Silence and Not Hearing Back to a Job Application

This is an audio topic published as part of the Meetup on working overseas.

So it's different when you're looking for a job in your home country. Of course, you're the target of most of the job offers. Most employers and recruiters or people that are hiring can evaluate the credentials and get back to you or not get back to you. Silence is still a problem when you're looking for a job, even in your home market, but you'll get recruiters and other people who want to assess your credentials, who want to reach out and talk to you and figure out if you're a fit for the job.

And it's just a short call away or an email and then they try to set up a time to talk (in your home country). However, when you're applying for a job overseas, first, the job might not distinguish between overseas and domestic candidates. Two, you have to try to figure out, are they looking for overseas candidates if they are looking for overseas candidates?

Yeah. Is it listed? How they're going to reach out? Or if they are? Many companies won't. So you get silence without knowing whether you're considered and what was wrong. You don't get any feedback. So where it's possible if you can travel to a country and talk to recruiters. Yeah, That would be great to get feedback. It's expensive to do. And certainly in the age of COVID-19, it's almost too expensive to even think about. But if you're open to doing that, for example traveling to a country like Singapore from somewhere in Asia, and if they allow that and as long as you obey the quarantine rules, you could go there and meet with a recruiter to talk about it.

But failing that, given all the restrictions, you could call them up, you could reach out via email. You have to be much more proactive when you're looking for a job overseas than when you're in your home market. Also, again, the issue with working overseas is the jobs are not the same in many cases as the ones you've been doing up to now. There are skills that can be in common, but you have to be able to show those skills and not focus so much on the job title.

If you're worried about whether you can do the job, you know, that's something you can look for jobs that have different job titles and just send over your resume and focus on the skills rather than the job titles you've done before, and you can follow up with a call and you can follow up with emails. But again, it's almost as if you're a different person when you apply for jobs overseas, you have to be more proactive necessarily than when you're applying for a job in your home market.