Why do recruiters ignore self-taught SQL projects

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why do my SQL projects keep getting ignored when i apply for data jobs i keep getting passed over for people with less hands-on work than me and it makes no sense

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Answer 1 · 2026-06-10T09:47:31+00:00

A lot of recruiters aren’t reading projects the way you think they are. They’re skimming for titles, tools, and job-shaped signals, not whether you built a clever SQL analysis on your own time. That part stings, since the work can be real and better than some “experience” people list.

For data jobs, your projects need to look like employer problems: clear business question, clean repo, short write-up, maybe a dashboard or metric tied to something messy in actual data. Self-taught stuff gets treated like homework unless it looks adjacent to production work - annoying, but that’s the game.