I was on a job interview in October 2007 and the topic of long-term career goals was discussed. During the discussion it was mentioned that a former individual in the department had rotated into an international assignment. It was the first time I heard of such an opportunity and I instantly knew that I wanted to work internationally.
When I traveled around the world, my final objective was to land a finance job in either Hong Kong or Singapore. If my around the world trip was an Olympic gymnastics routine, the first year was a record setting performance, all I had to do was stick the landing…in this case find a job…unfortunately I landed face first on the hardwood floor, completely missing the mat that would have at least provided some cushion. My advice for finding a job after your travels should be taken with some caution because…I didn’t find a job. But I tried. And I tried. And I tried. And I kept smacking my face on the hardwood floor.
THE CONCEPTUALITIES OF A JOB SEARCH
First, research how easy or difficult it is to obtain an employment visa in the country you are seeking employment. If you are an American, you may think it’s easy given how many foreigners obtain an American employment visa. It ain’t easy. And it’s becoming more difficult. The rest of the world isn’t giving visas to people who show up unannounced. India. China. Japan. South Korea. They have hundreds of millions to billions of people and helping a non-citizen find a job isn’t at the top of these governments’ priorities. These countries turn the screws on employers to hire the citizen, the citizen the government needs to keep happy, over some guy whose goal is working in Asia. The Chinese and Indians are going to do what the Chinese and Indians got to do.
Second, research how long it takes to obtain a work visa. Some countries process visas as fast as two weeks (like Hong Kong and Singapore) but for many countries the visa process lasts over two months. I thought “two months is nothing”, I’d wait six months or a year. While I may be willing to wait six months, companies aren’t so inclined. They need an employee now. The longer the processing time the more difficult to obtain the employment visa.
I thought that since Hong Kong and Singapore use English as a language of business that would be an advantage when searching for jobs. I’m not sure. I thought that since Hong Kong and Singapore serve as a base for American companies to locate their Asian headquarters that would be an advantage. I thought the overhead of a headquarters function would provide more jobs than a sales office or a manufacturing facility. I’m not sure. I thought having a CPA license and knowing all the nuances of U.S. SOX would be a strong selling point. I’m not sure. I question my preconceived employment visa notions. There’s no right or wrong profession. Accounting and finance are easy and transferable skills and a conservative and a high paying profession and a career path for foreigners to enter the U.S., so there’s plenty of locals available to fill those positions. Companies are allotted a fixed amount of work visas and it’s not a great use of that limited resource to apply the visa in a job area with a high volume of qualified, local candidates.
I think a broader business background that is not so intricately linked to U.S. accounting and finance could be helpful. If you work in marketing, the Chinese or Japanese company may need someone who can create ads in English to promote a product, destination, or hotel to English speaking customers. If you work in sales, those same companies may need someone with English language skills to sell in foreign countries. There’s thousands of Asians that can perform U.S. SOX accounting procedures but create an ad directed towards American travelers? The local populace lacks that skillset. If the skillset is lacking, the company will be more likely to use a visa on the position.
An important note about finding a job in Asia…be aware of Chinese New Year dates. Asian companies pay annual bonuses off the Chinese New Year date, not the calendar year end. I was told that’s a disadvantage because it means there are fewer job openings since no one leaves a company during the final three months of the year and the first two months of the next year. Then after the bonuses are paid it’s a massive game of employment musical chairs. Or that could be an advantage if a company desperately needs to hire someone and nobody is moving because they are waiting for their year-end bonus. The worst situation is that companies lead you on…and on…and on during that five month period.
The fourth quarter of a fiscal year is slow for hiring in general. Beyond employees not leaving because they want to collect their bonus, companies are trying to hit their annual earnings targets. If a division, department, or company is slightly behind their annual forecast, the easiest lever to pull and reduce expenses, is to simply not hire additional employees when there’s a vacancy. I worked at companies with unwritten rules that stated no hiring in the fourth quarter. If someone left the company at the end of Q3 or during Q4, management’s view was “grind it out and maybe we’ll let you hire a replacement at the start of the next fiscal year.”
THE PRACTICALITIES OF THE JOB SEARCH
So conceptually you say “ok, let’s do this.” Here’s a practical job execution strategy that relies on a combination of luck and perseverance. The luck is that the person on the receiving end of your resume has a reaction to your application. Luck is sitting next to the right person at the bar or meeting the right person at a business event. The perseverance is casting as wide a net as possible, applying to hundreds of jobs, visiting bars in business districts during happy hours, and attending business events.
