Especially valuable is networking that demonstrates your skill since it makes you more of a known quantity and less of a risk. The hiring process is mostly about risk management, and due to expense of ramping up new employees and social pressures (and often the sunk cost fallacy) against firing those that don’t turn out as valuable as expected, companies are very risk-averse in the hiring stage. They strongly prefer precision in identifying valuable candidates over recall or accuracy, and will happily filter out many strong candidates as long as it means they never (or rarely) make a bad hire.

But all that aside, I think the bulk of your job-application effort should be spent on developing new skills and capabilities, especially really general ones that will serve you for your entire career, rather than tweaking the marketing materials you use to sell yourself (i.e. resume, etc). For software engineers, this means learning architecture design, writing, project management, etc. rather than learning just the hot new programming language or framework. Having a broad range of generalizable skills will make everything about this process so much easier, and ensure that you never end up being the bad hire that employers worry about.