Ask HN: How Did You Find a Job Abroad?
As an American looking to move overseas, I'm a bit overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite possibilities and the lack of curation of resources.
Looking for insights from people who have already been through this. Especially if you didn't already have a professional network at your intended destination, how did you start?
Did you find and contact specific companies? Apply to openings on job boards? Find recruiters? Something else?
If you went the recruiter route, how did you locate them and select the ones worth working with?
81 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] threadI just took a leap of faith. I had a (small) amount of savings, that could keep me a float for 3-4 months.
I interviewed a couple of companies (both start ups and big corps) over the phone while still in Australia, and ended up getting an offer at the first company I interviewed at in person. I liked them so I cancelled the rest.
Best decision I've made, I love London and don't plan on leaving. But I was in a very privileged position to be able to take that huge a risk, and already had an easy Visa + friends to fall back on if I couldn't find a job.
Can you (or anyone) clarify that detail or speak to this issue? Because my suspicion is that an American would likely need a job offer in order to apply for the right kind of visa. In the US, if you show up on a tourist visa and then want to get a job or marry an American, that is apparently not kosher, from what I gather.
The reason we travel far easier, is that Australia is an incredibly young country (1901), so most people are < 2 generations away from European ancestors. This makes visa's quite easy.
We also have a pretty great deal with the US, with the E3 visa, which is basically a private pool of visas only available to Australians.
Re: US citizens travelling to the UK, I don't think there are very good systems in place for that. I think you would be better off with the wider EU (Swizterland, Germany, France, Netherlands, Denmark are pretty decent from a tech perspective)
1.) Youth mobility visa - when people talk about how easy it is for commonwealth citizens to get UK work visas, this is normally the program they're talking about. If you're between 18-31, are a citizen of the Commonwealth and have the resources to support yourself while you're looking for work, you can live in the U.K. for two years without needing a work permit. This program cannot be renewed and a recipient can only come to the UK on a youth mobility visa once. This visa also has no resident/citizenship path. I was too old when I started looking into immigration so didn't look into this one any further.
2.) Ancestry visa - If you're a Commonwealth citizen and have a grandparent (you have other options if your parent(s) were born in the U.K.) who was born in the U.K., you can get a five year Visa that lets you work (but oddly, not study) in the U.K. After five years, you can start the residency -> citizenship path.
3.) A regular points based visa - This is open to everyone.
(Source - I'm a Canadian who strongly considered moving to the UK)
Some time ago I have started poking around for a job abroad. Don't know when or how but I have found AngelList. I wasn't actively looking and I didn't want to be overwhelmed by a million job sites so I thought I'd just try out my luck on this one as it was trending at that moment as a startup job site.
Filled out my profile, started sending my resume to companies from cities I was interested to move to. Few months after I got a response from a guy from a small company in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It didn't sound too serious but we kept in touch through the year and then he asked me to come over. Booked me tickets introduced me to the company and to the city a little bit.
And that's how it went. I got a few weeks to decide whether and when I want to come. I left my job in my home country Lithuania and I'm happily living in Amsterdam for over a year now.
I'm not sure how actively you're looking for a job but AngelList would be the No. 1 place to start. I have heard other success stories related to that place as well.
Rather than finding a specific location to move to, why don't find a project that aligns with you, and then move wherever they are? (after investigating the location of course)
Edit: worth to add that this was in Barcelona, which seems to have a higher percentage of people speaking/understanding Spanish. First town I moved to was Girona but no one spoke English so had to move to Barcelona.
# Competing in hackathons overseas (I got many job offers this way)
# Getting inside interesting IT, or VC facebook group, many times they offer jobs this way. (I got my current job this way)
How did you fing these groups?
- In your home country, find a large company with offices abroad where you want to gom work for them a few years, and monitor internal job offers and apply to get transfered abroad.
PRO: good package if succesful.
CON: long and low probability of success.
