emilov

Hi All,

I just wanted to share my (successful) job searching experience with you.

3 days ago I accepted an offer for my dream job. It is sort of an IT Consultant with lots of international travel & project management involved. I'll arrive in the first week of October.

How I did it (besides being extremely lucky ):

I increased my resume to 4 pages and added referees to the end (they actually get called when things heat up, read on).

I had a nice, slimy cover letter where I replaced the name of the company and adjusted the skills to match more closely to the job description (for each single application).

I used seek.com.au (only seek) to apply for every position (in Brisse) that seemed suitable. These were about 50-70 (who remembers them all, right?).

It turned out that most of them are duplicates of the same few positions (under 10) only offered by different recruiters. All other sites had about the same jobs (hays did have some unique interesting stuff too but they did not call me even once). Lots of the other recruiters said to contact them when I arrived. Lots of them just called unannounced (it is VERY important to point out suitable times in the cover letter AND resume). Use these calls to practice for the "real" interviews because, as I had to find out, it does not mean anything when a recruiter calls.

Mostly, the first thing the recruiters asked was how much money I wanted. I quickly learned to avoid such a question by saying "it depends on the package, whether there is a car, private health insurance and other perks involved". They weren't too technical; they wanted to hear the buzzwords etc. Then they said I was great for their customers and that they would present me to them. Some of them named their customers also. That is a good starting point to write an application to the company directly. So far not a single recruiter did anything else than talk.

I had also applied directly at a few companies I knew. They called to get to know me first and then again to conduct a technical interview (mostly both at the same time, about 45 - 60 min). They then would let me do an assignment (in my case it was programming different problems in Java and C#, a search in a labyrinth, a complete company order system etc.). The company that I went for also has offices in Berlin (where I am right now) and Munich.

After 1,5h of interrogation (technical & people skills) I was invited to the Berlin office, they let me sit in front of a PC (Linux) and let me program on a task (plot a function on the screen etc., C++). I had never needed to actually paint anything. They told me that that was the plan. Good architecture was essential. It seemed to have went well because on the next day they invited me to Munich (all expenses paid) for another interview.

After that, they contacted my boss (who is one of my three referees on my resume, so these are important after all). He knows that I'm leaving and I had talked to him so his "interview" too went well.

The day after that they offered me the job.

In conclusion:

Forget recruiters go directly to the company.

Make sure your resume is up-to-date and to Australian standards (poke around seek and careerone for advice). It's ok to change things here and there so that it matches better to the job description.

Make sure your cover letter is catchy (it is even more important than the resume at first).

Make sure the cover letter has all the buzzwords from the job description in the first few lines (nobody actually seems to read to the end where I explained that I had permanent residence, everybody asked me about that status). There are lots of cover letter examples on the net (monster.com etc.)

Make sure your cover letter has the name of the person you are addressing it to ("Dear Mr. Whatshisname"). Try to find that out (mostly at the end of the job ad).

Oh yeah, I did write the name wrong a few times (copy/paste error) or wrote Mr. where Ms. would have been right or misspelled the name of the company or pasted the wrong company name. Needless to say, I did not hear anything from these people. So if you assembly-line-send your job applications, take your time to triple-check ALL those things (and don't do it late in the evening, that's when I made most of my mistakes).

I can't stress that enough:

It takes weeks to create a good resume/cover letter and it is a hard work. I read/let read mine dozens of times. Make sure NO SPELLING ERRORS and other trivial stuff taints it. Put your name, current title AND times when you can be reached on the head of each page.

Even harder and more tedious is to apply for jobs. It took me almost two weeks to apply for all positions (always in the evenings after work and on the weekends).

Good luck to you all

Cheers,
Emil

Nicstids

Thought I would be the first to say Congratulations!

We've been over here 6 months and yesterday I heard that I've got a new job too
Have been a solicitor for 17 years but am now changing direction completely as a Trainee Financial Planner - not bad at age 41! The application process was far more rigorous than any job I applied for in the UK - one interview with the agency, 2 interviews with the firm, a battery of psychometric tests and they wanted 3 referees as well. Am feeling very pleased with myself as there were 25 applicants for the job

Hope the job is everything you want it to be

themerlin

Congratulations!!

I agree re agencies! I'm not sure why companies still use them instead of posting directly on seek.

Bix da Boss

Excellet post

Well done, bet you are really chuffed Worth the hard work then!


best of luck to you in your new job, it sounds great

Time for a then a

herrchook

Congratulations on getting the job, and thanks for such an informative post.

Best of luck,

Gill

seang

Great post. Best of luck (and to Nicstids as well)

emilov

Thanks a lot guys.

I'll start on October, 16th.
We'll see how it goes

Cheers,
Emil

TeresaG

Congratulations on getting the job and thanks very much for the great post.