Want to move your developer career abroad? Together with Relocate.me experts, we have gathered 7 simple tips that will help you land your dream job faster. So, let's just dive in.
1. Combine tourism and interviews
You are more likely to get an interview if you are already near the office of your future employer. You can inform them that you live abroad but that you will be in the area between date and date to encourage them to call you in.
Go ahead and explore the area you are hoping to relocate to. It can give you a huge headstart in the relocation process by helping you pick a neighborhood.
2. References work
Use LinkedIn to find your old friends and connections around the area you are looking to relocate to and ask if it's possible that you can be referred to their company.
Instead of saying 'I'm looking for a job abroad', you can say: 'I might be a good fit for your open positions X and Y that I've seen on your website. Can you consider me as your reference?'
3. Stop using 'I'm looking for a job with visa sponsorship'
Employers are always looking for talented people, so demonstrate your skills first, not the fact that you are in need of a sponsor. This should be mentioned but why are you going to waste valuable space at the top of the page to say it? It can be placed elsewhere.
On average, you have 5 to 10 seconds to catch the eye of a recruiter or a hiring manager. Chances are, they are going to read the first couple sentences very briefly and then skim your bullet points and other bold print. They want to quickly get a sense that you're the right candidate. You can give them that sense by focusing on your skills.
4. Your resume should be stunning
Remember, you only have 5-10 seconds at best to grab the recruiter's attention. Invest your time in the resume that you can be proud of.
- If you’re relocating to Europe, please avoid the Europass resume format. It’s weird and not accepted by European companies anymore.
- Keep things short. You need to condense down to a 1-2 page resume at most.
- Only include the most relevant experiences, programming languages, and frameworks. The rest is fluff.
- If you have leadership experience, don’t forget to include it. Conversely, if you have little experience, don’t be shy to mention your field-related high school projects or coursework.
- When describing your experience in bullet points, follow the formula from Google employees: Accomplished [X] as measured [Y] by doing [Z].
- Having finished your resume, double-check it, or better use the special resume enhancement platforms, such as CV Compiler. Correcting the flaws and stressing the advantages of your resume is much easier with professional tools.
5. Prepare well for the interview
There is a lot of information out there about [preparing for both HR and technical interviews on the internet. You will be surprised how similar the questions are that you will be asked during interviews. Preparing ahead of time will enable you to stand out from other candidates.
6. One more chance to be heard is a cover letter
Make sure to keep your cover letter focused and short — that will help you to showcase yourself as a true techie. Moreover, you should generally be crafting a new cover letter for each position. A lot of it will transfer from one to the other, but when a company reads your cover letter, the idea is that they get the sense that you are truly perfect for the specific position at hand.
Recycling your cover letter is possible, but that generally means it is too vague if it suits every single company/position you are applying for. Each company and position are unique, so you should edit your cover letter a bit to be perfectly suited to each.
7. 'Fish in the right pond'
Use specialized platforms/job boards where companies are providing the developer jobs with relocation. Don't go looking for opportunities where they scarcely are found.
Here are some great places to look for a dev job abroad:
- Relocate.me
- Landing.jobs
- VanHack
- Global {M}
- ‘Who is hiring?’ section on Hacker News (Visa sponsor: Yes)
- Glassdoor
Along with the team at Relocate.me, we also created a Telegram channel where we regularly share the hottest tech job offerings with relocation assistance. Everyone is welcome to join!
8. Bonus tip
If you really want to move, you can try to change your LinkedIn location to your desired place of residence. It might help you to get more attention from recruiters in this area or, who knows, start the process of visualizing your goal of moving to the new country ;)
Good luck!
Top comments (12)
Excellent tips. For my previous company, we had a person who done exactly this. He lives in Spain, but just reached out to us when he was in San Francisco, and we have a talk/interview here in SF. He was one of the best hires we had. The collaboration was so much smoother, since the initial couple weeks he was here in SF.
In many ways, we all still count each other as friends.
Thanks for sharing! I agree that personal meetings help companies to define more precisely whether a person is a good match for a particular vacancy. As for candidates, they can estimate all the pros and cons of their destination. That's why I advice people to combine travelling with job searching. It's great that it worked for your company!
Thanks for the tips Andrew!
Do you have any advice if you're looking to move to a country where you don't speak the native language (Russia in my case)?
Any idea how many tech companies would speak English at the office? Probably doesn't help that I'll be looking for a junior position too.
Aidan, the specialists willing to move to Russian-speaking countries are in very high demand now. Such countries can boast growing markets and lots of product companies, along with low taxes. Try searching vacancies on jobs.dev.by/ or jobs.dou.ua/. Not all companies there offer visa sponsorship, but some of them certainly do. You should contact the recruiters directly.
As for English, developers in Russian-speaking countries are gradually learning it :) Unfortunately, that's not enough to forget about language barriers yet. For smoother relocation, it's better to be a middle/senior developer. However, nothing is impossible — due to high demand, you still can find something appropriate for you.
Andrew thanks for sharing these great tips.
Thanks for reading ;)
Thanks for sharing! I'll be looking for abroad jobs in the near future and it's great to have a bit of light in this otherwise confusing path!
Great! What country are you relocating to?
Haven’t decided yet but I think the Netherlands is the perfect match for me. I visited the country some years ago and I loved it and seems to be a place with lots of offers!
Nice choice! There are plenty of developer jobs in the Netherlands, and English is widely spoken :)
If you're looking for dev jobs in Switzerland you can find jobs and sign up to our job alert here: epyc.ch
Before applying, make sure you inform yourself about how to apply in Switzerland. A good start would be this blog article: Find jobs in Switzerland
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