- move to the foreign location first, and start your job hunt there, with linkedin, local recruiters and meetup.
PRO: more chance to be successful.
CON: your jobhpackage might not be as good as with the first method.
- teach english abroad.
PRO: the easiest way.
CON: salary wont be as good (but can still be decent compared to local wages), might be harder if you are not a citizen of an english speaking country (especially to get a visa), and no career prospects..
- find a remote job, setup a company locally, and hire yourself to get the visa. Technically, you will be a consultant to the foreign company.
PRO: financially can be really good, in particular if you earn western salary and live in a cheaper country. Also you will be very independent.
CON: a lot of setup is required, and it js harder to find a remote job. a variation of this method is to create your own online business. Probably the best setup if you manage to do it.
A few other thoughts:
- expat contracts are less and less offered
- knowing a relevant foreign language is not that helpful. If the company needs someone who can speak the local language, they will prefer to simply hire a local
- what is really helpful is to have a unique technical expertise that is hard to find in the country (someone said developer?)
Another option would be working remotely for US company and travelling - see digital nomads. Then once you are fine to settle down you can seek local job. Recruiters will chase you down anyway once you switch your LinkedIn location.
Actually you can even now show your interest to relocate with LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/career-interests/
Note that in many jurisdictions this is in violation of immigration laws (and possibly tax laws). Check the law in the location you plan to move to.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16492994 (March)
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16282819 (February)
I applied and got the job very quickly, after a couple of interviews and an online test for competence. It was a contract and I ended up staying for six months.
Of course, you could also just apply. What's your skillset? Also, where do you want to go? Overseas is a big place!
Not jay-sun, the name.
Interesting thing about my situation - I don't have any degree.
Before even looking for a job, I had to do research about work permit rules in different countries in respect to bachelor degree.
The problem is that I couldn't ask for any help on the Internet for two reasons. First, there were very few "smart dropouts" looking for a job abroad. Second, very strong perception in society that university degree is solid, reliable and universal proof of qualification (and that's wrong, having a degree from noname university often tells absolutely nothing about qualification). Usually, I got useless answers like this: sorry, but Europe is out of the question, nobody needs uneducated people.
Obvious choices like US couldn't work for me since they have stupid H1B visa system. According to stupid logic of H1B, even if you get decent job offer from Google, you are not eligible for H1B visa without degree or 12 years of documentary proven relevant experience.
For months, I thought it's not possible to go anywhere in the first world without a degree.
In 2014, I dismissed popular beliefs that it's almost impossible to relocate without a degree. At that time, I decided to directly contact several immigration authorities about work visa requirements - Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Sweden.
In Hong Kong, they said it's theoretically possible. At that point, I realized that I still have a chance.
In the Netherlands, Immigration and Naturalisation Service confirmed that degree is not a requirement for highly-skilled work permit. And this was starting point to actually look for a job in the Netherlands.
I looked for a job mainly here:
https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?sort=i&q=c%2B%2B&l=Netherland...
Additionally, I found my ex-colleagues in LinkedIn who work in Europe. I significantly improved my LinkedIn profile by explaining what I actually did at my previous jobs. Also, I added lots of recruiters to my LinkedIn network. Gradually, my profile became relevant and I started appearing in searches more often.
There were some very useful recruiters (mainly from London), who gave me valuable advices about my CV. If you have a lot of recruiters in your network, then you have a good chance to have a few of them, who understand your non-standard situation (i.e. not having any degree) and who are willing to spend their time giving you advices and recommend you to employers.
What I found is that mediocre companies tended to care much more about degree, than top companies. For example, Google, Facebook and Amazon really don't care about your degree unless it's Standford, MIT or something like this.
It was a long story how I failed lots of interviews because of cultural fit, ability to explain well what you thinking during coding round etc. I won't cover it here.
Eventually, I moved to Sweden first, worked for two companies there, then I moved to the Netherlands (thanks for 30% tax rulling for expats, I love it!).