RESUME / CV CLEANUP
If you did not purchase a local SIM card and obtain a local phone number when you first arrived in the country, now is the time to do so. Update your resume with the local number and the hostel’s physical address. Major international cities draw thousands of applicants for a single job posting. Dubai. Tokyo. Hong Kong. New York City. I wager that 75% of the people applying for jobs in these cities, don’t live within a thousand miles of those cities and create noise that drowns out your application. Rise above the initial noise with local contact information so you pass the first automated cut.
If you are an American, you will need to turn your resume into a curriculum vitae (“CV”). CVs are longer in length than a resume because a paragraph or two describing your work experience is included above the job description bullet points. Use Google to find a clean CV format. Or for $30 a freelancer on www.fiverr.com will clean up your resume and convert it to a CV.
Update your social media presence—privatize your Facebook account and add current information to LinkedIn (if you don’t have a LinkedIn account, create one). Update your LinkedIn profile for the country where you are applying for jobs—this will lead to more country specific openings in your search results. Consider obtaining a professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile. Subscribe to LinkedIn’s premium membership package, which will provide more insight into the qualifications of other job applicants, where other applicants are located, and salary ranges.
ORGANIZE THE JOB SEARCH
I created a master spreadsheet to track my job applications. I applied to over five hundred jobs. I saved PDFs of the job requisitions and used a numbering system that linked the spreadsheet file to the PDF. This way I retained a reference to the job description later in the recruitment process. With the spreadsheet I could also track all the username and passwords I generated when creating a user profile on each company’s job site. To minimize the volume of username and passwords I used the first part, the non-extension part of my email address as my username (some job sites default to this username) and a password with strong encryption settings (upper, lower, number, special character, 12 characters in length) so I didn’t need a different password for each company.
SEARCHING FOR JOBS
Job boards, like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Monster, are the obvious place to start the job search. While reviewing job boards it should be evident which postings are directly from a company and which are posted by a recruiting agency. Visit the recruiting agencies’ websites and apply for the jobs through their website. Within a day or two a recruiter should contact you to setup a meeting at their office. If no one at the recruiting agencies contact you, that’s an ominous sign. In Hong Kong I met with three recruiters in the first two weeks. In Singapore none over three months. I should have known after two weeks I wouldn’t make any employment progress in Singapore.
In addition to job boards I performed Google searches to identify U.S. Fortune 500 companies operating in my job search locations—specifically which companies located their Asian headquarters in Hong Kong and Singapore. I then visited those companies’ websites and filtered for jobs in Hong Kong and Singapore.
I tried every job search technique possible. I hand delivered resumes, sometimes in a suit. I prepared an information package, which included a personal background and professional summary with career highlights, then found local printers to create color copies, then delivered those copies. Many of the buildings I visited did not have security in the lobby making it possible to reach a company’s front desk reception. I’m not sure how well the hand deliveries worked. Out of over one hundred deliveries only one person came out and talked. I did not receive any other acknowledgement of the information packages.
A benefit of the hand deliveries was that the office building lobbies had a directory of companies operating in the building. I took a photo of the directory and after returning to the hostel, I searched for job openings at those companies.
Be prepared to get discouraged. The job search is an incredibly frustrating process. It’s rejection after rejection after rejection. There’s little rhyme or reason to the job market in general and over analyzing the specifics in a foreign country will only drive you insane. Don’t believe the hype stories. Nobody disembarks a plane and two hours later has a job. People have connections and contacts. They have someone who helped them through the door. That doesn’t make for a good story.
If you are in a major city, chances are high there is a local chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce or similar professional organization. Search for events at these organizations and hope to find an event with a low entrance fee. Arrive early to meet the event organizers who are also likely to be the organization’s executives and may have connections that can help you.
International job searches are cliquey and the cliques look out for one another. Americans have a mindset, particularly in the corporate world, that talent evaluations aren’t any more complicated than if you are the best person, you’re hired. As such, expatriate Americans won’t go out of their way to look out for other Americans. If an American shows up at an American company’s foreign office, there’s no hiring advantage for the American. The rest of the world does not operate that way. Europeans, working at an American company in Singapore will be more interested if you are European, than an American. Australians will hire the Australian. There’s something off putting about a South African living in London saying you aren’t qualified to work at a major U.S. media company in Hong Kong even though you previously consolidated international channel segments while working for a major U.S. media company. Europeans, Canadians, and Australians seem to collectively lack the self-awareness associated with working for an American company in a foreign country. They have no problem telling an American that they lack Asian experience and being oblivious to the fact that they, as a European working for an American company in Hong Kong, obviously lacked Asian experience at some point. Don’t get discouraged.
