambitious thing you abandoned halfway through.

Keep a running note of anything you get working, even little utilities or fixes, because those details are easy to forget six months later when you are polishing the resume again.

I ended up taking a diffrent path than the resume rewrite and it paid off more than I expected. After about eight months of silence following graduation, I mostly stopped cold-applying and started showing up where hardware people actually gather. There's a monthly meetup about an hour from me, and I also started poking around open-source FPGA projects on GitHub that had issues tagged for beginners. I picked up a small bug in an open-source storage controller, fixed it, and the maintainer mentioned my name in the release notes. One of the regulars at the meetup turned out to be a hiring manager at a test equipment company, and he didn't even ask for my resume til the third time we'd talked. That referral got me the interview, and honestly the project mattered more in the room than on paper. They had me walk through how I found the bug and why I wrote a testbench before touching the code, and that conversation went better than any bullet point coud have.

My take is that a resume full of projects is table stakes now, but a person who can vouch for you skips the pile entirely. Fifteen applications in a batch feels like a lot to the original poster, but I would trade all fifteen for one person at a meetup saying 'yeah, I've seen his code.'

I wonder if the focus should be less on the final design and more on the process of verification. I think a lot of people just show the block diagram but they rarely show the simulation setup itself. Showing how you test your logic is actually super important to managers. It proves you know how to use the tools and that you can fix bugs, not just that you can write code. It's not enough to just build something that runs; you gotta show you know how to verify it. That's what relly gets people excited in an interview.