How was I able to find a job in Europe from India?

It was on November 2018, when I decided that I want to look for an opportunity outside India, obvious choices were US, Canada, Australia and Europe.

But for my skills Europe and Us were much better and with US there is a lottery system for h1b visa and I never believed my luck, so only option was to go for Europe for equal life quality and work opportunities , specially the eu countries because having a schengen visa means you get access to 25+ countries for travel. Countries which I shortlisted were Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, as all of these have good job options for frontend developers. I opted out for Uk and Switzerland as getting visa for these would have been double the effort. Norway and Finland were also options but have a reputation of being extreme cold.

After this I started to work for it, first I tried to search on linkedin for my skills with jobs having keywords as “visa sponsorship”, I found a few options on which I applied, but to my surprise they didn’t opt to interview me. Because of my location, they replied with words like “not fit for the job”.

So I tried to follow profiles of recruiters, who were posting these options, and activated linkedin premium for first free month to be able to contact them directly. Most of them didn’t respond to the messages which I sent. Some of them took my resume, and told me to wait for clients to reply, but they never did so it was kind of heart breaking, and untill now I have spent 2 months without any interview.

Then I was searching among my friends and friends of my friends who were in these countries, and asked them to refer me if I see a opening in their company, all were very kind and the did refer me, and i got my first coding round scheduled for an german giant. It was a big success, untill I blew up in the assignment round, because I didn’t know what recruiters expect in europe. I completed my assignment, but took little too much time and didn’t focus on test cases much which was a big negative against me and I lost this opportunity but I learnt a lot from this mistake, and started to prepare more for technical assignments and codility because now I had confidence that I will be able to get interviews.

I took one month of break from linkedin and focused on preparing personal project on github writing articles on medium to make my profile stand out of the rest. I spent nights with netflix and coding personal projects.

Then I reached out to more friends for referral, and this time I got the best option I can, which is to get a job at the netherlands branch of an indian mnc, which will be technically be not a deputation but a local hiring. I never looked for onsite opportunity by an indian service company, because there could be a lot of waiting time, and I wanted to accomplish my goal early. But this was different as clearing the interview means I get directly recruited in NL, I passed all the coding rounds and gave 2 assignment round for two clients one in nl and other is in belgium. I got the option to go to belgium which I happily accepted as belgium is center of europe and an equally good country to make a career in frontend development.

In june 2019, 8 months after my preparations started, I got my job letter and it took around 6 months for visa formality and after exactly 12 months on Nov 2019, I was in Belgium with my new job.

Key points:

1. Having unique skills (for me it was being full stack developer)
2. Preparation for coding assignments and focus on unit testing
3. Using linkedin and contacts wisely
4. Keep on applying on new jobs as you might be rejected on 90% of them if you are applying randomly.
5. Make a quickly scannable resume, as these jobs get lots of applications
6. Work on giving interviews on skype and understanding accents, always ask to repeat the question if you don’t understand properly.
7. Work on behavioural and managerial questions, also on processes like agile and tdd/bdd.
8. Practice on websites like codewars/codility.
9. Good cover letters
10. Have an active github repository
11. Keep your documents completed if you get a job like passport, degree certificate, pay slips, marriage certificate( in case of married) for quick process