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Candidate Experience

7 Things we’ve learned in 2019 about relocating to Canada

Adeline Ionescu

June 23, 2020

2019 has been an amazing year for us, succeeding in helping people from all across the world relocate to Canada. Some of the countries our Community Members came from are Belarus, Ukraine, India, South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, and Zimbabwe. We managed to create a multicultural community that we very much love. 

Our goal has always been to help Canadian companies connect with the world’s top talents, match the right people with the right company and make the process as smooth as possible on both sides. We are continuously learning, but this year we have been able to fix a lot of large gaps in the process of completing people’s journeys overseas. 

Recently, we had the last webinar of 2019, in which we discussed our learnings regarding Tech Talent Recruitment and some of our community members asked us about the things they are the most concerned about. This article highlights some of the topics we tackled during the webinar. For more details and information, you can listen to the session here:

Learnings

1. The seriousness of the candidate is essential.

If you are willing to shift your life into a new place and gather all the necessary documents to relocate to Canada, you also need to be ready to prepare for the interview that will make this possible. Understanding the fact that the North American process is different from what you previously experimented with and preparing properly will make your goal achievable. 

What we learned this year is that it seems to be a lot of underestimation in terms of how difficult interviews are, and how in-depth companies go when evaluating what you do on a test. We have seen many highly-skilled developers who didn’t pass the interview process due to not understanding what the Canadian employers were asking for, but more importantly, due to not preparing for the interview.

Don’t just take it lightly, feeling like it’s a task you need to get done. Try thinking that “This is the only way that a company can get a glimpse of how I think, how I work, how creative I am, how engaging I am and how good of a problem-solver I am” - You usually have only an hour, maximum two to show that.

No matter how good you are, you have to practice for this.

2. You have to treat a virtual interview the same way you would treat an in-person interview.

Being on time, what you’re wearing, and the environment you are going to take the interview in, are some crucial aspects you should consider when having an online interview. 

Tips:

  • Find a quiet place where you can have your interview
  • Don’t let anything laying around to distract you 
  • Make sure you’re early to the meeting 
  • Use WorldTimeBuddy or a similar time zone app to be sure that you’ll make it up on time 
  • Test your equipment to avoid any technical issues

This year, we’ve had a few people messing up time-zones and asking for a second chance. Usually, if a candidate misses their interview, the company doesn’t give them another shot. This is because we’re talking about an environment that wants to move fast, hire the right people, and a lot of valuable time is taken from the engineering teams to do interviews. 

3. What employers are looking for in our community are people who are highly motivated to come to Canada. 

The companies we are working with are not looking for worker bees. The people we helped moving to Canada invested and continuously spent time into being the best of the best in their field, being genuinely interested in the development of their industry.

If your only motivation to get a job is to come to Canada, and you are willing to take any job to relocate, we’re sorry to break it to you: it will not work. Our hiring partners are looking for someone motivated by the fact that they want to work with them (or are passionate about what the company does). Therefore, these kinds of people are bound to succeed in the long-term and get hired. 

4. What is going to help you rise to the top and bring you more interviews is presenting your background as clear as possible.

Start with including key insights about the company you are working with and projects you have worked on in your resume. Keep in mind that not everyone has time to research the company you work with, figure out the tech stack, or what your role was in the team. Try to be more specific about yourself, what did you do and what you were able to achieve in the previous job, to make your resume more appealing for the employers in order to get more interviews.

An important thing to keep in mind is that you have more chances to relocate if you are well-rounded in terms of technical background, and aspire to master the language you chose to work with. Bringing up the right kind of experience from your past is also essential, as you should clearly explain what you have done in the previous companies. 

We do our best to get you in front of companies, but there are a couple of things that you need to address yourself and help us out with:

  1. People outside of your ecosystem might not fully understand the types of companies that you’ve been working with in your country. As we already mentioned, it's your job to showcase your previous work and the impact it brought.
  2. If you have been jumping from one job to another, it is essential to explain to us the reason. As long as you can provide clear information about it, it’s easy for us to forward it. It’s going to come up anyway.
5. A few common things we observed in most of the candidates that successfully passed the interviews are: 
  • Showing curiosity and interest
  • The hunger for constant learning
  • Experience with working in different backgrounds
  • Being able to communicate across different cultures
  • Demonstrating Technical leadership
  • Strong communication skills (the ability to communicate an idea, what it is that you’re trying to suggest about a product) - As the employers are looking for feedback
  • Understanding how to work in a very collaborative and fast-paced environment
6. How to market yourself in the best way:
  • Whether you worked with various languages/tools or worked extendedly with only a few, the most important thing is to show what you built and achieved. And by that, we mean YOU, not the entire company.
  • During the interview, share impressive achievements or learnings (related to your work-life)
  • Fix your Linkedin and Github profiles. We’ve seen a lot of recruiters checking up the candidates on these two.
  • Understand what the Interview Process looks like, and start preparing accordingly. Here’s an article where we detailed on how the Interview Process usually looks like. 
7. Why 2020 is the best year to relocate to Canada

First of all, the demand for Tech workers is starting to rise and companies start settling in Canada. An ICTC research from last year shows that there is a major shortage of tech professionals in Canada. 

Also, the Canadian Ecosystem doesn’t have a lot of Senior Tech Talent, and neither developers with experience in working on products at scale. There are many incredible developers, but unfortunately don’t rise above Junior experience. Hence the accelerated need for more talented techies. 

Bonus
8. We make relocation super easier for you

Being part of our community means that your journey to Canada is carefully supervised by a team of professionals united by the same goal. 

We will lend a hand by helping you create an amazing resume, do all the job hunting for you, arrange your interviews, negotiate the offer and also help with both immigration and relocation process.

We never wanted to create a recruiting company. We want to create a new industry, which is an intersection between recruitment, immigration, and relocation. 

We spent the last two years learning and innovating as a team, and we are really excited for 2020 because, among other surprises, we will be launching a "Mentorship Program" with the help of our existing alumni. This program is our way to help you seize the opportunity we are seeing, prepare you a little bit better for your interviews, and help you land your dream job.

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