How to Prepare for an Overseas Job Move 6–12 Months Before You Apply
You need to do research, start warming your market up and make a name online before you apply for a relocation-friendly job.
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Most candidates treat relocating for work like a standard job search, just with a flight to another country at the end of it. They wait until they are “ready,” polish their resume, and then start mass applying to roles that offer relocation to Germany, Canada, or Spain.
But there’s a mistake hidden in this process. And the candidates will notice this mistake when they start stacking up their rejection emails.
The mistake is that, even before you apply to a relocation-friendly job, you need to get yourself and your profile ready for the local market (I call this “warming it up”). Matter of fact, you should prepare for an overseas job move 6–12 months before you apply.
I recently caught up with Eli Gündüz, Principal Tech Recruiter at Atlassian and founder of Careersy Coaching, to discuss what actually works for candidates who want to move abroad. As you can expect, we agreed on one core truth: the most successful candidates start building their runway 6 to 12 months before they ever send a single application.
Why so much preparation? Because when you plan to relocate, you’re missing out on your local network
If you wait until you need the job to start looking, you are already behind because you’re forgetting that you’re not playing under the same conditions as you are at home.
This is not like applying for a job in a market you know about. In a local search, you have a network, you know the market, and employers recognize your previous companies. You might even have a friend here or there who can refer you.
When you move abroad, you lose those advantages. It sounds a bit coarse to say it like this, but remember: you’re entering a new ecosystem where no one knows you, trusts you, or understands your background. (Unless you purposely connect with someone who’s from the same place as you are.)
That’s why you have to treat an overseas job as a market-entry challenge. And a challenge, any challenge, requires preparation!
Researching your market and warming up to it is more productive than mass-sending CVs
If you want to relocate and find a job abroad, you can divide your preparation into two distinct buckets: