Lifestyle and habits of the globally mobile

How to search for international jobs online

In this article we’ll give you some tips on navigating through the maze of online information to find job openings in your field of interest.

We’ll also show you how to post your resume on the Internet so employers can find you.

Employment Databases 

First we’ll look at employment databases. These are usually sponsored by recruiting firms and there are hundreds to choose from. Some specialize in certain types of jobs, for example computer professionals. Others specialize in a geographic region such as Asia. Others are general. Our Job Sites page has categories for several major career fields as well as one for various regions of the world. Within each category you will find links to employment databases which specialize in that field or region. There is also a category for other types of jobs which don’t fit into any of the previous categories. You’ll find that some of the sites we’ve listed contain links to other sites as well.

Usenet Newsgroups

Usenet is another part of the Internet which can also be a fruitful resource for international job leads. The Usenet is made up of “newsgroups” which could more accurately be described as discussion groups or electronic bulletin boards. They are places where people can post information for others to see and respond to. There are over 20,000 different newsgroups on the Internet although some Internet providers may not provide access to all of them.

Many newsgroups contain lists of job opportunities in various fields or places. To determine which newsgroups contain the types of job leads you’re interested in, use one of the major search engines such as Alta Vista, Infoseek, or Deja News. Each allows you to search Usenet newsgroups by a keyword or a combination of keywords to find sites of interest.

Search engines

Search engines are the “yellow pages” of the Internet. They are electronic directories that can be searched for documents, pages, or sites. Popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, Alltheweb.com, Northern Light etc. There are many more.

When using search engines, you’ll need to experiment to find the right combination of keywords. If your keywords are too general, for example employment, you good get list of several thousand sites, some of which are only remotely related to employment. A better choice would be employment + computers, or better yet employment + computers + international. Also try using different words. For example, instead of employment, try jobs. If you are finding too many hits, narrow your search using specific words like: “esl buddhistan capital” or “engineer job buddhistan”

Experiment with different search engines. Just like the telephone yellow pages, different search engines may contain different lists of sites so its a good idea to check more than one.

The Internet has made it relatively easy to gather extensive job and company research. In fact, the process has become so easy that many people are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of responses they get to a typical search engine inquiry.

However, there are a couple of tricks you can use to improve the quality of your search and zero in on the best information. Try:

Searching with multiple words, a phrase or a concept in the dialogue entry box and enclose these words within quotation marks to force the search engine to read the phrase in a locked context. For example: “employment trends” will force the search to be contained to the phrase rather than on the individual words

Apply a conditional or restrictive qualifier to keep the search within a specific target area. For example, Oracle and programmer NOT java. This search will return instances where pages contain the words oracle and programmer, but will automatically eliminate those containing the word java.

These techniques will reduce the number of hits you will generate and produce more qualified results. See “The Actual Internet Job Search” below.

Employer Web Sites

Another approach to finding jobs is to go directly to the employer’s web site. Most large employers and many small employers now have their own web sites. These sites contain a lot of useful information about the company and their products and services. They often list job vacancies as well. Most of these sites allow you apply for job openings online through email or by pasting an electronic version of your resume directly into one of their forms. Submitting your resume through a company’s web site show that you understand the Internet and may give you an edge over other applicants.

To find a company’s web site, use one of the search engines mentioned above.

Resume Databases

In addition to being a job hunter, you can become one of the hunted and have employers find you by uploading an electronic version of your resume to a resume database. There are many of these now on the Internet and employers and recruiters both use them regularly to find qualified candidates.

These searchable databases contain the resumes of individuals seeking employment. Employers/recruiters can search the database by keyword(s) to collect a list of potential employees from among the thousands of resumes in the database. Some of the sites listed are strictly resume databases, but many employment databases also contain a section for job hunters to upload their resumes.

Submitting your resume to one of these databases normally requires either emailing it or pasting it into a form on the web site. Specific instructions for doing this can be found at each site.

 Preparing an Electronic Resume

Before you can email your resume to a recruiter or employer or paste it into an online application form, you must first create a version which is suitable for sending through the Internet. This requires that you first remove all bold type, underlining, italics, tabs, and other fancy design features. Once this is done use the “Save As…” command to save the file as a text or ASCII file. Your resume can now be uploaded to the Internet and read by the employer with any word processor.

When employers or recruiters search through resume databases for candidates, they use keywords related to the position they are seeking to fill. If the keywords they are searching for are not found in your resume you won’t be found. For this reason your electronic resume should contain a one or two line section called “keywords” containing words a prospective employer is likely to search for. This section is commonly placed either at the end of the resume or just below your name and email address. List all keywords which describe you, your experience, and the type of work you are seeking.

Examples of keywords for some sample occupations would be:

Mechanical engineer, heat transfer, design, project manager…

Accountant, controller, MBA, finance, etc…

Nurse, surgical, RN…

English teacher, EFL, ESL, TESOL…

Computer programmer, Visual Basic, C++, Cobol…

Although job seekers are often advised to use “active” words such as managed, employers generally search electronic resumes by job title such as manager. Because searches are most often done on nouns, your electronic resume should be a noun-intensive document.

