Anyone ever get an international job?
First off, fuck job applications. It's an awful and tedious charade. Creating accounts on hundreds of websites for the resume parser to not work and have to manually upload that all again, to then write a cover letter that's skimmed at best, for a word to be missing from the resume which their detection tech passes before you're given a real shot.
But regardless that's not why I'm here. I'm in the process of applying to jobs, but for the first time I'm applying to jobs internationally (I'm US based). Have any of y'all applied for and received jobs abroad? What was successful and what wasn't? I'm primarily looking into pharmaceutical research or pharmacovigilance/drug safety because that's where English language jobs are in my area of study, but hope to eventually become fluent enough in a different language so I can move back into infection prevention or disease surveillance.
I've gotten international tech jobs.
It helps a lot to be in a field where English is the professional lingua franca. I presume that this is the case for pharmaceutical research. (People who don't have a specialized and globally in-demand skillset are out of luck.)
It helps to apply at multinationals where there are employees from all over the world so English ends up being the workplace language. Local companies use the local language.
Having an internal referral puts you at the top of the resume heap and saves you from being algorithmically culled. So you need to network. The harsh truth is that multinational companies in desirable countries are inundated with resumes from applicants—the vast whom of which are unqualified—who are desperate to leave countries like India. Not to mention that the contemporary internet makes it very, very easy for people to spam job postings with resumes.
An acquaintance who was a very senior HR person at a large multinational corporation told me that they get thousands (sometimes tens of thousands? if I recall correctly, it was some unbelievably insane number) of applications for any given position. So they algorithmically discard some 80% of applications before even doing a quick visual skim to further cull the remainder.
Maybe try joining the r-bioinformatics Slack (send a PM to https://www.reddit.com/user/apfejes/) and ask in their #career_advice channel. Also worth checking out their #jobs channel.
Yes, but the hiring manager knew me, and it was an internal transfer.