Multilingual jobs in London
After making that big decision to jump into the unknown and relocate to what many call the capital of Europe, how do you actually go about finding a job in London when you arrive from overseas?
We asked some of our multilingual candidates a few questions about how they found the London multilingual job market and what advice they could give to new arrivals.
Everyone had their own individual way of starting out, depending on whether they are brand new to the job market or already had some previous experience in their home country. Many of our candidates worked closely with recruitment agencies, others relied on job boards and a number took the first role they could find, to gain some London based experience.
Many job seekers ask us whether they should focus on using their language skills? That fully depends on the languages on offer. Whilst some languages are much sought after, others are very common (e.g. French, Spanish, German) and the London market seems to be saturated with those skills. A more deciding factor in finding a good role seems to be the skills you have acquired from previous work experience.
All candidates we spoke to used job boards but with mixed results. The larger job sites (Monster, Totaljobs etc) have a constant large flow of new CVs so they highlighted the importance to make a cv stand out in terms of clarity and focus. Some candidates who had decided to focus on a specific sector used specialized job boards for their industry. Generally speaking it would seem that job boards were a good tool, but the overall view was that this should have been used in conjunction with using the services or a recruitment agency or sending out cvs directly.
Finding the right role is not usually easy, but what are the main challenges for multilingual candidates?
Interviewing in a language that is not your own seems to be a concern for quite a few people. Interviews are stressful at the best of times and in stressful situations it is easy to get lost in translation.
Another challenge is related to the pool of available candidates in London. This city has a large concentration of educated people who are looking for a role, and this tends to result in a large number of applications for any vacancy. This can impact candidates in the sense that they will need to send out a much larger number of applications than they originally anticipated in order to get a handful of interviews.
So how can you prepare for these challenges? According to our candidates, research and preparation are the keywords. Research what industry or sector you want to focus on, look into the recruitment agencies that specifically recruit for your sector and their way of working, research the roles you want to apply for and how you can best bring across what you can bring to the role, and last but not least, prepare for interviews by researching thoroughly. Once you have done all this you will be much better prepared to go through all the steps of a recruitment process.
Would our candidates do anything differently if they could start all over again? If anything it seems they would focus on the roles they are interested in, and then use all the available tools to go for those roles. But most of our candidates are simply proud of what they have achieved. Relocating is very daunting but the rewards of finding a challenging role in a foreign job market are plentiful.
What advice do our candidates have for new arrivals? Be true to yourself and your needs, prepare and research, and focus. But most of all: be patient. If your first role in London is not what you always dreamed of, it doesn't mean you should lose hope. Keep your eyes and ears wide open for opportunities and work on your skills. The right role for you is somewhere out there.
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