Learn to be creative in your job search. Job seeking has become increasingly more competitive as the ways of getting your resume into a prospective employer’s hands has grown from “snail-mail” to fax copies, to e-mail attachments to Internet posting.

With more and more people taking a “What have I got to lose” attitude and tossing their resume into the pile, each employment opportunity receives hundreds of applications from both the right and the wrong candidates.

Look at how you can make your resume stand out by:

Organizing the facts so that they can be easily picked out from the body copy.

Providing summaries of skills and core abilities where appropriate.

Using white space judiciously so that the layout is pleasing to the eye.

Keeping your resume and cover letter brief and relevant to the job opportunity.

A common error that people make when writing their resume is that they often confuse their job “responsibilities” with their “accomplishments.”

It is important to learn how to describe your experience in terms of transferable skills that the reader will be able to interpret as being a benefit to his or her business.

Here are a couple of tips you can use when writing your next resume to help enhance your perceived value:

Under your job title, add a sentence or two that describes your overall job duties in this past position. A descriptive “responsibility statement” will put your seniority and level of expertise into perspective, and help the reader see how you might better fit with the job opportunity.

Use the PAR formula to help you best define your accomplishments. P stands for the problem or challenge you faced. A represents the action you took to solve the problem, and R refers to the results you obtained. Write two to four accomplishments for each job position you held ensuring that the PAR formula has been satisfied in each explanation.

Company recruiters are not impressed with a laundry list of past responsibilities. Rather, they want to learn about how you think, tackled problems, and what experience and useful skills you bring to the advertised opportunity.

Give your resume greater impact by following these helpful hints:

Be blatant. Your resume is no place for you to suddenly be shy about your past accomplishments

Keep your points brief. Try to get right to the heart of the matter and re-read your resume over to yourself several times out loud to help you make the very best word selection

Remove any information that is a given or is repetitive. Ensure that your resume and cover letter content reinforce each other

Order your points with the most relevant first. The correct core skills priority is often found in the order of job requirements as they have been listed in the ad

Every point should sell. Look to writing in such a way as to demonstrate a benefit in hiring you

Your resume should not be your complete autobiography. A good resume can say almost everything it has to say in two to three pages. Let one of your (past) co-workers read your resume over and comment on its accuracy and completeness.

The cover letter which accompanies your resume serves to add value, color and dimension to what might otherwise be interpreted as just another job application. The cover letter provides you with the opportunity to stand out from the crowd and be noted as an individual who can make a difference to a company seeking to fill a vacancy.

The following examples illustrate how a well constructed cover letter can significantly enhance your first impression.

A properly designed letter fulfills three primary functions:

It identifies your job objectives. “I was most interested in your advertisement posted in the Globe this morning seeking a ‘Manager for New Business Development’. I am currently the Regional Sales Manager of the ACME Industrial Supply Company in Glasgow, and due to the recent transfer of my spouse to Gotham city, am seeking a comparable position with a firm such as yours.”

It emphasizes those transferable skills that you have learned in your past positions. “My past work experience has included the ability to recruit and train qualified people, build a functional sales team from the ground up, and manage a sales force of six against established competition.”

It links skills that you have developed in past positions with the requirements of this opportunity. “In my role as Sales Manager, I have increased my company’s market share over the past three years from 12% to 18%, trained eight new salespeople, and have implemented a database control system that has improved our customer contact ratio by 43%. I feel confident that I am able to achieve similar results and achievements for you.”

Don’t waste this golden opportunity to impress a prospective employer by sending a bland and lifeless cover letter with your resume.

One of the most difficult obstacles for a job candidate to overcome is to secure employment in a new locality.

Whether you are moving across the the country or half-way around the world, it is extremely difficult to pre-arrange employment before you arrive unless you are very lucky or have an agent working on your behalf. It is best to plan your relocation very carefully.

First, make the assumption that you will not be able to obtain the employment of your choice when you first arrive. Ensure that you have adequate savings on hand to help you bridge any employment gap.

While still at home, you might try to contact prospective employers to introduce yourself and let them know that you would like to interview with them when you do arrive. Do the same with appropriate recruiters. Lists of prospective companies, foreign newspapers, and recruiter directories are available at most major libraries.

When you do arrive at your new location, consider temporary employment while conducting your job search to provide local experience and some cash flow.

Breaking Into the Global Job Market

The Nature of the International Job Market

The international job market is just that, a market driven by economic forces of supply and demand. Why do organizations hire Westerners and nations grant work visas? For our professional skills and products. Westerners are too expensive to hire as unskilled labor, but worth paying for our technology and our products. This demand fuels jobs for about 4,000,000 Americans overseas.

All countries protect jobs for their own people. Also, all countries go outside to meet real needs, including the US, which increased the number of college educated/high tech (H1-B) work permits from 65,000 to 115,000 for 1999 and 2000. That quota was filled in six months in 1999 and three months in 2000. Many are calling for an increase to 200,000. Interestingly, the purpose for these visas is to obtain high tech workers like computer programmers. Corporations, institutions, and agencies all over the world go outside their country to find people they need. If we plan to work overseas we must listen to the market to discover where world needs intersect our training and skills and to learn how we can best equip and position ourselves for that market.

