How to Win

Jobs & Influence Germans

The Expat’s Guide to a Career in Germany

Chris Pyak

Copyright © 2017 Chris Pyak

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-3-9818935-0-2

ISBN: 3981893502

For Jan, Dominik & Tim

I am an immigrant into your country. You are natives of this foreign land: the future. My goal is to contribute to your home and to make it enjoyable, safe, and wealthy.

The future belongs to you, my children.

Contents

Is This Book for You?

Testimonials

About the Author

Three Mistakes that Kill Your Job Application—Instantly

Never Leave, but Still Wake Up in a Foreign Country.

Back to the Future IV

The Immigrant Spirit

Part Zero: Checkmate

English Jobs versus German Jobs

You Are Not Alone

The Scale

Strength, Not Weakness

Excuse My French: About Language

Beyond the Bratwurst: The Cultural Challenge in a Professional Context

The Deeper Meaning of Punctuality

The Six Dimensions of Culture

Five Ways to Build Sympathy in Foreign Cultures

Legal Requirements, Visas, and the Value of Your University Degree.

Your Work Experience Counts Nothing

German Angst

Two Roads to Rome and One to Phantasialand

Part One: the Standard Application Process

The Perfect CV in Germany

The Perfect Cover Letter in Germany

Fix Your Job Hunt Problem in One Sentence.

“The One Where You Find A Job”—You & the Cast of Friends

Finding Rachel, the Incredible Research Tool that Guarantees that You Address Exactly the Biggest Needs of Each Specific Employer—Every Single Time.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales & Job Descriptions

Reverse Engineer Your Next Employment

Learn How to Ride a Bike

From Zero to Awesome: Nineteen Steps to Your Next Job.

Bonus: How to Deal with the Mother of All Objections: “You Don’t Speak German?”...…………………….

Part Two: Recommendations

New Friends, Old Friends, and a Kind Word that Leads to a New Job

You Know More People than You Know

Friends and Favours

How to Ask for Favours and Introductions

How to Turn Promises into Deeds

Finding the Hidden Door into Your Dream Company

How I Use My Professional Network

What’s Next?

Acknowledgments

Many good people have guided and supported me over the years, but no one more than the woman on my side—the one who is as strong as I am, the one who challenges me every single day. Thinking of the decades to come, I cannot help but smile. Seven years are just the start.

I love you, Evgenia.

Is This Book for You?

If you are an international professional looking for your first job in Germany, this book is literally for you. All the examples and experiences I share are from German companies that hire—or don’t hire—international professionals. The strategies in this book have served hundreds of expats before you. They will also work for you. You will find a clear path towards your first job in Germany.

If you are a professional looking for a new challenge in a different foreign country, this book will be very useful for you too. Frank Sinatra believes that you can “make it anywhere” if you can make it in New York, but I strongly disagree; the Big Apple is a “playground on a sunny afternoon” compared to Germany.

The reasons for this will become obvious in this book. Once you understand the strategies that will get you a successful career in Germany, it will be easier for you to get a job anywhere in the world (including New York, dear Frank).

If you grew up in Germany, this book will also help you. To be frank, our home country makes it very hard for everyone who isn’t “ISO normed.” I only truly understood this after I had lived abroad for ten years and worked in six different countries and four different cultures. The pressure to fit in is enormous, both in society and business. If you deviate from the norm, then the first instinct for too many HR managers will be to cast you out.

“Her degree is from a foreign university. I cannot evaluate her education.”

“He is fifty years old. He will be too expensive, and can he even keep up with new developments at his age?”

“She is exactly the right fit, but she just got married. She might want children very soon.”

All this leads to “Better not take a risk”—and you are out.

In How to Win Jobs & Influence Germans, I discuss strategies that helped me build a successful career over twenty-seven years, even though I never fit into “the norm.” (Actually, I found that the wish to fit in ultimately led to my worst career decisions.)

This book will help you build a fulfilling and well-paid career by being human and not a tool.

Are you an employer, HR manager, or head-hunter? I invite you to take a journey into the world of international professionals and experience the job market through their eyes. You will earn the money you spent on this book thousand fold. You will discover a market of highly skilled, experienced, and motivated professionals who are overseen and undervalued—and who will be happy to join your team.

Some of my clients are well-known companies including trivago, Teamviewer, and Trusted Shops, and NGOs like the Red Cross, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, or the Forest Stewardship Council. Because they do one thing differently than most other German employers, these organisations get literally thousands of job applications without much effort.

After reading this book, you will understand:

- the job market in Germany,

- your position in this market in relation to all other candidates,

- the megatrends that influence your success rate,

- the decision makers who are involved in your employment,

- their motivation,

- the ethical foundation for your success, and

- the practical tools for your success and how to use them.

In short: in the first half of the book, you will get a crystal-clear idea about the market you are about to enter, as well as its challenges and opportunities.

In the second half of the book, you will find step-by-step instructions on how to get job interviews in Germany (or any other alien job market) while staying true to yourself and getting the best possible salary at the same time.

You will be able to build a successful career by being true to yourself.

Testimonials

“Hi Chris, I wanted to let you know that I’m enjoying my new job at the GIZ :)
Interesting projects and a friendly international team!
Thank you again for your invaluable coaching and support!”

Samantha Ölz,
Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit

“The series of seminars with Chris Pyak was a full success.
More than 90 percent of participants rated the seminar as a full success
and recommended the trainer for future seminars.”

Martin Wilhelm,
strategy and organisation at Trivago, GmbH

“It was genius how fast you understood the situation.
At times, I felt like you were my colleague
—because you understood the internal challenges so well.”

Nidal Sultana, controller

“Thank you so much for your help and guidance,
which has led me grab three interviews for the past five applications
I made to companies in Europe and especially Germany.”

Abhineet Narang

“Being from North America, I was unfamiliar with the interview process in Germany.
With Chris’s help, I was able to identify what I really wanted
and how to quickly determine what potential employers are looking for.
I am grateful for the support, learned a lot, and was successful in finding my next career step.”

Vanessa Burnand, Airbus

About the Author

Chris Pyak is managing director of Immigrant Spirit GmbH. Chris has worked in six different countries and led teams in four different cultures.

In 2011, Chris returned to Germany. In 2013, he created Immigrant Spirit GmbH in order to bring the brightest and most motivated talents in the world to his home country. Over the years, Chris has worked with over five hundred HR managers, hiring managers, and CEOs, to whom he introduced international talent from all over the world and a wide variety of professions.

The client list of Immigrant Spirit GmbH includes organisations like trivago, Home24, InnoGames, and the German Red Cross. Over the years, Chris has finished projects for Microsoft, Lycos, Onvista, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and many other companies.

Chris Pyak also works directly with individuals. The Immigrant Spirit Contributors, a select group of international professionals, are his former clients. Their commitment to develop their careers, contribute to their employers’ business goals, and make a positive impact to our society is outstanding.

The real-life experiences and best practices of thousands of international professionals and hundreds of German employers provided the foundation for this book.

Three Mistakes that Kill Your Job Application—Instantly

In the majority of the book, we will talk about ways to get job interviews. But let me start by sharing three common mistakes that will kill your job application instantly. Avoid them, so that you don’t waste your time—or mine.

1. You Don’t Take the Time to Make Your Application Worth Mine

It is 9:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. The fresh coffee in my mug is just what I need to get started on my day as a hiring manager. I open my inbox, and it’s stuffed with new e-mails. Your application is just one of them. Your first challenge is to stand out from the crowd.

I will scan through the headlines, to see if anything interesting catches my eye. Then I will start again at the top and open each of the messages. I will glance at the first paragraph and make a decision: reject or review? “Reject” is my default decision. Your second challenge: give me a reason why I should spend time with your application.

German HR managers spend an average of seven to twelve seconds with each CV. This is no surprise. If you recruit for a well-known company or you offer jobs in English, then you must sort through hundreds of applications. Most of them will be rejected. They will not even get an answer.

Why? Most jobseekers send the very same standard application to each employer. There is a name for identical mass mailings to hundreds of people: it’s called spam.

If you send a job application that is badly prepared, generic, or clearly shows that you haven’t spent one second trying to understand the company, the job, and the goals, you are wasting the HR manager’s time. We don’t respond well to that. Actually, we don’t respond at all.

Later in the book we will write an application that will get the HR manager’s full attention—and make you stand out from the crowd.

2. You Don’t Take the Time to Know the Local Market

I have much more sympathy for the second mistake that many expats make in their job hunt. They apply mostly for the big brand names like trivago, Henkel, BMW, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, and so on.

This is understandable, since many of you have been working for brand names in your home country or on other assignments around the world. Why is applying mostly to the “top forty” companies a problem? Surprisingly, the answer has to do with peas. In 1896, Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, made a surprising discovery in his garden: 80 percent of his peas came from just 20 percent of his peapods. Later, Vilfredo wrote a paper about this surprising fact. This 80/20 rule became known as the Pareto Principle. (That would also make a good title for a Dan Brown novel, don’t you think?)

The Pareto Principle holds true for jobseekers as well: 80 percent of candidates apply with just a small number of companies. It’s not even the top 20 percent of companies; it’s the top forty companies.

One of my clients is trivago in Düsseldorf. Its employees speak English at work, trivago is a well-known company, and Düsseldorf is a fairly big city. Combine these three factors, and you understand how attractive trivago is as an employer. (They have a wonderful business culture and beautiful offices as well.)

How many job applications do you think trivago gets every month?

a)      40

b)      400

c)      4,000

d)      40,000

The correct answer is d: forty thousand. In the three years I have been working with trivago, they created six hundred new jobs. At the same time, they got over forty thousand job applications every single month. Do you realise how big your competition is when you apply for a job with a brand name?

Please take a moment to let the full consequences of these proportions sink in. For each position they offer, trivago gets at least eight hundred candidates—and you must be better than 799 of them.

I understand that you’d rather work for BMW in Munich than for Mike’s Garage in Little Town. If you love big corporations, I encourage you to go for it—but have a plan B as well. There are 340,000 companies with more than ten employees in Germany, and many have great products and services. But they don’t get lots of applications because they don’t own a brand name.

Jobseekers also prefer companies in big cities. Adidas is known all around the world, but since they are in a tiny city named Herzogenaurach, they sometimes struggle to attract top talent, as Vicki Ng, who runs Adidas’s Make Your Move campaign told me.

3. You Don’t Believe in Yourself

The last mistake is really sad. I see this behaviour with expatriates after they have been living in Germany for some time. They came to Germany full of hope—and they face only rejection, rejection, rejection. After a year or two and after hundreds of applications, they start to doubt everything: their education, their life achievements, their self-value.

This really breaks my heart. I’ve met women who had degrees from Berkeley and from Cambridge, professionals who worked for the London School of Economics. They ask, “Am I good enough?”

Of course they are. Not only are they facing an invisible monster, but they don’t have the right weapons to slay it. My aim in this book is to expose this monster and then provide you with the right ammunition to kill it. There are hundreds of “troll hunters” who hang the skin of this monster on their wall, and you will too. I am here to guide you.

So, what is the mistake that this group of professionals makes? They start to believe that they are flawed. They listen to their well-meaning German friends, who tell them that they are too colourful, too unusual, or too different from what Germans are used to. They start to believe that they must fit in and smooth out their rough edges.

Do you know what happens when you become just like everybody else? When you take on the same shape and colour as your surroundings? You disappear into the background—and the world forgets you.

My aim is to help you find employers that will hire you because you are different from all others. Because you are unique. Because you are an individual, not in spite of it.

I’ll also let you in on a little secret: those who take pride in their individuality are those who get paid the most in the market. (If you choose the right market, that is. Stay tuned!)

