Your Complete Guide in Getting a Job in Europe Directly From India
From the native country of India where I am from, with a population reaching 1.38 billion, I am very safe in my assertion that millions aspire to work abroad from India. Be it for a culture change (both personal and professional), or for an international exposure, or just plain simply to escape :), reasons are plentiful.
In this post, I would like to share the steps anyone can follow to crack a job directly from India, without any referrals. It is a bit different from my technical blogs, in a way that I go on a rant ^_^. Most importantly, I would like to share all my knowledge I built in my own successful journey of cracking European job directly from India, including crucial info such as resume formatting tips, useful websites to apply, how recruitment works, interview process etc.
European jobs are in great demand right now, owing to their huge skill shortage. The companies are not only willing to pay top euros, but also willing to sponsor the entire visa cost. This is the perfect opportunity for aspiring job seekers to get a foreign opportunity and explore the famous European work culture :).
All the information is completely free of cost, and DO NOT require you to visit consultancy and waste tons of money there, or require you to study. It is my own knowledge that I built while going through the complete process. Additionally, the individual articles are aimed for anyone trying to crack into the European job market, so feel free to pick and chose the steps relevant for you!
a) Step 0: Introduction and how recruitment works.
b) Step 1: Tips on creating a killer profile.
c) Step 2: Building the right resume and cover letter.
d) Step 3: Strategy of applying and sponsorship ready job portal links.
e) Step 4: Insights on actual interview process and conclusion.
Hopefully, the above steps could help anyone land their dream European job, and that, would be the success of this post!
Introduction:
TL;DR: To get a job in Europe, update your LinkedIn profile, make a simple one page no fancy resume, make a simple cover letter, do strategic applications in LinkedIn and other relocation friendly job openings, and wait for the stars to be aligned! Referrals are your best friend!
I will be honest here and give the brutal truth: cracking abroad jobs is heavily weighted towards luck and how long you persist.
There are many lucky folks, who cracked European jobs through referrals pretty much instantly. There are fresh graduates who are contacted by LinkedIn directly from recruiters abroad (especially from London). Then there are people like us, who manually applied through openings for couple of years before landing their first gig.
Agreed, hard work is there: you build your profile, you slog through work, take challenging projects, take side projects, and essentially build your skillsets to crack the interviews. But if you do a quantitative analysis, between 10 amazing profiles available on LinkedIn, only 1 will get the call. That’s 90% luck right there from the start.
Difference between lucky folks and unlucky ones like me? I just persisted, although, being brutally honest, this was a draining process and I had almost given up.
With this info in mind, and expectations set, let us dive deep!
Step 0: How Recruitment works?
Before you apply to the next job opening, have you ever wondered how did the opening come up in the first place? Why is that particular job advertised with those skillsets?
Suppose you are running a construction company business. You sign off a huge contract of building a plaza (congratulations). The first thing you would do is create an opening for construction workers right? And suppose you anticipate few more projects coming in as business is booming. You would hire few extra folks in anticipation, as recruiting, and training in advance would take time! Additionally, few of your more experienced staff leave/retire, so you would need to fill those role too.
In the same way, any engineering firm opens up openings whenever a new project comes in, or the existing engineers leave. It is a simple business of filling in the demand.
For your construction company, you would want to fill in the roles with the experienced folks with the least amount of money. That way, you get skilled staff at fraction of price. And to save the cost of finding the right talent, you would rather have your own employees recommend new workers to you (referrals!). Ideally, you would want to shift the workers from less profitable or about to close projects to this new one, retaining the internal company knowledge (internal transfers).
In the same way, for a engineering firm to remain profitable, they put the maximum openings for experienced people, and try to compensate according to the market demand/availability for that skillset, and the urgency to fill the role according to the timeline of the projects. Some firms hire external recruiters for this, as they are in a hurry to fill in the roles to win a big business contract by showing off their manpower (bench strength, mostly practiced in service firms).
And just like your construction company, most engineering firms try to fill the role internally first. It is much easier for an internal employee to leverage his internal company knowledge and network to get the work done. Additionally, company would want to save training cost in hiring external employees. If internal transfer doesn’t work, they look for referrals, as it is a much easier job for recruiters to have a ready made profile to begin with, rather than spend days searching for the right ones.
To sum up, Recruitment works on the principal of velocity.
In order to remain competitive and save cost, most engineering firms prefer internal transfers, then referrals, and then finally externally applied resumes. In the first two process (internal transfer and referrals), shockingly 40–50% job openings are gone and would never show up in the first place!
This is especially true for abroad jobs. Remember, even if you get selected, the firm would have to wait for months before your visa is processed and flight tickets are booked. So essentially, they are betting on your trust and immigration. So naturally, they are more inclined to find someone local or internally rather than have an external recruiting from a different country.
That’s it for this post folks, check the other parts for more info!