Beyond the cliques, bilateral working holiday programs exist between many countries throughout the world. These programs allow young travelers (the programs typically have an age restriction of 30 to 35 for applicants) to find employment without arranging for an employment visa through an employer. This makes it easier to find employment. For example, Japan’s working holiday program allows citizens of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Argentina, Chile, and several other countries to obtain employment through a streamlined working holiday visa process. These bilateral arrangements are reciprocal in nature, meaning that a Japanese worker may obtain a working holiday visa in each of these countries that Japan grants the visa too. These countries have agreements with one another making it easier for young workers from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to move between countries and quickly find employment. The major economic power, global leader that is conspicuously absent from many working holiday programs? The U.S. The U.S. has working holiday program agreements with Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. When you read the details on these visa programs you will see these programs are more restrictive (must be a student, must have $5,000 in savings, etc.) than the others. This places Americans at a distinct advantage when applying for jobs in foreign countries, even if that job is with an American company. If you are a thirty-five year old American wondering why the twenty-eight year old Australian with less experience is more successful with their job search than you…it likely has to do with the visa holiday program.
DO YOU TAKE ANY JOB?
As much as I wanted a job in Hong Kong or Singapore there were certain companies and industries, I had no interest in joining. I turned down an interview with a company that was a pyramid sales scheme. After traveling through Asia and understanding the importance of familial relationships, I didn’t want to be a part of a company that uses families and friends to sell products to one another. I had a chance to interview with a casino company that was expanding operations into Cambodia. I passed.
PART-TIME WORK
It is possible to find part-time work in any country. Part-time work such as fruit picking, stomping grapes to make wine, and similar seasonal employment activities exists for those seeking to extend their travel through any means possible. No country is issuing work visas for host/hostess and waiters/waitresses yet you’ll see plenty of foreigners working in these positions. Owners will pay you cash to stand outside a store holding a sign. These jobs will cover your daily living expenses.
THE CONCEPTUALITIES OF A JOB SEARCH
First, research how easy or difficult it is to obtain an employment visa in the country you are seeking employment. If you are an American, you may think it’s easy given how many foreigners obtain an American employment visa. It ain’t easy. And it’s becoming more difficult. The rest of the world isn’t giving visas to people who show up unannounced. India. China. Japan. South Korea. They have hundreds of millions to billions of people and helping a non-citizen find a job isn’t at the top of these governments’ priorities. These countries turn the screws on employers to hire the citizen, the citizen the government needs to keep happy, over some guy whose goal is working in Asia. The Chinese and Indians are going to do what the Chinese and Indians got to do.
Second, research how long it takes to obtain a work visa. Some countries process visas as fast as two weeks (like Hong Kong and Singapore) but for many countries the visa process lasts over two months. I thought “two months is nothing”, I’d wait six months or a year. While I may be willing to wait six months, companies aren’t so inclined. They need an employee now. The longer the processing time the more difficult to obtain the employment visa.
I thought that since Hong Kong and Singapore use English as a language of business that would be an advantage when searching for jobs. I’m not sure. I thought that since Hong Kong and Singapore serve as a base for American companies to locate their Asian headquarters that would be an advantage. I thought the overhead of a headquarters function would provide more jobs than a sales office or a manufacturing facility. I’m not sure. I thought having a CPA license and knowing all the nuances of U.S. SOX would be a strong selling point. I’m not sure. I question my preconceived employment visa notions. There’s no right or wrong profession. Accounting and finance are easy and transferable skills and a conservative and a high paying profession and a career path for foreigners to enter the U.S., so there’s plenty of locals available to fill those positions. Companies are allotted a fixed amount of work visas and it’s not a great use of that limited resource to apply the visa in a job area with a high volume of qualified, local candidates.
I think a broader business background that is not so intricately linked to U.S. accounting and finance could be helpful. If you work in marketing, the Chinese or Japanese company may need someone who can create ads in English to promote a product, destination, or hotel to English speaking customers. If you work in sales, those same companies may need someone with English language skills to sell in foreign countries. There’s thousands of Asians that can perform U.S. SOX accounting procedures but create an ad directed towards American travelers? The local populace lacks that skillset. If the skillset is lacking, the company will be more likely to use a visa on the position.