Never Leave, but Still Wake Up in a Foreign Country

My youngest son was born a year ago. By the time Tim turns eighteen, Germany will be a very different country from today. (Just as it is a different country now than it was before 1989.)

Imagine this: if you are in Germany today and you never move, you will still wake up in a very different and alien place in 2034.

Today, Germany is at its peak. Never before have been so many people employed as are today. The unemployment rate is at its lowest level since Germany was reunited in 1990. Salaries are finally rising.

But all of this will change—and that is good news for Europeans on the move and expatriates willing to contribute to our society. The truth, one that too many Germans refuse to admit, is simply that Germany needs you.

In the next seventeen years, baby boomers will retire. Suddenly, we will have more than five million new retirees to feed. Our hospitals and retirement homes will have to accommodate millions of additional patients. And, according to the German Federal Ministry of Health, we will need more than 120,000 additional nurses for this task alone.

Over that same time period, and for a very simple reason, our workforce will shrink by more than seven million people: Every year since 1972, we had more coffins than cradles in Germany. Only immigration has helped us sustain our population.

As a result, generation Y is less than half the size of the baby-boomer generation.

Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Cologne: By the time my baby boy enters university, the equivalent of the population of our four biggest cities will have vanished from the workforce.

Simple math: when four baby boomers retire, only two young people of generation Z are there to replace them. That means that two employers can’t fill their positions—unless they hire international talent.

That’s great news for you, indeed. If you are a professional, the demand for your skills will only rise, simply because there are fewer and fewer German professionals left in the market.

There is a growing number of companies that will hire you because they need you. There will be a growing number of employers who have no choice but to look to the international labour market.

Back to the Future IV

In 1985, Marty McFly and Doc jumped into the DeLorean and flew it right to the future: 2015! The writers of Back to the Future imagined a world of flying cars in every driveway and fax machines in every household. Well, they got it half right. As we all know, fax machines are obsolete today, but flying cars are finally on the way.

Maggy Sailer is the head of recruiting at Lilium Aviation. A few days before I wrote this, I had the chance to interview Maggy for the Expats Career Podcast. Her company is recruiting talent from all over the world. The task: build the first fully electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) airplane, one that is silent, highly efficient, and can take off and land with no runway needed—inside a city. They’ve already built a flying prototype and hope to offer flying taxis by 2025. Alphabet, Tesla, and Uber all have fully autonomous cars on the street today. The cost for solar energy has dropped to less than three cents (US) per kwH—and better technologies allow battery storage of electricity on an industrial scale.

When I turned eighteen in the 1990s, no one could imagine a flat fee for telephone services. We still paid extra for long-distance calls, and mobile phones were just a rumour. Many experts predict that electricity will become as cheap as a mobile-phone connection. In the future, we’ll pay a flat fee to use as much as we want.

When my son turns eighteen, he will live in a completely different reality—even if he never takes one step out of Germany. Imagine what it will mean if energy become as cheap as mobile-phone service. Imagine what it will mean when products are printed directly on your 3-D printer and are as easily available as your Google search results.

The world is changing—not gradually but radically. The scale of progress is immense, and that scares a lot of people—but they forget that progress is (mostly) for the better.

You bought this book because you want a better life. You are willing to work for it. You are even willing to move to a foreign country to better yourself. That proves that you have the qualities we need in Germany.

Professionals Who Dare to Shape a Changing World

The most secure job in Germany in the coming decade? In the opinion of Thomas Sattelberger, a former board member of Deutsche Telekom, that’s a change manager. Sattelberger has been a strong advocate for unusual candidates throughout his career. As he told the members of the Immigrant Spirit Contributors, “You need character to make a difference.”

Most of us grew up in a world with scarce resources. We now enter a world of abundance. That’s the most fundamental shift that we need to understand. People need salt, but they pay close to nothing for it. No one “needs” the newest iPhone, but millions happily pay a week’s salary to get one.

Being unique makes you precious, and being obedient makes you unemployed.

“A Couch Is Not a Couch Unless It’s the Right Colour”

The best employers confirm this statement. Home24 AG looks actively for candidates from as many different countries as possible. The Berlin-based online furniture store is long past the start-up phase. It is an established business with customers around the globe.

Hiring professionals from different countries means that they can “really focus on what their personal markets or customer group desire,” says public relations manager Laura-Lucia Wehner. And that’s important, because tastes differ wildly from country to country. A grey couch is a hit in Germany but would not inspire Spanish customers to hit buy. “Whether it’s colour, products…they [international professionals] just have the expertise.” When we filmed at Home24’s headquarters, Laura-Lucia explained, “We want to be authentic, and that’s why it’s important to have these people.”

When asked why HitFox Group GmbH loves to hire international professionals, Marketing Manager Theresa Sivertsson said, “They are naturally curious. They always seek new challenges and opportunities and always try to learn something new.” In one short sentence, Theresa defined the dream candidate of every hiring manager I have ever met.

Fabian Siegel is a legend in the Berliner start-up scene. After he sold his share in Delivery Hero, Fabian went on to create another hit with Marley Spoon. Expatriates are an important piece of his strategy. “As a start-up entrepreneur, you look for people that are entrepreneurial. That dare to do new things. And what I have seen is that those who leave their country to move abroad are more entrepreneurial.” Fabian also added something that I believe as well: “We need your help.”

There is a growing number of companies that will hire you because they want you. There will be a growing number of employers who love to have a million choices.

The Immigrant Spirit

Now you know why my company is called Immigrant Spirit GmbH—and not slave.com. I want the best possible future for you, for Europeans, and for the peoples of the whole world. I want to bring professionals to Germany who dare to be individuals—not clones.

I want you to embrace the immigrant spirit!

Part Zero: Checkmate

By the time a player becomes a grandmaster,
almost all of his training time is dedicated to work on this first phase.
The opening is the only phase that holds out the potential for true creativity
and doing something entirely new.

—Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion

I realise that you might be in a hurry, dear reader. You might have been looking for your next career move for quite some time. You might be scared, you might be worried, or you might run out of money. You might want me to shut up and just give you a step-by-step process that you can follow. But I urge you to heed my advice!

If You Are in a Hurry, Walk Slowly

Take the time to read the coming chapters carefully. I will explain this chessboard called the German job market. I will show you the pawn, the bishop, and our special friend, the knight. You will learn their moves and objectives, and for a while, you will wonder how all these pieces are related. But once we have placed the pieces on the board, it will all come together—and you will make your move. Checkmate!

(And yes, your patience will be rewarded! You will get a step-by-step process in the second half of the book.)

English Jobs versus German Jobs

Immigrant Spirit GmbH is analysing the complete German online job market. Together with our partners, we scan forty thousand career websites, company websites, job portals, and the like. Right now, there are more than seven hundred thousand open positions in Germany, but only 3 percent of them are published in English. That’s twenty thousand English job offers—only. What does this mean for your profession?

Your First Homework Assignment

Search for your profession in “English” job offers in Germany and then compare them to German and English job offers in Germany.

Question 1: What difference did you notice?

Question 2: What is the most important lesson you learned?

You Have Competition!

Every year, more than 1.2 million Europeans, immigrants, and German repatriates like myself move to Germany. Because most of them don’t speak German when they arrive, they all apply to English-speaking companies. There is a profound insight here, both for international candidates on the lookout for their next career challenge and for German employers looking for a strategic solution to the Fachkräftemangel (labour shortage). The graphic below illustrates what our analysis of more than seven hundred thousand open positions has shown.

Forty percent of all German-language job offers in Germany are still online after eight weeks. At the same time, 60 percent of English-language job offers in Germany are off the market after three short weeks. If you are a German employer, I just gave you the answer to all your prayers. Allow international professionals to start working in English and learn the local language on the job, and your recruiting worries will be over. You will never again have to decline customers because you lack the staff to fulfil their orders. Your company’s future is secured.

Yes, there are challenges to overcome. You will have to make a few changes in your workflow, and you will need to get your existing colleagues on board. But you will be rewarded with two great advantages: first, you will never have to worry about getting candidates anymore; you will get more applications than you can imagine. Second, you will be able to hire professionals who have a much higher qualification than you could usually afford. You might not have a world-famous brand name, and maybe your headquarters is not in a big city, but that doesn’t matter. You will dance even when you are not the prom queen, because you will be the only girl at the party.

If you need advice on how to hire and integrate international professionals in a German-speaking company, please reach out to me.

Some 340,000 companies in Germany have more than ten employees, but only five thousand of them advertise jobs in English. That’s not even 2 percent! If millions of professionals apply to the same few thousand employers, then you are in a very weak position. I will help you to change your odds. In the English-speaking job market in Germany, you are just one out of thousands of candidates. As soon as you enter the German-speaking job market, you will be one.

From day one, I want you to move from the English-only listings to the complete German job market—even before you speak German.

And if the only place where you want to move is the future, this book will arm you with the right tools to be successful in your career ten, twenty, and forty years from now.

You Are Not Alone

You and an HR professional look very differently at your job application in Germany. You put a lot of thought and careful preparation into your application. This is what you see:

My CV

That is not how an HR manager will receive it, though. She will see your application like this:

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

Lesson One: You are not alone. Your application will be just one out of many. You need to separate yourself from the crowd if you want to be considered. You need to be different, unique. “But hey,” you say. “Look at your own example. I am different!” And you would be right, but the thing is, HR managers want you to be different—as long as you are the same as everybody else. I agree with you: that doesn’t make sense. But it’s true nonetheless. We will talk about this obstacle and how to overcome it in the chapter about “German Angst”.

Right here and now, I want you to understand another assumption that makes no sense. It’s not a misguided belief of a recruiter, but of you, the candidate:

You are not alone.
You are not special.
You are just a snowflake in a snowstorm.
If you want to succeed in the German job market,
you have to become unique and outstanding.

I know this sounds incredibly harsh, but I am this frank with you because I really want you to succeed. And for this, I need you to understand your real position in the German job market. Please don’t be disheartened; I wouldn’t present obstacles if I didn’t also offer solutions. There are employers who will love what you have to offer. You will find once you reach the chapter “Finding Rachel”.

Now look even closer. Is this how you are perceived by recruiters?

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

This is a more realistic picture. (If you seek an English-language job offer in Germany, add 796 other foreign applications for this one position, and the picture will get pretty accurate.)

Do you still stand out? Or is the real perception of too many HR managers German guys vs. foreigners?

I repeat: If you want to beat your competition and win a great job, then you need to become unique. You want your application to look like this:

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

German Guy’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

Foreigner’s CV

I SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM

Foreigner’s CV

Luckily, there is a failsafe way to become the solution to your future employer’s problem. We will get there; stay with me.

The Scale

Come, sit for a moment in my chair. I want you to see the world from my side of the desk, from the perspective of a German employer. Are you comfortable?

What do you see when you look across the table? There is a candidate who wants you to hire her, who wants you to spend roughly 75,000 EUR every year on her. (Every year, I conduct the Expats Career Survey. This survey shows that the median net salary that expats expect is 3,500 EUR per month. Which translates into 75,000 EUR p.a. costs for the employer.)

So, what goes through your head as an employer? Two questions:

First: “What can you do for me?”

Second: “How much trouble will it be to hire you?”

Remember: If you apply for an English-language job in Germany, there may be up to eight hundred other candidates applying for this very job. You need to be more “fitting” than each and every one of them.

In theory, there are two ways to achieve this: Be less trouble than any other jobseeker or add more value than all the other candidates.

Let’s have a look at each of these strategies. How do they work out in real life?

Strength, Not Weakness

Which is better, to reduce your perceived weakness or to maximise the benefit that you can add to the employer?

These are the concerns that might lurk in your future employer’s head:

- Language

- Culture

- Visa and legal requirements

- The quality of your education

- Work experience

- Attitude

Imagine you could reduce all the obstacles to zero: your language skills would be perfect, your education would be fully recognised in Germany, and your work experience is identical to those professionals who have spent all of their lives in my country. You got yourself a work permit, and you are never late to a meeting. The colour of your skin gets lighter, and your hair becomes blond. (This is not how most Germans actually look, by the way.)

What would you have achieved? Congratulations: you are exactly like everybody else. You are a white letter on a white sheet of paper. As Seth Godin said, “The reason they want you to fit in…is that once you do, then they can ignore you.”

Of course, learn German (or whatever the local language of the place is that you want to move to). Learn the local culture. Reach out to as many natives as possible, but don’t expect this alone to get you a job. The most you could hope for is to not to be “different,” and that’s a terrible sales pitch.

Now, what happens if we turn this around?

Please think about your biggest wish in the world—the one thing, relationship, or experience that you want more than anything else. On a scale from 1 to 10, this wish should be at least a 9.5 (near perfect).

Do you have something concrete in mind?

Now imagine that I can:

1. Show you that I understand what this concrete wish is

2. Prove that I helped others to fulfil this exact wish

3. Offer to fulfil your wish for you

What are the chances that you refuse my offer? Zero, right?

The best strategy to beat eight hundred other candidates? Get the employer the results he wants the most.

But just for your peace of mind, we will talk about the obstacles in your way shortly. Then we move on to the strategies that will make an employer disregard all objections to hiring you.

Excuse My French: About Language

In the beginning was the word. And the word was Nein! If you want to work in Germany and you don’t speak German, that’s a problem, obviously.

Therefore, learn the language. Of course, learn German! Duolingo offers free courses, for example. But don’t expect miracles to happen from speaking German alone. Even adding zee Djörmän äccent will not be enough.

How quickly can you improve your German? And to what level? And how much will speaking “some” German reduce the risk of hiring you in the eyes of an employer?

When I started Immigrant Spirit GmbH, I had about five hundred sales conversations with German HR managers. Every single one of them wanted to hire international talent. Great news, right?

So how come I didn’t sign a single contract? Because each and every one of these HR managers wanted to hire international professionals…who already speak German. (I will tell you in the chapter “Finding Rachel” how I solved this problem and how you can too.)

Most employers will not be satisfied with “some” German, either. They know from experience that a B2 certificate doesn’t mean that you can actually speak German on B2 level.

What can you do? If you pursue a “reduce risk” strategy, there are two things.

One: Improve your German as quickly as possible. Take courses, watch German language news for foreigners and movies for children. (Not cartoons and not German-dubbed foreign shows, since you learn from watching the lips move.) And most importantly: talk, talk, talk! Germans will love to correct your mistakes and help you improve your skills. Actual speaking a language is the fastest way to learn that language.

Two: You need to change the way German employers look at your skills. Employers see your German-language skill as a photograph. This is your level. You have never been anything else. You will never be something different.

Your job is to prove to them that they don’t watch a photograph, they watch a movie where boy meets girl. Right now, we are in this scene: the hero and his love interest have fallen apart. But ten minutes ago, there was another scene: the hero meets the girl for the first time. There was not even a relationship. And twenty minutes from now, there will be another scene: the boy and the girl are reunited and are about to get married. Happy ending!

The same goes for your language skills: six months ago, you couldn’t find Germany on a map.* Now you can order dinner in German. And in six more months, you will be able to talk about work issues in German—if you are allowed to learn the language on the job.**

It’s not about hiring someone who doesn’t speak German. It’s about hiring a talent and then helping them to develop their German-language skills.

*If that is literally true for you, I am sorry, Mr. Trump. We don’t hire orange people, but you are welcome to pay for our wall.

**As you might have noticed, my Djörmän äccent shines through, even in my writing. My apologies. See it as a test for your real-life experience with German colleagues.

Beyond the Bratwurst: The Cultural Challenge in a Professional Context

Your American boss might be fine if you call him by his first name, but he refers to you as “my team.” He is the boss, and you are the teamster. At the same time, your German secretary might address you with your full academic title (“Frau Doktor”) but will thoroughly interrogate you before she agrees to take over a task—not because of disrespect, but because we Germans are raised to use our heads and not blindly follow orders. (Are you surprised?)

You might count yourself as punctual if you race into the conference room exactly when the clock strikes the full hour—but when I met the investors in my company, they asked me to be there thirty minutes early so we could start on time.

My friend Parinita used to hire five hundred new employees on a weekend back home in India. A German HR manager might need eight weeks to finalise a single contract, even after he already decided to hire you.

The same goes for promises. You might be used to giving your team a task and then following up with them on the progress. Try this with a German colleague, and you will experience first-hand that famous German directness in our conversational style. “I told you it will be ready on Friday. Is it Friday? No. Don’t bother me.”

Warning!

Cultural differences might be too much of a concern by many German employers. But it might also be that you give them too little thought right now. A lot of fights are not about wrong or right but about how important something is.

It’s a lot like the difference between a square and a cube: if you know the theory but miss the important third dimension of actual real-life experience, then you might learn the hard way how a theoretical square turns into a real-life brick. That’s when experience hits you on the head—literally.

Therefore, please be patient with me. Burn the scented candles, brew some tea, and snuggle with me into our security blanket. In the following two chapters, we will talk about our feelings (or at least about the German culture and how it affects your career). I promise—two chapters from now, we return to the hard facts of finding a job in Germany.

The Deeper Meaning of Punctuality

Germans like to be punctual. There is a truism if ever there was one. Aren’t you glad you bought my book? But there is more to this simple fact than meets the eye.

Being late to a meeting or on a deadline will tell Germans a lot about your character, and it will affect how they will behave with you in future interactions. From a German perspective, when you are late, you are saying that your time is more important than mine.

We might understand rationally that you are simply from a different culture, one that has a different perception of time—but it will still feel like an insult to us. You have some life experience. What counts when people decide if they should trust you? What people know or what they feel?

This chapter is not about punctuality but about what punctuality represents. You might think, “I am twenty minutes late. So what? I was stuck in traffic.” But Germans might see the significance of this event in a very different light. By being late, you might offend their deepest beliefs. Hofstede identified six dimensions of national cultures. Being late sounds the alarm in three of them—from a German perspective. We’ll discuss each of these dimensions in the next few pages, but for now, I’ll start with three of these concepts.

By making us wait, you push us in the position of a subject who has to wait its turn, and this violates our culture in the dimension of power distance.

When you finally show up, it might be too late for us to honour other appointments, which means we must reschedule with other people. “My word is my bond” is not just a phrase for most Germans; it’s a sacred belief. Forcing us to break a promise because you fucked up: That’s a sure way to make an enemy. This affects the dimension of Long-Term Orientation.

And last: You let us hanging. Will you show up? When will you show up? If you finally show up: Will you be prepared – or will you be as sloppy with your content as you are with your time management? Not to know for sure: That is killing us. Adrenaline and Cortisol is flushing our blood stream. Blood pressure rises, the heartbeat goes up and we are one step closer to a heart attack. Why would you do that to us? Uncertainty avoidance is the third cultural dimension affected by punctuality.

Small mistake. Huge effect. When I moved to Estonia in 2001 I constantly managed to offend Estonians. They would ask me a question, and I would simply not answer. Was I ignoring them on purpose? Of course not.

This is what happened: the Estonian language is beautiful, but it is intonated in a very flat voice. There is not much modulation in a sentence. As a German, I am used to going higher with my voice at the end of a sentence. Estonians will simply keep talking with the same tone until the—

Sorry—did you feel that last sentence was incomplete? Then you know how I felt. I was waiting for the Estonians to finish their question (i.e., to go up with their voice), but they had already finished and waited for my response. In vain. They were upset. I was upset. Relationship damaged.

Take Away

You and I may look at the same facts, but we may evaluate them very differently. You might not even notice when a friend is late, but Germans will notice. They will also remember and alter their behaviour towards you. “Better ask someone else to do this job. She has let me down before.”

Of course, you should take these examples with a grain of salt. Every person is an individual, and I described stereotypes. But we are also all influenced by our environment. Meet some Germans and check for yourself.

The Six Dimensions of Culture

Geert Hofstede was a social psychologist from the Netherlands with great experience in the worlds of both academia and business. His six dimensions of national culture are based on extensive studies of thousands of employees working for IBM and other companies. Earlier, we introduced three of them in respect to punctuality. Here are all six dimensions and how they affect German culture.

1. Low-power distance
Germans see each other as equals and want to be treated accordingly. One aspect where this clearly shows is the chain of command. Germans take pride in their professionalism. They want to understand why they should do something.

Since the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, the German army had used the concept of Führen mit Auftrag (leading by mission) with great success. Give orders only together with a reason. Have faith in your colleagues. Define the objective, the time frame, and the resources, and then let your colleagues decide for themselves how they will achieve the goal. This will ensure that your colleagues (not “your team”) will deliver the results you seek.

2. Long-term orientation
Germans like to plan in advance. We are fond of consistency, both in business and in relationships. You convince us by explaining the long-term benefits of your proposal. You destroy your reputation if we only hear from you when you want something. Relationships are built by regular contact. Don’t expect much success if you call us only when you want something. (That’s true everywhere, I guess, but I still see people behave without any such consideration every day.)

3. Uncertainty avoidance*
Germans want to be certain, and it stresses us out if we can’t rely on you. If you let us down in small things—like being punctual—we will not trust you in more important areas. Help Germans to avoid uncertainty, and you will make good progress toward your goals. This is one reason why you should eliminate all time gaps in your CV. Tell us what you’ve been doing, even if you were looking for a new job. Being unemployed is acceptable—making us guess is not.

4. Individualism
Germans think in terms of “I” and not “we.” Germans are committed to self-actualisation. Loyalty is based on personal preferences for people as well as a sense of duty and responsibility. On his website, Geert Hofstede writes about Germany: “Communication is among the most direct in the world following the ideal to be ‘honest, even if it hurts’—and by this giving the counterpart a fair chance to learn from mistakes.” Because I care about you and your success, I intend to live up to this ideal.

5. Masculinity
“Germans value performance.” What is true about this statement: We disrespect those who offer claims instead of deeds. But I need to pour some water into the wine beer at this point.

For nearly three decades, I worked as an entrepreneur. Why have companies like Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Microsoft, Lycos, and Onvista all used my services? I deliver on my promises. But I do not see this commitment to results with German HR managers. As a matter of fact, few of the human-resources specialists I met ever asked the hiring manager this simple yet crucial question, “How do you measure success in this position?” They talk about process but never about results.

This is your greatest challenge. How can you prove that you can get results when the person who decides about your application doesn’t know what defines success in his or her organisation? This is why Germany is a much tougher job market than New York. How can you win a soccer match when the referee doesn’t know that the whole point of the game is to score goals?

6. Indulgence
Do you work to live or live to work? Indulgence measures how a culture values discipline. Germans have a low score on indulgence. We control our feelings; our feelings do not control us. (Except in soccer and on the highway.) Hofstede claims that cultures like ours “have a tendency to cynicism and pessimism.” How would he get that idea?

Compare your own culture with the German one. It might help you avoid communication problems and unnecessary conflicts.

My advice: Don’t spend much time worrying about differences. A much more effective way to build strong relationships in a new culture is to focus on the values we already share. Luckily there are five that are precious to humans across the world.

* There is a big plus in being afraid of uncertainty. Our need to “be sure” lets Germans embrace the rule of law. There are a lot of rules in Germany, and that alone can be quite unnerving. But the upside is that everyone will be treated the same according to the rules.