Here is my LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eldar-gaynetdinov-a0564b61/
May be I should help those university dropouts who want to relocate to different country.
Not having a degree in tech remains an extremely expensive (yet surprisingly reliable) counter signal for exceptional technical ability.
The question of why a company should hire someone without a degree overlooks the more accurate one which is, would this person actually still be in tech if they did have a degree?
There are laws and regulations in place to filter those people out, but like anything, there are exceptions to the rules. If you know any of them, they would be really, really useful.
Posted in the monthly freelancer thread on HN and was emailed by a guy with some work that was also remote and switched to working for them.
I'd say the easiest way to get a remote job first, then you can move wherever you want, timezone permitting.
There's no single answer to this question, it depends almost entirely on A. What citizenship(s) you hold and B. What immigration arrangements your intended country of work has with any of the States you hold citizenship in. Like many of these things, there is a bit of a birth country lottery involved here as to how difficult this may or may not be for you, or even whether it's legally possible in the first place.
In other words pick somewhere and google or seek legal advice for your own situation. The answer is often entirely different depending on which country you intend to work in.
That is an option. Companies I have been working for have hired people that contacted directly. If you want to come to Stockholm, these are some companies I know people in:
- https://king.com/sv/jobs?locations=stockholm&roles=all - https://www.netent.com/en/section/work/ - https://www.spotifyjobs.com/
If you know the company you want to work for, just apply for that. But before that, make sure that you like the culture, weather, city, etc. where you are moving in. If you know which city or country, but not wich company, other methods are probably better that investigating company by company.
A good option is to work for an international company with cross-country secondment offers. I did this. I worked for a company in my country of origin, and then applied for a position in another company. It was quite easy.
Email me at matt@loomx.io put [HN] in the title
PS: I'm from Sri Lanka
Interviews were all conducted via skype. Had 1 HR screening, 2 tech rounds with now teammates, 2 director rounds (not really tech more like cultural fit)
After having worked for the team 2 years I will say my return on time invested was at least 100x, YMMV though.
I really thing
My first overseas job: I had spend a few months there and enjoyed the place. When I realised they had a blooming startup scene, I built a small project to map the startups and send it to a few people. That caught the attention of the CEO of one of the startups who then proceeded to send me an email asking if we could arrange a Skype call
Second overseas job: Had been freelancing for a while. The CEO found me on angel list and asked if we could arrange a call to discuss some contract work (having some blog posts and a website played a big role in having them choose me). I got their app off the ground, helped them with a few other things and the CEO eventually asked if I would be interested in working full-time for them.
(EDIT) I guess the lesson learned here is: have an online presence no matter how small.
In one country, I went there as a student and through an internship got a job in my industry (media).
In another country, I went there to study language and ended up finding local companies (mostly media) who wanted to hire me and were able to set up temporary work visas. It was not hard to find work, lodging, and other resources, even though this was in the days before widespread Internet use. Networking and print classifieds could take you pretty far. I once found housing on an old fashioned public bulletin board.
The Internet has made it much easier to find such opportunities. I know in some countries there are local expat bulletin boards with job and housing listings, plus advice on local work requirements. But I have also seen lots of international listings using LinkedIn job search and restricting to certain locales.
Good luck!
a. A post doc at EPFL. The professor sent out the JD, I applied.
b. Microsoft China. I looked at their webpage and cold emailed someone whose area seemed appealing to me. Got the job a few months later.
In total, I was out of the USA for almost 11 years (2 in Swiss, 9 in China).
The market for PhDs is a bit different, we have to rely almost solely on our connections (recruiters aren't useful), but on the other hand it is easier to get the jobs you are qualified for (not as much competition at the PhD level) if you know where to look.
This is pretty much the same here in AUS. Being from mainland EU on a spouse visa (457), people hardly get ANY job, and I mean even a toilet cleaner position. People get simply rejected because of "lack of local experience" bull5hit.
AUS will reap what it sows, every country will.