An important note about finding a job in Asia…be aware of Chinese New Year dates. Asian companies pay annual bonuses off the Chinese New Year date, not the calendar year end. I was told that’s a disadvantage because it means there are fewer job openings since no one leaves a company during the final three months of the year and the first two months of the next year. Then after the bonuses are paid it’s a massive game of employment musical chairs. Or that could be an advantage if a company desperately needs to hire someone and nobody is moving because they are waiting for their year-end bonus. The worst situation is that companies lead you on…and on…and on during that five month period.
The fourth quarter of a fiscal year is slow for hiring in general. Beyond employees not leaving because they want to collect their bonus, companies are trying to hit their annual earnings targets. If a division, department, or company is slightly behind their annual forecast, the easiest lever to pull and reduce expenses, is to simply not hire additional employees when there’s a vacancy. I worked at companies with unwritten rules that stated no hiring in the fourth quarter. If someone left the company at the end of Q3 or during Q4, management’s view was “grind it out and maybe we’ll let you hire a replacement at the start of the next fiscal year.”
THE PRACTICALITIES OF THE JOB SEARCH
So conceptually you say “ok, let’s do this.” Here’s a practical job execution strategy that relies on a combination of luck and perseverance. The luck is that the person on the receiving end of your resume has a reaction to your application. Luck is sitting next to the right person at the bar or meeting the right person at a business event. The perseverance is casting as wide a net as possible, applying to hundreds of jobs, visiting bars in business districts during happy hours, and attending business events.
RESUME / CV CLEANUP
If you did not purchase a local SIM card and obtain a local phone number when you first arrived in the country, now is the time to do so. Update your resume with the local number and the hostel’s physical address. Major international cities draw thousands of applicants for a single job posting. Dubai. Tokyo. Hong Kong. New York City. I wager that 75% of the people applying for jobs in these cities, don’t live within a thousand miles of those cities and create noise that drowns out your application. Rise above the initial noise with local contact information so you pass the first automated cut.
If you are an American, you will need to turn your resume into a curriculum vitae (“CV”). CVs are longer in length than a resume because a paragraph or two describing your work experience is included above the job description bullet points. Use Google to find a clean CV format. Or for $30 a freelancer on www.fiverr.com will clean up your resume and convert it to a CV.
Update your social media presence—privatize your Facebook account and add current information to LinkedIn (if you don’t have a LinkedIn account, create one). Update your LinkedIn profile for the country where you are applying for jobs—this will lead to more country specific openings in your search results. Consider obtaining a professional headshot for your LinkedIn profile. Subscribe to LinkedIn’s premium membership package, which will provide more insight into the qualifications of other job applicants, where other applicants are located, and salary ranges.
ORGANIZE THE JOB SEARCH
I created a master spreadsheet to track my job applications. I applied to over five hundred jobs. I saved PDFs of the job requisitions and used a numbering system that linked the spreadsheet file to the PDF. This way I retained a reference to the job description later in the recruitment process. With the spreadsheet I could also track all the username and passwords I generated when creating a user profile on each company’s job site. To minimize the volume of username and passwords I used the first part, the non-extension part of my email address as my username (some job sites default to this username) and a password with strong encryption settings (upper, lower, number, special character, 12 characters in length) so I didn’t need a different password for each company.
SEARCHING FOR JOBS
Job boards, like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Monster, are the obvious place to start the job search. While reviewing job boards it should be evident which postings are directly from a company and which are posted by a recruiting agency. Visit the recruiting agencies’ websites and apply for the jobs through their website. Within a day or two a recruiter should contact you to setup a meeting at their office. If no one at the recruiting agencies contact you, that’s an ominous sign. In Hong Kong I met with three recruiters in the first two weeks. In Singapore none over three months. I should have known after two weeks I wouldn’t make any employment progress in Singapore.
In addition to job boards I performed Google searches to identify U.S. Fortune 500 companies operating in my job search locations—specifically which companies located their Asian headquarters in Hong Kong and Singapore. I then visited those companies’ websites and filtered for jobs in Hong Kong and Singapore.
I tried every job search technique possible. I hand delivered resumes, sometimes in a suit. I prepared an information package, which included a personal background and professional summary with career highlights, then found local printers to create color copies, then delivered those copies. Many of the buildings I visited did not have security in the lobby making it possible to reach a company’s front desk reception. I’m not sure how well the hand deliveries worked. Out of over one hundred deliveries only one person came out and talked. I did not receive any other acknowledgement of the information packages.
A benefit of the hand deliveries was that the office building lobbies had a directory of companies operating in the building. I took a photo of the directory and after returning to the hostel, I searched for job openings at those companies.
