In May 2023, I landed Toronto, looking for a job. I am developer with 2 years of foreign working experience, self-taught, female, Asian, non-native English speaker. As of 31 Jan 2024, the data is as followed:
Application sent: 1686
Interview: 20 companies
To the final round: 4 companies
CV version: 7
Duration of job search: 4 months (July - present)
So after 7 months (first two months was travelling and settling down), I still haven’t landed a job. What weng wrong?
Self-taught, female, Asian, non-native English speaker, foreign working experience – I don’t think any of these tags stood in my way to the footstep given I was able to get so many interviews, but they did make me have to do harder to finally open the door.
Here is the lesson learnt and the stories
- Overprepared and prepare for the worst In an interview, there are two things that I don’t want to happen – question that I don’t know how answer and awkward silence. To deal with the first situation is easy. Google all the general question, analyse the job description and list out the characters that the team/ company are most likely looking for and prepare a story for it.
For example, for a software developer, the ideal canadidates should have the following qualities:
- Ability to solve a problem
- Seek help and support each other
- Learn things fast
- Curosity
Have some stories that can demo these qualities and also prepared for the common question like why you want to join this company. These should give you a pass in most scenario.
The awkward silence is the harder part. In recent two interviews, this happened to me. It was technical interviews and the interviewer obviouisly came underprepared. They prepared some extremely easy coding questions that I solved within 5 minutes. Afterward, they just sat in there waiting for me to ask the questions, which I actually have most of the information I wanted to know in the last round of the interview. So for half of the interview, no one knew what to do. And there was just silence. I was prepared to have to ask questions for 30 minutes and their answers weren’t giving me much context to extend the questions.
Surely, the interviewers weren’t being responsible, given they didn’t show the intension to try to know me and also the technical challenge was useless to differentiate the coding skills among candidates. I was underprepared for on the questions part too.
In any interview, we should prepare to ask question that we want to know and also able to sell ourselves, which lead us to the second point
- SELL, SELL, SELL In any interview, our job is to show the interviewers how we are the right fit and how much we are interested in the job. We want to tell stories to show that we are really good at problem solving, how we are good doing at XYZ. The opportunity comes from not only answering the questions but asking the questions. By asking business/ team specific questions, it shows that you did your research and you are interested. By responding to the asnwer, you earn another opportunity to sell yourself with your own story.
We NEED to make our merits/ how we are a good fit as obvious as possible. Point to the JD and say we have this quality, we did this before!
- Relax and wait for luck to knock on your door If you did your preparation and performed well in the interview, just wait. There are too many things that are out of your control. Luck I would say is really the number one factor.
I was once interviewed with a company. It took me entire 2 weeks and interviewed 6 different people. Finally, I met the CEO and got the rejected letter. Later on, when I sat down and talked to the HR, he hinted that I got screen out because I was holding an work permit and was considered less stable comparing to other candidates. Nothing I can say.
Back to those tags, are they getting on my way? Yes. Could they not be overcome? Of course not. But I do have to work harder than others. This is the challenge I have to accept when I decided to move to here and I am not gonna give up until luck knocks on my door.