One experience made this very clear to me. I had been living abroad for many years. After my last station in Moscow, I returned home to Germany. One night, as my wife and I walked home from a party in a dark and dirty side alley, close to the main railway station, we ran into a police patrol. As soon as I saw the officers walking towards me, I felt safe. I felt protected. And in the same moment, I wondered how I would have felt if this had happened in Moscow.

As you have probably figured out, there are many things that I feel could be better in Germany. I criticise these flaws openly and strongly because I love my country, and I want it to make progress. The rule of law, though, is one thing that is working very well in Germany—and that is no small achievement in and of itself.

Five Ways to Build Sympathy in Foreign Cultures

Building a career really means building trust and respect with other professionals. This is a real challenge if you have just arrived and you don’t know a single soul.

Most cultural training focuses on the traditions that are different in other cultures. A much more effective way is to focus on the concepts that connect us. Luckily, there are five major forces that create sympathy amongst people everywhere.

Familiarity

The more often we are in contact with someone, the better we feel about this person. This psychological phenomenon is called the mere exposure effect. For expatriates, this has two major applications.

First, in a new workplace or virtual team, make sure that you are regularly visible to your co-workers and clients in your target country. Make a contribution in meetings, write a private note now and then, and call just to keep in touch. Many opportunities come along simply because you are available.

Use InterNations to build connections with international professionals from Germany right in your hometown! Nearly four hundred cities around the globe host events of this worldwide expat community. Join their events and make German friends who could recommend you in the future. But take note: the mere exposure effect works only when people don’t get a negative impression from your behaviour.

Once you are in Germany, set aside time to stay in touch with your family and friends at home. Let them take part in your adventures, and stay connected to their lives. If possible, use videoconferencing services like Skype or Google Hangouts to literally be seen by your loved ones.

Consistency

This feature is important everywhere, but in cultures with a very low tolerance for uncertainty—like Germany—it becomes especially significant. People want to see that you keep your word and that you stay true to your beliefs. This is a regular point of conflict between German employees and team members or business partners from other cultures. For example, an American manager might say “sure, no problem” to a request—because he is optimistic he will be able to find a way, but a German manager would only make such an assurance when he already knows exactly how he will fulfil your request.

Consistency in your behaviour is one side of the story, but there is a second one too. People want to be consistent in their own world view as well. If your behaviour, opinions, or even the way you dress directly challenges their world view, they can get confused and upset. Therefore, choose your battles wisely. If you can alter a behaviour or the way you dress without compromising your deep beliefs, do so. This gives you the possibility to take a stand on issues that are really important to you.

Similarity

We all love this game: Where are you from? What do they do differently there? However, when we seek to build and maintain long-term, meaningful relationships, we look for common values, beliefs, interests, and habits. This is part of our deep-rooted wish to belong to an in group, our family, and our tribe. Luckily, in an individualistic society like Germany, it is easier to become part of an in group.

Look actively for things that you have in common with the people around you and highlight them. Maybe you love the same sport, work in a similar field of expertise, or even share something as simple things as hair colour.

There is a mobile phone company in Germany that directs its employees to sign letters with a fake name, and it changes the name based on the first name of the customer. Why? Because people are considerably more willing to collaborate with someone with the same first name.

If you actively look for similarities, you will soon notice a positive side effect: not only will people like you more, but you will also start to like them! We have a limited ability to process information. When we focus on the positive information, we like people more. When we focus on differences, we like them less. It’s a choice you can make.

Mutual Sympathy

This brings us to the strongest tool in our repertoire: people like people who like them first. We all want to belong and be seen as attractive and lovable. Look actively for things that you like in your partners, and don’t be too shy to offer them a compliment.

Honest appreciation works wonders, if:

- You are honest

- You compliment a strength of character (honesty, creativity, braveness, accuracy, etc.)

- You give proof (a specific experience where this character strength showed)

- You keep it short (no more than three or four sentences)

I frequently give trainings in companies. That is challenging because you basically enter a hostage situation: the training is mandatory, and participants are forced to attend. So, it is no surprise that many trainers face an audience who sits there, arms crossed, utterly unwilling to participate. Frank Rebmann taught me how to use mutual sympathy to win the cooperation of my trainees. Frank was my instructor when I trained to become a Dale Carnegie coach. Thanks to his advice, I always face a friendly audience, and my trainees can achieve their goals.

The secret: I make a special effort to learn something likeable about each participant in advance. I write down exactly what I like about them and why. A few years back, I gave a training session at trivago. As usual, I arrived quite early. When the participants entered, I welcomed each with a warm and personal word. For example, I might say, “I prepare thoroughly for my seminars and try to get to know each participant. I really admire your ability to think outside the box. I saw on Facebook that your favourite book is Glennkill (a novel in which a group of sheep tries to solve the murder of their shepherd). Someone who likes unusual ideas like that will also find very creative solutions for our company’s problems.”

This woman was very sceptical when she entered the meeting room, but after that compliment, she was the most active contributor in the seminar. I only needed to tell her what I honestly believed.

(If you wonder why I talk so long about giving honest appreciation, it’s because honest sympathy is the most important tool for building strong relationships. If you forget everything else I wrote, just start to actively look for things you like in other people. Both your life quality and your career will improve dramatically. There is a reason that Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is still a bestseller a century after it was published.)

Physical Attractiveness

The last tool to increase sympathy is physical attractiveness. We are most attracted to features that are closest to the average look of people—and to ourselves. In one study, participants were shown a collection of pictures and asked to rate the attractiveness of each subject. Among the gallery, participants also saw their own picture, but it had been digitally altered into the opposite sex. Not surprisingly, this picture was rated “most attractive” by the largest number of participants.

Practical application: If it doesn’t compromise deep beliefs of yours, dress in the same manner as the people around you. In a bank, wear a suit, but in a start-up, jeans might be appropriate. Highlight the features that you share with those around you.

“Clothes make people” says an old proverb in Germany. Unfortunately, that is still true, as Doris Weichselbaumer from the University of Linz in Austria demonstrated. In 2012, she sent out fifteen hundred fictional job applications to companies across Germany. All the “candidates” had the exact same résumé. Each featured the same female applicant in the photograph. Only two things were different: her name and her clothes.

Five hundred employers received a résumé from a candidate named Sandra Bauer; 18.8 percent of them invited “Sandra” for a job interview. Five hundred other companies received the exact same application with the exact same woman in the photograph. But this time, the name of the applicant was Meryem Öztürk, and she was wearing a headscarf (in a very professional photograph). Only 4.2 percent of employers invited Meryem.

Sandra needs to write five applications to get one interview. Meryem needs twenty applications.

A piece of cloth and an “untraditional” name were enough to reduce her job opportunities from 20 percent to only 4 percent. Too many HR professionals don’t see you when they look at your photograph. They see only a label: foreigner, maternity leave, old, Muslim, inexperienced, and so on. They confuse the label with the human being.

One of my neighbours found the easiest solution to this conflict between being yourself and “fitting in.” She is a devout Muslim who wears a headscarf. At the same time, she proactively approaches new people and introduces herself with a warm smile. Stereotypes die as soon as you become a “real” person. This is an important insight, one to which we will return when we talk about the standard application process.

Bonus: Two More Ways to Build Sympathy

I strongly believe in the mutual concepts of under-promise and over-deliver, and the last two tips to build sympathy anywhere are driven by both.

Be Generous

If someone is good to us, we feel a strong obligation to respond positively. Social psychology calls this the rule of reciprocity. People will go to great lengths to pay an emotional debt, especially when we do favours without being asked. Think proactively about how you could help the people in your life with their goals. How can you help your boss, your colleagues, or the people you love? Once you have identified these opportunities, do something good for them.

Ask for Help

The human heart is a funny thing. If we help other people, we start to like them more. Therefore, don’t be afraid to ask people for help. It can actually bring you closer together.

Germany needs smart, skilled, and motivated people like you and your friends. Which of them do you admire for their commitment to constantly improve their skills? Help them and me by recommending my book to them. I would be grateful.

Okay, was all this emotional and cultural stuff so bad? Now we can return to the task at hand: getting you your first job in Germany! But first we should cover a few perceived obstacles before I can walk you step by step through a successful job hunt.

Legal Requirements, Visas, and the Value of Your University Degree

Tick, tick, tick.

Five months, twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-nine minutes.

Tick, tick, tick.

Five months, twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-eight minutes.

Ramesh and Durga were happy the day when the German embassy gave them their job-seeker visas. But what had once looked like the entry ticket to a better life back then started to feel like a time bomb once they arrived in Germany.

Days went by without responses to their job applications, and only rejections kept coming back. Clearly their sales pitch didn’t speak to German employers. Which wire did they need to cut in order to defuse this time bomb of a jobseeker visa?

Tick, tick, tick.

Five months, twenty-nine days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-seven minutes left.

Once you need a visa to work in a foreign country, life becomes—interesting. If you are a citizen of the European Union and you would like to work in another member country, you can skip this chapter. You have a huge privilege: you can work wherever you find a job. (If you choose to read on, you might want to find a quiet moment and light a candle in the cathedral of your heart for our European Union. Lady Europa makes our life so much easier.)

If you are a citizen of India, China, Pakistan, or England, you will have to deal with the visa challenge, though. The German Blue Card immigration law is surprisingly easy to understand. If you meet the following criteria, welcome to Germany!

- You own your university degree.

- You got a work contract with a German company.

- You get a gross salary of 50,800 EUR (2017).

But what seems easy enough gets a bit more complicated in practice. The first obstacle is having your foreign (from a German viewpoint) university degree recognised as one of equal value to a German degree. Luckily there is a website where you can check this quickly. Not surprisingly, the Anabin Database is completely in German. Since the people who need this service the most are by definition foreigners, this makes a lot of sense, right?

If you are working in a profession with a great lack of skilled labour, the minimum salary you need in order to qualify for a Blue Card is much lower (39,624 EUR p.a., gross).

If you don’t own a university degree but you learned a profession in an apprenticeship, then you can apply for a different kind of work visa. Here are the current non-academic professions with high demand. The list is provided by the German Arbeitsagentur, a government agency.

This link provides a list of the top ten non-academic professions in demand, according to Arbeitsagentur.

What if you don’t own a university degree and you are also not educated in one of the professions in the Positivliste of Arbeitsagentur? I want you to live a happy and successful life. If you haven’t finished university and there is no demand for your skill, there is no future for you here. It would be better if you find a different dream to pursue.

This is a quick overview. Here, you will find a detailed description of Germany’s immigration rules. Please be advised: this is not legal advice, and I don’t guarantee that the information is accurate or up to date.

If you need a visa to work in Germany, then your job hunt will be a great deal more challenging. In the end, you need to be able to provide an incredibly compelling answer when a prospective employer asks the big question: “Why should I go through the trouble of getting you a Blue Card when I could simply hire an EU citizen?”

Your Work Experience Counts Nothing

“If you would have an apprenticeship with Sparkasse, then maybe we could do something for you.” This was the one and only time my wife ever went to the government’s unemployment agency. Evgenia had worked for Morgan Stanley and the investment branch of Deutsche Bank. She had helped to organise events with the director of the Louvre and once arranged a meeting between her boss and German chancellor Angela Merkel. But none of this mattered when she moved to Germany. Why? Her work experience was not in Castrop-Rauxel or Wattenscheid, but in Moscow.

German employers tend to value your foreign work experience as meaningless. They simply assume that Germans are the most professional people in the world. Therefore, your work experience in other countries can’t be worth much. (As a matter of fact, I just had a heated discussion with someone who disregarded all “non-German” academia. How come those who trash talk everything they don’t know so often know so little in the first place?)

Feruz is a professional in the tourism industry. She had to watch while the head of HR in her company sorted out German and foreign job applications. The German ones were neatly stacked on the right site of the table. The foreign ones were quickly filed in the trash bin. Luckily, this at least has started to change.

I won’t hide my feelings: This is disrespectful. This is ignorant, and it really pisses me off.

In a moment, you will understand the deeper meaning of all these perceived obstacles. By the end of this book, you will know how to make them all irrelevant.

German Angst

What does it take to sell tyres to customers in France? Fluent German, apparently.

“We didn’t get a single application.” By now, I was used to this answer. For six months, I had been trying to sell our recruiting services to a small company in a tiny village in southern Germany. The HR manager had been advertising in the same well-known German job portal for half a year. Every single month, she spent 800 EUR of her employer’s money, with nothing to show for it. Every month, I would call her and offer my help. “We have a lot of readers in France,” I would say. “Many of them have sales experience. They would fit like a glove.”

Every month, I would get the same reply: “Well, we will try it the usual way one more time. Call me next month again.”

Why would the HR manager stick to a hiring tactic that clearly did not work? German angst.

As a group, Germans feel very uncomfortable with uncertainty, and German HR managers feel this tenfold. Everything that is new (to them) is “uncertain,” and to a German, “uncertain” equals “dangerous.” There is a certain (pun intended) type of people who are drawn to work in human resources. Usually, these are women and men who feel a high need for security. They choose HR because they believe that nothing ever changes in this field. Now, here is the insight I really need you to understand fully if you want to become successful in your job hunt: if the most important goal of the person who evaluates your job application is security, what consequences does this have for you?

Put yourself in the shoes of this recruiter for a moment. Nothing is more important to her than security. What will be her number-one criterion for choosing a candidate? Does she try to find the best candidate for the job, or will she invite the candidate who will make sure that no one will blame her? “This is how we have always done it” is the safest excuse for any decision.

Take a moment to let this really sink in. Your job application arrives in the inbox of the HR manager. Her top priority is not to find the best candidate, but to avoid uncertainty, because uncertainty is “risk”. And now you come along, and:

- You don’t speak German.

- You don’t have work experience in Germany.

- Your degree is from a foreign university she has never heard of.

- You have no friends, relatives, or contacts in Germany.

- You have no one who can or will vouch for you.

If the HR person wants security above all other things, you are in trouble. Is she more likely to take a risk or avoid it altogether? Of course, she will toss the “foreign” applications out. You threaten her security, because you ask her to change.

Does this make sense? No.

Is it a reality in Germany? Yes, absolutely.

My goal is to help you overcome this perception of risk and make employers see the value you provide. I will help you to talk sense to the recruiter who is afraid in the dark.

Two Roads to Rome and One to Phantasialand

There are two ways to Rome (and a third one that works only in your imagination). This is the last obstacle that we will analyse before we finally talk about the solutions.

Dear Head-Hunter,

I am moving to Düsseldorf in September for family reasons. I have five years of experience as a financial analyst for a major US corporation. Do you have any openings for such a position?

With best regards,

Jane Doe

Many highly skilled professionals send e-mails like this to German head-hunters—and why wouldn’t they? When Evgenia and I were dating, she wanted to move to Deutsche Bank Moscow. The idea was to build some ties into the German business world so that it would be easier to find the first job in Germany after we got married. She called up a head-hunter and told her about her plans. The head-hunter went ahead, found a fitting position, and introduced her to the hiring manager. Just like that, she got a job offer.

Evgenia had a unique experience. Unique in the sense that this is unlikely to happen again—and certainly not in Germany. Head-hunters usually work with a small number of clients. These clients have very specific wishes. Immigrant Spirits’ corporate clients pay us only for software developers, for example. There are big companies like Manpower that have many clients. But these clients also have very specific needs. It is highly unlikely that your profile will fit a certain set of requirements by pure chance. Head-hunters only offer “initiative applications” on their website so you stop calling them.

Here is what you can do to be more successful with head-hunters. First, you should check their website to determine what positions they fill. If there is one that fits your experience, call the recruiter and ask specific questions about this position. If the head-hunter’s website does not show any fitting position, then there is only one useful question to ask: “Do you have any positions in the pipeline that are not yet on the website?” If the answer is no, then don’t bother sending an application. Instead, I suggest that you ask the head-hunter if it’s okay to connect via Xing and LinkedIn. That way, you at least build a tie in the German job market. Who knows what will be in a year or two?

Candidates are often confused about the role of a head-hunter. A head-hunter gets paid by the company. He or she works for them, not for you. No head-hunter will invest time or work helping you. While this makes economic sense, it’s also an ethical obligation. It would be unethical to spend client money for your benefit.

If you want a professional to care about your career, you need to pay him or her. The good news is that there are professionals who work for you, the candidate. They are called business coaches or career coaches.

I Am a Career Coach, and I Will Not Get You a Job

This is what I do for a living 90 percent of my time: not get you a job.

Instead, it is you who will get yourself a job. If you hire a career coach, then you need to commit to doing all the hard work yourself. You will convince an employer with your dedication to results, your commitment to your own development, and your professional skills. If I would be your coach, then I could help you in three ways:

1. Help you understand each employer better than any other candidate

2. Help you make yourself irresistible to the right employer

3. Use my professional network and introduce you to managers you find useful.

These are the three things that I can promise, because I can deliver on them, and they work. Nearly all of my clients find their next career step. This makes me very proud, because they proved to have the immigrant spirit.

Two Ways to Your Work—That Work

Since head-hunters prove to be a dead end if you approach them with an unspecific request, it’s better to focus on two roads that really work.

Part One: The Standard Application Process
The advantage here is that you are in control. No one but you decides how many companies you contact and how well you prepare your application.

The disadvantage is that standard applications are the least effective road to a job, since you are always one of many candidates. It is also a one-way communication, not the best way to present yourself as valuable as possible.

Part Two: Recommendations

Eighty-five percent of all jobs are filled via networking. This has been true for many decades now. Here is the good news for everyone who wants to move abroad: most recommendations come from acquaintances, not good friends.

There is a simple reason for this. Think about the people with whom you are close. Chances are that they are similar to you—they have the same worldview, the same tastes, and they move in the same social circles. Therefore, you already know most of the things they know. Acquaintances, on the other hand, live in different circles and therefore hear different news. They know about job opportunities that you would never find on your own.

I will show you how to build a network of acquaintances in Germany. The advantage of recommendations is that they are highly effective. When I introduce coaching clients to managers in my network, they usually get a response from 50 percent of my contacts within a week. How does this compare to your experience in the German job market so far? The disadvantage of recommendations is that you are at the mercy of others. The biggest challenge here is not ill faith but the most human flaw of all: inertia. Don’t worry, there is a way to motivate even the laziest of your friends to honour their promise and recommend you.

Finally, we are getting started!

Part One: The Standard Application Process

We start where you are in control: the standard application process. You know the drill: search for a job online; read the job description carefully; research the company (and if possible, the person to whom you will send your application)—and then what? Nearly everybody follows the same procedures when they respond to a job advertisement. For that reason (and countless others), I suggest you do things differently.

Most of my clients have followed the established model of application faithfully. They applied…and applied…and applied…and applied again. By the time they finally book a coaching session with me, they have already submitted up to 150 job applications and got between zero and three job interviews in Germany.

Although they were smart, well educated, and had a proven track record of results delivered, they found zero success in Germany. Most of the time, they didn’t even get a reply. If this sounds familiar to you, don’t worry. We will change that.

What I will suggest to you is very different from what you are used to doing. What you are used to didn’t work. My proposal will be unusual and uncomfortable, but it has one advantage: it works—over and over again. Most of my clients write another sixty to eighty job applications, but they also get ten to twelve job interviews out of the process. In the end, they often have two or three job offers to choose from.

Sounds good? Then let’s dive right into the fascinating world of job applications.

The Perfect CV in Germany

By now, I can see this question lurking in the corner of the conversation. It’s hiding behind the friendly smile of the expat when I have a glass of wine at InterNations. It’s sneaking up to me behind the hopeful eyes of a young graduate when I speak at a university: “Can you have a look at my CV?”

The pure form of a correct curriculum vitae scares the hell out of a lot of international professionals. I get it; after all, we Germans are sticklers for perfection, right? It might surprise you, but I don’t worry about the form of your CV. It is not what keeps you from getting job interviews. (More on this later.) But since you insist, here are five things that you should pay attention to in your curriculum vitae.

1. Make sure there are no gaps in your description. If one job ended in May and the next one started in September, recruiters will want to know what you did in June, July, and August. Help them out by providing an explanation. “Re-evaluation of career options” (read: unemployed) or “Taking a gap year after university.” That’s not a big issue, just don’t make us guess. Uncertainty is something most human-resources specialists can’t handle very well—especially if they are German!

2. Don’t write just job titles. Give us a short description of your most important tasks and achievements in that position. The goal of an employer is to understand if you can help him solve his problems. For this, we need to know what you are actually able to do.

3. Use a standard CV for all your applications. Edit it only if you can add an experience that is relevant to the concrete goals that this employer wants to achieve. But if you have an experience that is relevant, you must add it. This is where you separate yourself from the crowd. (I will show you how to do this in the following chapters.)

4. Don’t lie. Employers will find out. A lie in your CV will harm your reputation and can also have legal consequences in Germany.

5. Prepare your CV in the EU standard form. Here you will find a template that you can use and more additional information about the formal aspects of your résumé than you could ever dream of. You will wish you’d never asked.

The Perfect Cover Letter in Germany

There is a traditional form for a cover letter in Germany. Here you will find a guide to write a perfect standard cover letter.

Now, please—forget this format! You will need to do better than “standard” to beat your competition for a good job. Like great sex, a good cover letter can be surprisingly short. Three paragraphs will do:

1. I understand your problem.

2. This is how I helped a former employer solve a similar problem.

3. Let’s talk about it.

Marcel is a coaching client of mine. He worked as a PHP programmer in South Africa and wanted to move to Germany with his family. Like many others, he listened to my series of podcasts with German employers. He then chose to apply to a PHP programmer position offered by Dustin Figge, the CEO of Homelike GmbH. But Marcel didn’t write a standard application. Instead he asked me to forward this message to Dustin:

Dear Dustin,

Thank you so much for joining Chris’s Expats Career Podcast on Tuesday. You mentioned that your biggest challenge is to guarantee a certain level of quality at all times.

I worked as a PHP programmer in South Africa for the last three years. In this time, we were able to reduce customer complaints by 85 percent. I would be glad to contribute to your goal of maintaining a high standard of quality. I am looking forward to discussing this topic in a personal job interview.

With best regards,

Marcel

Who do you think got the job? Marcel—or this guy?

Hi.

I am a PHP programmer. I have this many years of experience. I know PHP, Java, etc. etc. I have this diploma and I visited that course…

Do you see the difference? Marcel addressed Dustin’s biggest problem directly, so naturally, Marcel got the job.

I can read everything I need to know about your skills in your CV. The cover letter has only one function: to tell the employer why he should spend time to get to know you. The best way to achieve this goal is not to talk about yourself, but to talk about the employer and his biggest problem.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
—Dale Carnegie

How do you write a cover letter like this? I will give you a failsafe tip in just a moment. But first, we need a clear overview of all the actors involved in the hiring decisions—and how their worldview affects your success rate.

Fix Your Job-Hunt Problems in One Sentence

“Clarity, this chapter will give you,” says Yoda.

Too many jobseekers have a clouded idea about the purpose of the hiring process. When a company advertises an open position, they are not trying to give you an income. They want to solve a problem. Their problem—not yours. This is obvious in theory but is constantly ignored in practice. Most candidates put this mantra at the heart of their job search: “I need a job.”

Successful professionals start each day with a different prayer: “I find this manager’s biggest problem and I solve it—better than anybody else.”

Cut this sentence out and place it where you can always see it. These words should become your North Star. They will guide you in times of confusion and focus your efforts on the point with the biggest impact.

Before you do anything, always ask yourself, “Does this help me find the biggest challenge of this particular manager? Does it help me understand the biggest problem—of this specific, concrete employer—better than anybody else?”

Only do things that will move you one step closer to this objective. Don’t waste time on other stuff. After you found the biggest challenge of this concrete hiring manager, you’re in a position of power. Solving his problem, will solve your problem.

“The One Where You Find a Job”—You & the Cast of Friends

I can’t stress enough how important it is to focus on the concrete manager and his real problems. To demonstrate the impact of this focus, let me tell you about the TV show Friends. A group of good-looking young people in New York are the cast, and you are about to have a guest appearance. Let me set the stage for you.

- Monica is the villain in this special episode of Friends. She is the HR manager.

- Ross will be the damsel in distress. He is the concrete hiring manager with the biggest problem.

- You will have a guest appearance on today’s show. You are the hero of this episode.

So, here is our cast: Monica, the villain; Ross, the damsel in distress; and you, the hero.

What Is Your Motivation?

You want to understand Ross’s biggest challenge. You are a mysterious stranger who travels the world with one aim—to help managers like Ross solve their biggest problems. In return, you hope for nothing more than a small token of Ross’s gratitude: a bag full of money, the power to make decisions, and the opportunity to learn and grow.

What Is Monica’s Motivation?

Monica is the HR manager. Like most people in human resources, she wants security. That’s her number-one goal in life. Therefore, she wants control. She wants you to behave in a specific way—and only in this one specific way—that she can understand and control. Monica believes she knows best what Ross really needs (order and security), but she really doesn’t.

What Is Ross’s Motivation?

Ross wants Rachel. He fell in love with her in high school, and he never stopped loving her. Ross wants Rachel and Rachel alone. Loving Rachel and not being able to hold and kiss her is Ross’s biggest problem.

Pssst! The Show Is About to Start!

Lots of other heroes have tried to win Ross’s favour. Some listened to Monica and offered security. Some researched the museum where Ross works and offered him a dinosaur. Others were smarter: they knew that some boys like girls, so they offered Ross a dating service: “Look,” they said, “this is Janice. Isn’t she just what you want?”

None of them had success, but others prepared much better. They understood that Ross doesn’t just want any girl; he wants a specific kind of girl (so they thought). Some introduced Ross to a girl in New York. Others introduced Ross to a girl who is tiny and blonde. Others introduced Ross to a girl whose name starts with “R” (Regina Fellangi, for example), but none of them had success.

Now it’s your turn. If you know Ross, which girl would you introduce? Maybe…Rachel?

If you can prove that you can bring Ross and Rachel together, do you think there is any chance he will reject your help? How will he pay you? As little as possible -or whatever amount is necessary to get your help? If you can solve his problem, than I guarantee Ross will hire you. This is what “the biggest challenge” and “this concrete manager” means. This is how deep you have to dig to find the irresistible argument for hiring you.

In the coming chapters, we will put this idea into practice.

Finding Rachel: the Incredible Research Tool that Guarantees You Address Exactly the Biggest Needs of Each Specific Employer—Every Single Time

Imagine for a second what it would be like to always find Rachel. Not once in a while by pure luck, but every single time, no matter which employer you choose. Can you see how it would transform your application process if you could address the biggest need or the greatest pain of the employer?

How easy would it be to write the perfect cover letter for the perfect CV if you knew in advance exactly what it is this employer cares most about in the world? How would you like to stop firing job applications like a shotgun in a pitch-dark night, praying that you hit something? Wouldn’t you rather launch them purposeful, premeditated, like a laser-guided missile that never, ever misses its target?

I am proud to announce that after nearly three decades of working in the triangle of communication, psychology, and business, I have developed the ultimate solution for finding the greatest pain of each employer. The research tool I have developed has helped hundreds of other expatriates, individuals from all walks of life (and myself) find employers and clients at top conditions. I am about to share this tool with you. Right now, right here on the next page. Are you ready?

Which failsafe method guarantees that you address the biggest pain of each specific employer, every single time?

Ask!

Ask the employer. Pick up the phone, call the hiring manager or at least the recruiter, and ask, “What is your biggest challenge for this position?” Then use this answer to write your cover letter.

Congratulations. You are now 100 percent sure that your cover letter will address the biggest challenge of this particular employer. Why? Because you asked, and they told you. Simple, right? Once you flip it inside out, the power of this one tool becomes obvious.

To whom would you listen?

a)      Someone giving you general information about his skills?

b)      Someone who is giving you the solutions to the one problem that keeps you awake all night?

I am still waiting to meet someone who would rather hear some general sales pitch instead of a concrete solution to their biggest worries. Elon Musk proves my point. At the annual meeting of Tesla Motors in June 2017, he talked about his upcoming fully electric semi truck. The truck is not even completely designed yet, but customers don’t seem to need further assurance. “They just want to know how many can they buy and how soon,” Elon Musk said. Tesla is involving clients in the design process. Why? “It’s not a mystery. They already know that it is going to meet their needs because they told us what those needs are.”

In other words, he asked the customers to name their biggest problems. Then he designed a solution for this specific problem. Sales guaranteed.

It’s July 2017 as I write this. I hope by the time you finish this book, I can say, “You and Elon Musk know exactly how to sell your services because you simply asked your customers what they need.”

Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Job Descriptions

Why is it crucial that you ask about the employer’s biggest challenges before you apply?

Think for a moment about your current job. What is the most important, most valuable task you performed for your employer this week? Why was it so important?

Now, do you remember the advertisement that got you this job? Did it have anything to do with what you just described?

Have you ever been to a job interview, only to discover that the actual job is very different from the job description? Most of us have already had that pleasure. I was truly shocked when I learned that most HR professionals and hiring managers never talk about the position they are tasked to fill. When I visit companies, it is usually the first time these two key players sit in the same room and define the success criteria for this position. If you are like most of my clients, you already have some work experience and a few accomplishments to show. Do me a favour, please. Take a piece of paper and write down the names of ten colleagues who work in your field of expertise. Now, rank them from most professional to least professional.

What did the best person do that the average person didn’t? This person must have done something different otherwise, he or she wouldn’t be the best, right? Let’s do a quick exercise to help you hone in on those qualities you admire. On a piece of paper, I’d like you to write:

1. The name of the best professional on your list

2. In one sentence: Why was this person the best in his or her field?

3. Write down the concrete situation when you experienced this the last time

- When was it? (Date)

- Where was it? (Location)

- What exactly did the person do?

- Why was it so valuable that he or she did this?

When I coach managers, I ask them this very same questions. I let them think about all the colleagues they have already experienced in this position. Then I ask the manager to rank them from best to worst.

- What did the best people do differently?

- Why was it so important to your company’s success?

- When your new colleague is successful: What will be different from now? And why does this matter?

Most HR managers never ask these questions. They don’t know how success is defined in a certain position, but they still need to decide whom to invite for a job interview and whom to reject. So, what do they do?

They make up arbitrary criteria.

Unfortunately, that is the rule and not the exception. How can you hope to address the biggest challenge of a hiring manager based on the job description? There is no chance! This is why it is so important to ask before you apply.

There are two ways to achieve this goal. One is to talk directly to the hiring manager, and this often requires a personal recommendation. You could also convince the recruiter to forward your application to the hiring manager in the standard application process.

In the coming pages, you will learn how to use both ways with maximum effectiveness. And yes, you are right. There is an obvious problem in asking the HR managers about the biggest challenge. The truth is that in nine out of ten cases, they have no clue.

Would you be surprised if I tell you that it doesn’t matter if HR tells you a fairy tale, as long as you make an effort to find the right answer? Stay with me and find out why this is true.

But first, let’s put your imagination to work.

Congratulations! You’ve just started your first working day at your new employer!

Now, reverse engineer your success. How exactly did you get this job? Together, we will walk back—step by step—from the day you started to work in your new company to the moment you first started your job hunt.

The fastest way to your destination? Start from the success and look back at the road that got you there.

Reverse Engineer Your Next Employment

What did those expats who get a job in Germany do differently from those who didn’t? Last year, I coached 117 expats. They came from all over the world and a wide variety of professions. Each of them had a university degree. I analysed their success in detail. When I asked them to look back at the road that got them to their next job, these steps came up over and over again. Walk with me backwards, from getting the job offer back to the moment when you started your search.

But first, a warning.

Many trusted advisors told me that this chapter was too confusing—because I started at the end and moved backwards in time to the start. “Why don’t you go from step one to twenty? That’s much easier to understand!”

Well, they’re right. Starting at the beginning and then taking you step by step towards the end is easier. It’s understandable. It’s what’s called a process-oriented approach, and this is exactly what each HR manager is doing.

What is step one? “You need to speak German.” And you are out.

Convince an employer to first define the results he wants to achieve—and suddenly it is up to you to prove that you can provide what he wants. Maybe you will use a different path than he thought, but does that matter, as long as you get the results? If you want employers to define the results first, then you should be willing to do the same. That’s why I ask you to do something hard. Walk backwards with me. From the result (You got the job!) to the moment when you started your search (I need a job!). Take the effort of extra work now, and you will save work every single day in your hunt for a new job.

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Nineteen Steps to Your Next Job!

19) Final step! You add value.

18) “They offered me the job!”

17) Address all objections.

16) Prove that you can solve their biggest problem.

15) Prove that you understand their goals and challenges.

14) Verify. Always verify!

13) You get invited to a job interview.

12) You get selected into the short list.

11) Send your cover letter, CV, and other relevant documents.

10) Apply!

9) Discern facts and myths.

8) Call the employer!

7) Create your short list of interesting employers

6) Research the position, company, hiring manager, and recruiter.

5) Dragons, spaceships, and job descriptions

4) Be a domina!

3) Start your search-and-rescue mission

2) Lock and load—but first: analyse!

1) Define your search criteria.

0) I admit that my clients “cheat” in this game. They get themselves a booster rocket. They use my career-coaching service to better implement this strategy. Even more importantly, they know that I will open doors for them. I introduce them to managers in my network they find useful. That gives them instant trust, and trust leads to opportunities.

In a moment, we will discuss each of these nineteen steps in detail, so that you can follow them one step at a time. We will implement them in a standard application process and in recommendations.

But first…

Learn How to Ride a Bike

I was seven years old and feeling adventurous. My friend Dominik, who lived across the street, lent his brand-new bicycle to me. It was blue and shiny and the coolest thing in the world. I was learning to ride a bike.

Dominik did exactly what his father did with him: he held on to the bike, gave me a push, shouted for me to pedal, and then he—let go. I crashed five seconds later. Bloody knees and a fist-sized bump on the head didn’t stop me. I got right up and tried again. And again. And again.

That was thirty-six years ago. But I don’t need to take courses if I want to get back on a bike nowadays. I learned it once and never forgot. The same is true for the techniques and strategies in How to Win Jobs & Influence Germans. They defy your natural instincts as much as the concept of riding a metal frame with two wheels at thirty kilometres per hour. But just like the bicycle, they work.

You will fall. You will struggle. Keep getting up. Ask yourself what worked better than the last time. Once you know what worked, do that some more! As long as you get back on the bike, you will succeed. You only need stamina, and stamina is a choice, not a miracle.