Be prepared to get discouraged. The job search is an incredibly frustrating process. It’s rejection after rejection after rejection. There’s little rhyme or reason to the job market in general and over analyzing the specifics in a foreign country will only drive you insane. Don’t believe the hype stories. Nobody disembarks a plane and two hours later has a job. People have connections and contacts. They have someone who helped them through the door. That doesn’t make for a good story.
If you are in a major city, chances are high there is a local chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce or similar professional organization. Search for events at these organizations and hope to find an event with a low entrance fee. Arrive early to meet the event organizers who are also likely to be the organization’s executives and may have connections that can help you.
International job searches are cliquey and the cliques look out for one another. Americans have a mindset, particularly in the corporate world, that talent evaluations aren’t any more complicated than if you are the best person, you’re hired. As such, expatriate Americans won’t go out of their way to look out for other Americans. If an American shows up at an American company’s foreign office, there’s no hiring advantage for the American. The rest of the world does not operate that way. Europeans, working at an American company in Singapore will be more interested if you are European, than an American. Australians will hire the Australian. There’s something off putting about a South African living in London saying you aren’t qualified to work at a major U.S. media company in Hong Kong even though you previously consolidated international channel segments while working for a major U.S. media company. Europeans, Canadians, and Australians seem to collectively lack the self-awareness associated with working for an American company in a foreign country. They have no problem telling an American that they lack Asian experience and being oblivious to the fact that they, as a European working for an American company in Hong Kong, obviously lacked Asian experience at some point. Don’t get discouraged.
Beyond the cliques, bilateral working holiday programs exist between many countries throughout the world. These programs allow young travelers (the programs typically have an age restriction of 30 to 35 for applicants) to find employment without arranging for an employment visa through an employer. This makes it easier to find employment. For example, Japan’s working holiday program allows citizens of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Argentina, Chile, and several other countries to obtain employment through a streamlined working holiday visa process. These bilateral arrangements are reciprocal in nature, meaning that a Japanese worker may obtain a working holiday visa in each of these countries that Japan grants the visa too. These countries have agreements with one another making it easier for young workers from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to move between countries and quickly find employment. The major economic power, global leader that is conspicuously absent from many working holiday programs? The U.S. The U.S. has working holiday program agreements with Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. When you read the details on these visa programs you will see these programs are more restrictive (must be a student, must have $5,000 in savings, etc.) than the others. This places Americans at a distinct advantage when applying for jobs in foreign countries, even if that job is with an American company. If you are a thirty-five year old American wondering why the twenty-eight year old Australian with less experience is more successful with their job search than you…it likely has to do with the visa holiday program.
DO YOU TAKE ANY JOB?
As much as I wanted a job in Hong Kong or Singapore there were certain companies and industries, I had no interest in joining. I turned down an interview with a company that was a pyramid sales scheme. After traveling through Asia and understanding the importance of familial relationships, I didn’t want to be a part of a company that uses families and friends to sell products to one another. I had a chance to interview with a casino company that was expanding operations into Cambodia. I passed.
PART-TIME WORK
It is possible to find part-time work in any country. Part-time work such as fruit picking, stomping grapes to make wine, and similar seasonal employment activities exists for those seeking to extend their travel through any means possible. No country is issuing work visas for host/hostess and waiters/waitresses yet you’ll see plenty of foreigners working in these positions. Owners will pay you cash to stand outside a store holding a sign. These jobs will cover your daily living expenses.
I gave the job search nine months—six months in Hong Kong and three months in Singapore. I have no idea how I was not able to find a job. I would have continued the job search until my funds ran out except for the fact my girlfriend, who later became my wife, was heading to the U.S. I would have eventually fallen back on part-time work to scrape by until a more professional opportunity manifested.
I returned home in June 2015 and within a month landed a job better than any of those I applied for in Hong Kong or Singapore. I’m working in an industry I love, at a company I love. My quality of life in the U.S. is better than if I had worked and lived internationally. Since June 2015 I haven’t given international employment a second thought, although if I somehow received an unsolicited offer for a finance position in Hong Kong, I’m not sure I’d ignore the offer.
I returned home in June 2015 and within a month landed a job better than any of those I applied for in Hong Kong or Singapore. I’m working in an industry I love, at a company I love. My quality of life in the U.S. is better than if I had worked and lived internationally. Since June 2015 I haven’t given international employment a second thought, although if I somehow received an unsolicited offer for a finance position in Hong Kong, I’m not sure I’d ignore the offer.