Want to find a job abroad? Learn how to search

One of the key challenges for businesses across the globe is to find talented people to hire. It is often referred to as the war for talent, and businesses put huge resources and energy into winning it.

This war is about talent pools, candidate pipelines, talent acquisition, job boards, demand forecasting, search-engine optimisation, employee-referral programmes and much more. This should be good news for candidates searching for employers that can not only offer them better opportunities but also help them discover better career options and rewards.

When the pressure is on to find new employment, we can choose to dwell on the failings of our political leadership and blame the recession or to focus on the task of finding a new job. If we choose the second option we then have a further choice: to accept any job or to seek one that takes us a step closer along our career path.

The latter means we might have to look farther afield, perhaps abroad. Choosing to work overseas brings a degree of risk while opening up a world of experiences and personal rewards. Deciding which country to go to and what job to take is crucial, and not just for the short term. There may come a time when you want to return home or move elsewhere; the choices you make now can have serious implications on your options in the future.

Experienced job searchers know they are more likely to succeed when they are supported by a well-written CV, strong interview skills and reliable job-market information. But nothing happens unless you can apply effective job-search skills. The challenge is to locate exactly what jobs are out there, as well as to identify employers of interest, especially those that are hiring staff.

Search engines help us to find the job information we need, but, given the vastness of the information available, an even better option is to use metasearch engines. Metasearch engines, or aggregators, search multiple other search engines simultaneously. They offer more comprehensive results than can be the case if you use only one search engine, such as google.ie, aol.com, ask.com, bing.com, exalead.com, yahoo.com and zuula.com.

The metasearch engines I use are dogpile.com, indeed.com, ixquick.com and opentext.com. (For OpenText go to fqs.opentext.com; to locate the search box, when the page opens go to Demos, thenWeb Search.) Others include polymeta.com and webcrawler.com. Dogpile and Indeed are uniquely designed to search job boards.

Brush up your Booleans

To get the best search results, use both Google and Boolean search operators. So if you’re a project manager with expertise in construction, civil and electrical engineering and looking for work in Canada, preferably in Toronto or Vancouver, the search string would look like this: (“project manager” or “programme manager” or “program manager”) and civil and construction and electrical and (jobs or careers) and Canada and (Toronto or Vancouver) – “piping engineer”. To exclude results containing unwanted words, add the minus sign: -“piping engineer”.

Bear in mind, too, when searching in North America that they spell some words differently from us, so try to include both versions in your search terms, as I have done above with the word “programme”. In addition, if you are including keywords in your CV be sure to add them in too. Some other words to be aware of are “centre” and “defence”, which in North America become center and defense.

If online searching for live vacancies doesn’t help, try identifying employers and agencies. The best way to do this is to search using generic industry job titles. Another option is to use core job titles. For example, every company in the world has accountants, managers, directors, administrators, and sales and marketing people. So targeting Canada and using a simple search string such as “accountant and (jobs or careers) and Canada”, I located a number of interesting companies.

One was Liebherr, an employer of 39,000 people in 48 countries, and involved in multiple industries. When I looked it was recruiting more than 500 people in 13 countries, among them Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK and the US. It says on the careers section of its website that it welcomes speculative applications. “Convince us of your skills – even if there is no specific vacancy. If we think you have something to offer, we’ll be in touch.” This is an established practice at most companies.

Keep searching

When you discover a company of interest, don’t just stop there: continue your search and locate as many similar organisations as you can.

The best way to do this is to use the “related:” command, like this: related:liebherr.com. When I searched using the term related:liebherr.com Google returned more than 50 results, and many of the companies it listed were recruiting.

If you wish to explore a specific company use the “site:” search command. Recruiters often refer to this as X-raying. Let’s look at Ryanair, for example; to search for pilot roles, the search string will look like this: pilot and site:Ryanair.com and (jobs or careers). When I tried this search it generated more than 600 results; these are not all vacancies but are web pages with the word “pilot” and “jobs” or “careers” in the text of each document.

Along with these search activities, it is important to upload your CV to job boards and websites. You can choose to have it visible, and therefore available to recruiters to view and download when they wish, or you can keep it hidden and just have it there, so that you can conveniently submit it when applying for jobs online.

Then, when travelling or temporarily unable to access your equipment; you can continue to access your CV and submit applications remotely from your phone or any computer.

Target employers

Tedious as it may seem, and especially if you are looking for work overseas, I recommend that you create a system of folders and spreadsheets around your job search, to accommodate copies of your documents, versions of your CV and spreadsheets for your preferred search strings, search engines, job boards and target list of employers and agencies.

This keeps all your key documents and information in one place and gives you the resources to respond quickly to requests from recruiters and other key people during the hiring process.

Above all, good search-string know-how is one of the keys to success. Few people use them to their full potential, yet, with practice, job searchers can gain a huge advantage over other applicants.

Matthew Cunningham has more than 30 years' experience in international recruitment and is the author of How to Find Work Overseas