In the next chapter, we compare the average success rate of a standard application process versus a recommendation. We discover why you should use both methods, and then we start riding the bike. Don’t be afraid; I will take you through all the moves.

I’ve got your back.

From Zero to Awesome: Nineteen Steps to Your Next Job

Basically, there are only two ways to get a job: either you apply to an open position through the standard application process, or you get recommended by a door opener who has the trust of the employer. The advantage of the standard application process is that you are in control. Only you decide to how many companies you apply to and how much thought you put into each application. The downside? It’s the least effective way to find a job. You are basically sending an advertisement for your services to a total stranger, in the hopes that he or she will be interested.

The advantage of an introduction is that it’s a very effective way to find a new job; 85 percent of all open positions are filled by a recommendation. No wonder my clients made “find an ally in Germany” their step zero. The downside? You are completely dependent on other people.

How effective is a standard application versus a recommendation?

Reverse engineering your success is a great way to estimate the amount of work and sophistication you will have to put into your job hunt. Your ultimate goal is not to have a job, but a great job, right? If that’s the case, then you need to have more than one option to choose from. Your ultimate goal, in quantitative terms, should therefore be at least two to three job offers—instead of just one.

How many job interviews will it take to get two or three job offers? My advice is to aim for twelve job interviews. In this case, every four to six job interviews would lead to one actual job offer.

For how many jobs do you need to apply to get twelve job interviews? The answer to this question is very different for a standard application versus a recommendation. Three or four recommendations might lead to one job interview on average. With a standard application? The way most candidates apply, 150 (or more) applications lead to exactly zero interviews.

And if you follow my advice?

A total of sixty to ninety job applications should yield twelve job interviews. Your results will grow exponentially with each batch of applications you send. In the end, you should be able to get one to two interviews out of ten applications you send. (Remember that you apply as an English speaker in a German-speaking company.)

In the following pages, I will walk you through both the standard application and the recommendation process step by step. You will have all the information you need to implement my methods. We will start with the standard application process and then move on to recommendations.

Here we go…

Step One: Define Your Search Criteria

One of the guiding principles in my coaching practice is “We don’t guess, we test.” Did you notice that I always talk about a “batch of applications,” not about single applications? You want a reliable process for choosing companies, one you can repeat over and over and be confident that your applications will lead to job interviews. The fastest way to get there is an A/B test. Every week, you decide about one search criterion you’d like to test. For example:

- “This week, I will compare small companies to medium-sized companies.”

- “This week, I will compare companies in Germany to companies in the Netherlands.”

- “This week, I will compare German Mittelstand to start-up companies.”

You will search only for companies that fit your A/B test criterion. My advice is to always test batches of ten or at least five companies at a time.

If you choose only two to three companies for each test, how will you know the results are based on the criterion that you chose to test and not pure chance?

Step Two: Lock and Load—But First: Analyse!

As soon as you get at least two interviews out of ten applications, you “lock” your target group and apply exclusively to companies that fit all criteria of your best responses. How good will it feel when you know that ten applications will yield two or three job interviews? How different will this be from your experience so far?

This is, of course, the endgame. It will take you a lot of thinking and analysing to get to this point. It’s important that you analyse the results of each batch of applications. My tip? Learn to ignore your failures!

Most of us—especially if “us” means Germans—like to focus on mistakes. But the only thing that you learn from mistakes is what you should not do. You will still not know what you should do. A much faster way to succeed is to focus on experiences where your job hunt went better than usual. Think for a moment about the job applications that you have send out: Which of them got the best results, compared to the others? What exactly was better with this application?

And what helped you the most to get this better result? What did you do that was different? How was the employer different? How was the situation different? What about this employer’s needs was different? Was there a different personal relationship? Whenever you find something that works better than usual, keep doing it! And then analyse again: what was now the best result?

You see, there is no silver bullet, no magic formula. There is just test, not guess. Focus on things that work better than usual. Continue to do this with each batch of applications, and you will see better and better results—first slowly and then dramatically. After sending forty or fifty applications, you should be able to better quantify your market. “Okay, my target group is medium-sized automotive companies in the south of Germany who are restructuring their business model or who had a recent change in management.” Take a moment to count how many concrete details are in this description (size, industry, location, current business challenge, etc.).

Once you have a detailed understanding of your target group, you will see a dramatic increase in your number of interview invitations.

Why? Because you will apply only to those companies that fit your personal target group. You know already that they are interested before you apply. If you apply only to those companies that want you, is it a wonder that they invite you for job interviews?

Step Three: Search-and-Rescue Mission

Use every source available to find job offers. Always write down the source of a job advertisement. Analysing from which source you find the best job offers can help you save a lot of time.

Obvious starting points are www.immigrantspirit.com and www.immigrantspirit.de.

Immigrant Spirit GmbH scans the complete German online job market. We filter out all English-language job offers and list them on www.immigrantspirit.com. On the other hand, we don’t do that on www.immigrantspirit.de. Here, you find English and German job offers alike.

Compare the search results for your profession on both websites. This will give you an idea about the real size of your market. Can you focus on English job offers alone? Or do you need to apply to German-speaking companies right from the start?

The same is true for recommendations: Always write down who recommended you for a position. Soon you will figure out who are your most useful allies. (Don’t forget to thank them!)

Step Four: Be a Domina!

Select only those job offers for application that fit your search criteria for this week. If you are inconsistent and apply all over the place, how will you ever find out what works and what does not? You will be forever stuck in limbo.

Instead, you need to become your own domina. There are clear rules. Make sure you stick to them or you will be punished, you naughty, naughty jobseeker! This intellectual discipline is very hard, especially since you will not see results very fast. But trust me: if you stick with the program, you will be successful. Rome wasn’t burned down in a day.

How will you make sure that you “stick with the program”?

Step Five: Dragons, Spaceships, and Job Descriptions

What do these things have in common? They all belong in the fantasy and science fiction aisle of your mental bookstore. At this step in the process, you carefully analyse the job description and check their demands against your own skills and wishes. Often, the requirements in the job advertisement have little to do with the actual demands of the position. (As you might have discovered if you have ever been to a job interview.) For the moment, just keep that in mind.

Step Six: Research Position, Company, Hiring Manager, and Recruiter

Preparation is everything. You should have a clear idea about all aspects of your target company before you take the next step.

The Position
Obviously, you read the requirements in the job ad. But maybe you can do more. Could you ask someone in the company about the real work in this role? Could you ask which tasks are important and why?

Most likely, you don’t know someone in this company. But maybe there is a way to check if you know someone who knows someone in this company. Could you play checkers and move two fields to a contact directly in your target company? I am seldom more than three degrees separated from anyone in the German business community. You can build a bridge of recommendations right into a target company. In the second part of the book, we will have a close look at the blueprint for such a bridge.

The Company

Of course, you’ve researched the company’s mission, their main products, and their biggest competitors. But don’t forget to also check if the company was in the news lately. Maybe they introduced a new service or got an award for exceptional customer service. Is there something positive about the company that you could mention in the conversation?

The Hiring Manager and Recruiter. I also want you to invest five minutes to research the hiring manager and the recruiter. Check them out on LinkedIn and Xing.

Tip: Xing is a German company similar to LinkedIn. While LinkedIn is gaining ground, Xing is still way more popular in Germany. Every recruiter will check if you have a Xing profile. If they cannot find you on Xing, then it will leave another question mark in their mind. I recommend you open an account free of charge—and make sure it’s always up to date. Never spend more than five minutes researching a person. It’s too tempting to use it as an excuse for procrastination. When researching a person, you are looking for the answer to this question: “What do I respect the most about this person? And why?”

When I started to study business psychology at the Fresenius University of Applied Science in Düsseldorf, we read a ton of research about this topic. When you feel sympathy for a person, then he or she will start to like you better—even if you filter out all other influences like attractiveness, similarities, and the like. You will depend on the cooperation of these people in order to get your next job. Don’t waste an opportunity to build good relationships!

Additional Value

Researching the hiring manager can give you an additional advantage: If you find him or her, then you also find other professionals working in the same department. Studying their profiles can give you an idea about the skills, experience, and general background that this hiring manager is looking for. A job ad tells you what a company claims to value. A look at the profiles of your future colleagues might tell you what the hiring manager actually values (unless there is a major change in the company).

Step Seven: Your Short List

Once you have researched a good number of companies, you should now contact only those that still fit your test criterion for this week. If you already have a target group that has passed through the fire of actual testing (instead of guessing or wishing), you should apply only to these companies. I would like to stress this point: Don’t confuse assumptions with actual test results. If you have not tested and revised, tested and revised, and again tested your search criteria, you don’t have a target group yet!

Warning: the next step is absolutely crucial to your success in your job hunt!

Step Eight: Call the Employer!

Take a deep breath. This is the most challenging step for many jobseekers. Engineers, software developers, and other professionals in technical fields often shy away from this approach. I understand that it takes a lot of stomach to call up a stranger and ask for favours. I promise: it’s not that scary when you actually do it. I will walk you through the complete call.

First of all, you don’t actually ask for a favour when you call. Your call serves only one purpose: you want to know what to write in your cover letter. As soon as you have this information, you can hang up. One more time: the only purpose of your call to an employer is to find out what you should write in your cover letter.

Very few candidates ever call an employer, but those who do often make a common mistake: they try to sell themselves over the phone—and that is a terrible idea!

Imagine this: You’re an HR manager. You are in the middle of an important task. Maybe you are editing a presentation to the CEO that is due in the afternoon. Maybe you have a conference call in a few minutes.

The telephone rings, and a total stranger starts pouring information into your ear: where he is from, what he has done, where he went to university, and why he is looking for a job, and that he needs a visa and…and…and…

When did you stop listening?

But you’re not an HR manager, are you? No, you are the one who is going to solve that person’s problems, so I want you to do better than that. And it’s surprisingly easy.

1. Know exactly what you want.

2. Get their cooperation.

3. Ask one question at a time.

Okay, this is really important, so we will take it slowly.

1. Know exactly what you want. Remember that your cover letter should have only three paragraphs:

1. This is your biggest problem.

2. This is how I solved a similar problem for another company.

3. Let’s talk about this.

You call the company to get the answer to number 1. I can’t stress this enough: that is the only purpose of your call. As soon as you have the answer to that question, thank your benefactor sincerely and hang up. You don’t need to tell anything to get these answers. You only have to ask. The answer to your question will be the first paragraph of your cover letter!

Dear Ms. Meyer,

Thank you for our phone conversation. You mentioned that the most important task in the business analyst position is to prepare brief presentations that will allow management to come to a quick decision because you are moving in a very volatile market.

These few lines will take roughly seven to twelve seconds to read, and that’s the maximum amount of time an HR manager spends on most job applications. If you are Ms. Meyer, would you read on—or would you rather read on after a typical opening for a cover letter, something like this?

To whom it may concern,

I have five years of experience as a business analyst, blah, blah, blah…

Tip: If you want Ms. Meyer to read your cover letter, talk about Ms. Meyer, not about you.

I have two additional points that will help you have better phone conversations.

2. Get Cooperation

People will be very helpful—as long as you show respect. Always ask permission before you ask your questions. Say “thank you” for every answer you get, and always give them a reason why you are asking the question in the first place. The reason should be short—half a sentence. It’s not about the content but about the fact that you show respect. For example, you might ask, “Could you tell me what the biggest challenge for this position is, so I can write my application in a way that you can easily evaluate?” or “In every job, there are a good number of tasks. But some are always more important than others. For this position, what is the most important task?”