1. Vocational profile of the global job market

The need to develop is the primary force driving the job market in most developing nations. Development requires the transfer of technology and especially the training of any nation’s greatest resource—its people. Consequently, education at all levels is the single largest vocational field. Because English is crucial for globalization, English teaching is a huge arena all by itself. Further, as schools and other organizations overseas learn that they can get teachers who will work in their limited settings, the demand increases. Recently I have heard story after story of schools and universities asking tentmakers to help them find more teachers because they see what the tentmaker is providing. Especially at the university level, openings exist for almost all fields.

The second area providing international jobs is business and industry. There is tremendous demand in computers, communications, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, health care, and basic development. This is also considerable demand in banking, accounting, financial services, law, transportation, agriculture, tourism, and arts and media. Some vocations offer fewer openings like recreation and social services.

2. The two markets

There are essentially two overseas job markets, expatriate and local hire. The expatriate market pays Western wages in order to obtain qualified Western expertise and job openings are advertised publicly. The “local hire” expatriate market consists basically of local agencies which are open to hiring Westerners who are willing to work for local wages. Jobs in this market are not generally listed, but are discovered by networking. The President of Kyrgyzstan a few years ago wanted to hire 7,000 EFL teachers. But there is no way Kyrgyzstan could pay anything close to Western wages. There is similar interest in Kazakhstan and other countries. This is why it is not generally wise to go overseas to look for a job. You will not likely find a competitive Western job, will not be able to live on the income, and will harm your credibility if you take such a job and live on almost full support.

In reality, these two poles are oversimplified. There is a range of job sin between. Market forces drive this situation. Many organizations want more Westerners, but cannot afford any or many at Western salaries. So when Westerners are willing to work for less, they take them. Why do they work for less? Desire for travel, missions motivation, service motivation. For instance, a person can find numerous jobs that provide adequate income to live in China, though low by western standards. In other situations, a person will need supplemental support. In such settings, it is vital to negotiate hard for other forms of compensation like housing, in-country transportation rates, health care, etc. This lowers a person’s need for support and enhances credibility. Another caution should be added: Live appropriately to your role in the community. Identifying and connecting with the people is one of the great blessings of tentmaking. When tentmakers live beyond the means of their job, they undermine credibility and distance themselves from the people.

3. The four job providing entities

Basically four entities provide work to Westerners overseas: 1) international or local corporations, 2) indigenous national institutions like colleges, universities, and government agencies, 3) relief and development agencies, and 4) new start-up businesses. These are the arenas in which to look for jobs. Starting a business offers some wonderful advantages like ability to stay indefinitely and greater evangelistic freedom. However, it demands special skills and experience. More on this later.

4. Structure of the global job market

The international job market is very decentralized, fragmented, and unstructured. This is a natural result of specialization in skills and needs. With globalization and modern communication, it is easy for a university in Tajikistan to communicate with a chemical engineer in Idaho who is open to working there, but how do they find each other. Because of this challenge, the global job market is really a collection of hundreds or even thousands of relatively small, vertical job markets, which communicate through specialized networks, publications, websites, and job agencies. For this reason, it is vital for job seekers to take initiative and persist in pursuing all these channels.

5. Relatively closed nature of the market

The job market tends to be closed to outsiders for a couple of reasons. First, U.S. organizations have a strong tendency to promote and transfer from within for overseas jobs even when the person has little cross-cultural skill or experience. The reason for this is that organizations need people with intimate knowledge of the organization, its culture, products, services, and authority structure. The consequence of this approach is big adjustment problems and a high turnover rate for workers going overseas. Nevertheless, this pattern is likely to continue for some time. Some companies are recognizing the problem and a new industry is developing to provide cross-cultural training for employees.

The second reason for the relatively closed market is that there are few entry-level jobs for Americans. Generally openings require a bachelor’s plus two or more years experience in one’s field. This applies across the board with English teaching being the only exception. Almost any native English speaker can find a job teaching English somewhere, though qualifications are rising and pay is limited for those without TEFL certification. But going without good skills serves people poorly and dishonors Christ. In addition to vocational competency, employers often look for travel, overseas work experience, relational skills, and even language competency for obvious reasons.

6. Length of contracts

Overseas contracts tend to last 1-3 years. After that, a person must renew or find another job. Corporate jobs tend to last 1-3 years because they expect that employees will want to return home. Development agency jobs tend to be limited because they are tied to government grants and specific projects. Another factor is that national organizations want expatriates to equip their own people so that they can take over as soon as possible. The result of this trend is that international jobs and careers tend to evolve unpredictably and require ongoing changes. Since many jobs actually isolate people from the larger global job market, it is imperative to develop a broad range of contacts and keep one’s ears open to impending vacancies. Networking is indispensable. Furthermore, most job moves tend to be horizontal rather than hierarchical because most jobs are oriented toward delivering specialized direct services. Only larger corporations and government agencies provide more vertical job changes. However, such changes usually move people away from direct work in the field where many find greater satisfaction and excitement. Again, running a business is a big contrast to this.