3. Ask One Question at a Time

Think about the best conversation that you had recently. Who did most of the talking? Was it your partner? Or was it you?

People are willing to talk to you—so let them!

Always ask only one question at a time. Imagine you get two phone calls about your job hunt. The first one goes like this:

Recruiter: “I want to talk to you about your last job. What was it? How much did it pay? Did you like it? To how many companies did you apply? What was the job that you had before that? Why did you change your employer?”

The second phone call goes like this:

Recruiter: “May I take five minutes of your time and ask you two questions so that I can better understand how I can help you in your job hunt?”

You: “…”

Recruiter: “Thank you. My first question is this: in the last six months, how many job applications did you write?”

You: “…”

Recruiter: “I see. I respect your determination. May I ask: how many job interviews did you get out of this approach?”

You: “…”

Recruiter: “You put a lot of work in your career. Why do you think it was so hard to secure more job interviews?”

You: “…”

Which conversation would you have enjoyed more, the first one or the second one? You will get a lot of cooperation from employers if you treat them with respect and ask them just one question at a time.

I understand that this approach can be very hard to put into practice. Test it first with a person you trust. Then call ten companies where you don’t want to work, and test it with them. You can also ask me to coach you.

“Because of your help, I got these interviews.
I have applied to ten or twelve companies, and I got two interview invitations.
I called the companies to ask them the questions that you suggested
—and that made the difference.”

—Yeun-Kwan Kim

Step Nine: Discern Facts and Myths

Back to our phone conversation. Ask only two short questions.

1. “What is the biggest problem you try to solve with this position?”

2. “How do you measure success for this position?”

If you talk to HR, then the first answer will be either a directive to look at the job description or a list of skills.

But skills is not what the hiring manager wants. A skill is only a tool, like a hammer. You want to know what the hammer is used for! Do you want to hang a picture on the wall? Do you want to build a house? Or do you want to kill your husband?

No matter what answer you get, always follow up with why. You need to determine “Y“!

Why is this skill is so important to them? If your partner in this conversation is giving you several reasons, ask, “From this list of reasons, which one is the most important one? And why?”

Write down the answer and the name of the person you talked with. Congratulations! You have the first paragraph for your cover letter:

Dear Ms. Meyer,

Thank you for our phone conversation. You mentioned that the most important task in the business analyst position is to prepare brief presentations that will allow management to come to a quick decision, because you are moving in a very volatile market.

The second question you ask is, “How do you measure success for this position?” Once again, you will follow with “Why is this criterion the most important one used to measure success?”

This second set of questions helps you to verify the problem. Are there discrepancies in the answers to questions one and two? Check that you understood the biggest challenge correctly!

Bonus: If you can ask these questions to the hiring manager, you are golden. Now that you know exactly what his or her biggest problem is, you only need to prove that you can solve that problem.

If you can only reach the HR department, you need to know one thing: in most cases, the answer the HR manager gives will be wrong. But you should still call! Most recruiters never bother to learn which results a hiring manager wants to achieve. Therefore, HR might dream up reasons of their own. In other words: HR might tell you nonsense—because they just don’t know better. But that doesn’t really matter!

Why? Because your cover letter will still be good enough to impress the HR person. He or she will then forward it to the hiring manager—the person you really want to reach. Because of the incorrect information you were given by HR, the hiring manager will read your cover letter and think you have the wrong idea about the challenges for this position. But the manager will also understand:

1. You have the wrong idea because HR gave you the wrong information.

2. You were interested enough to ask.

Every single one of the hundreds of managers I have met over the years wants the exact same thing—an employee who takes ownership of his or her project, who constantly develops talent, and who will have his or her manager’s back. You just proved that you have all these qualities—because you cared enough to ask what the hiring manager wants. Very often, the hiring manager will contact you and explain the real challenges for this position. Then you are in a direct conversation with the hiring manager.

Step Ten: Apply!

If the call to the employer confirms your original evaluation of the job and you have a good impression of the company, it’s time to apply. If you discover in your call that the actual job is very different from the job description or the employer clearly has no interest in your application, congratulations! You saved yourself a lot of time writing your cover letter, preparing all documents, spell checking it, etc. Don’t try to change the mind of an employer who is not interested at all. “I’m not interested” is different from “I have concerns.” There are many other companies that will be more open to you. Focus on those that already want you—not on those that reject you with every fibre of their heart. The secret of successful deals is to offer your services to those who already love what you can do for them.

Step Eleven: Send Your Cover Letter, CV, and Other Relevant Documents

If you followed the steps above, your application will find a warm reaction. The HR manager will open his or her inbox and be delighted to receive your application. Why?

- You have addressed the manager by name (instead of “To whom it may concern”).

- You have reminded and thanked the manager for the nice conversation you had yesterday.

- In the first three lines of your cover letter, you have shown a clear understanding of the manager’s biggest problem. As a matter of fact, you’ve even used his or her exact formulation – nothing is more convincing than someone’s own words.

- The manager reads on and learns from your experience, in which you describe the struggle a former employer had (which is similar to this manager’s own problems) and how you solved that problem.

When you have a problem in your private life, whom do you ask for advice? Someone who already dealt with a similar situation, right? Will you be interested to hear how this person solved her problem? Of course! HR managers are people too. They love to learn from a real-life examples. If you are short and to the point, you show respect for the manager’s time.

At the end of the cover letter, you should ask for a personal interview. How will the HR manager react? Will he or she reject you—or be curious to learn more about you? I bet the manager will read your CV with interest and sympathy.

As someone who is on the receiving end of job applications every day, we don’t get many of these insightful and personal applications. We love to have you talk more about us—and how you can help us.

Step Twelve: You Get Selected into the Short List

Your application is remarkable, meaning it’s worth making a remark about. The HR manager is impressed with your deep understanding of the company’s problems and your experience in solving similar challenges in the past. In most cases, the HR manager will present your application to the hiring manager. Congratulations! You just made a big leap forward!

Step Thirteen: You Get Invited to a Job Interview

The hiring manager is usually much more welcoming to your contribution than the HR manager will be. There is much more at stake for him or her. To a recruiter, you are just a piece of paper. But the hiring manager has an actual job to do, a deadline to meet, targets to achieve, and problems to solve. If you can prove you can help this individual, he or she will listen.

Here is the interesting bit: Maybe the HR manager misinformed you. Maybe the biggest problem you addressed isn’t the hiring manager’s actual problem. But as anyone who leads people can confirm, professionals who take initiative are hard to find. People who volunteer to make a contribution and deliver are way too rare.

Arnim Wahls, CEO of Firstbird GmbH in Vienna, speaks for every single hiring manager I have ever interviewed: “It’s really about the attitude. For us, everything is about fast growth. People who have the aim to challenge themselves every day and to always improve what they are doing.”

Therefore, the hiring manager will still consider your application. You might have been wrong about the facts, but that’s actually the HR specialist’s fault. She didn’t do her job. But you? You’ve shown initiative, interest, sophistication, and the will to contribute. That’s outstanding! The hiring manager picks up the phone, curious to get to know you.

Your first job interview with the company is about to begin.

Step Fourteen: Verify. Always Verify!

Maybe you get a formal invitation. Maybe the hiring manager will call you directly. Either way, at this point, I encourage you to break with convention. At the very beginning of the conversation, ask the interviewer, “Do you mind if I ask a short question before we start?” Then you follow up with, “I just want to make sure I understand the position correctly. What is the biggest challenge you try to solve with this position?”

Then follow up with “Why?”

What happens if you don’t ask this question? In the worst case, you focus the entire interview on an issue that is either non-existent or insignificant for the employer. Then the interviewer will leave the conversation with the feeling that she’s wasted her time. Therefore, spend a moment to verify that you correctly understand the biggest challenge of this employer.

There are two additional benefits:

1. It breaks the employer/candidate dynamic. Instead, you become two professionals talking about a real-life problem. You are now on the same eye level as the interviewer.

2. Always ask for the “biggest” challenge. This way you are sure to focus on the topic that has the most value for your potential employer.

Step Fifteen: Prove that You Understand Their Goals and Challenges

This is easy: simply rephrase the hiring manager’s biggest challenge answer in your own words to ensure that you understood him or her correctly. Few other candidates can tell the employer, “I get it!”

Step Sixteen: Prove that You Can Solve Their Biggest Problem

How do you prove that you can solve the employer’s biggest problem? With an anecdote from your work experience. Tell a true story from your professional life in which you solved a similar problem. Explain why it was important to solve this issue, and then describe what you did to resolve the situation and clarify the final outcome.

Tip: This needs to be a true story. People are not stupid! They can smell “fake news” a mile away.

Do you see how important it is to verify the biggest challenge? Imagine you would have relied solely on the information that you got from the HR manager. You might end up telling a story that bores the hell out of the hiring manager, because it is not related to his or her actual challenge at all. Always verify!

About your story: It should be short and clear. These questions should be answered in your story:

- What was the challenge?

- Where was it?

- When was it?

- Who was involved?

- What did you do?

- What was the result?

This is a real-life example from my coaching. It is perfect—except for two (rather important) points.

- Can you identify the answer to all questions above?

- Can you figure out why the following example is not right for this chapter?

Vanessa lives in South Germany. Last year, she booked a coaching session with me. She got a lot of job interviews, but they never led to a job offer. Together we reviewed everything she said in her interviews. We realised that the hiring managers had doubts that were never mentioned during the conversation. I advised her to ask one additional question near the end of the interview: “Which concerns do you still have that we haven’t discussed so far?” She followed my advice and was hired by Airbus Defense.

Did you realise what’s wrong with my example? Your challenge in this moment is “How do I convince an employer that I will add the most value?” but my story is about something different: “When is the right time to deal with objections?” Did I mention that it is important to make sure that you talk about the real problems of the employer?

“But what do I say if you don’t have a story  about a professional experience that fits the scenario?” First, ask yourself honestly if you can do the job and do it well. If your answer is yes, then ask yourself why.

Share that answer with the employer. Maybe you have experience in a different industry that could help to solve the hiring manager’s problem as well. If you don’t have any fitting experience, then you go for the next-best thing: prove that you are a fast learner and that you are fully committed to your employer’s success. Just claiming that you are a fast learner or that you are highly motivated will not be enough. You need compelling, true, real-life stories to prove that you have these qualities, so work on your anecdotes before your interview. Remember that the best employers hire for attitude and train for skills.

“But what if there is no realistic chance that I could do this job?”

Then it’s easy. You thank the interviewer for his or her time and you look for a position that is a better fit. Never lie! Remember that if you get the job, you actually have to do it.

Ari (name changed) got himself a job as mechanical engineer in Castrop-Rauxel. On the first day of the job, it became painfully clear that he didn’t know any of the professional software they were using in this company (as he had claimed in the interview). For two weeks, he made coffee and made copies of documents—and then he quit. He says today that this was the most humiliating experience in his life.

Stick to the truth. There will always be other opportunities. There is one way to salvage at least something from the wreckage of this interview: If you have established a good personal connection, ask the interviewer which of his or her contacts could use someone with your skill. You might be able to get a recommendation at least.

My friend Martin Gaedt started cleverheads, a company that helps human-resources specialists recommend their second- and third-choice candidates to other employers. (Unfortunately, the service is only available in German so far, but this is an idea worth spreading.)

Step Seventeen: Address All Objections

Funny you should mention that. What destroyed the Titanic was not the tip of the iceberg but the huge mountain of ice that was hidden beneath the waves. There is only one time when you can detect and defuse hidden objections, and that is during the job interview itself. If there are objections that you didn’t answer in the interview, then they might kill you. Therefore, before the end of the interview, ask two questions:

1. “May I ask what your biggest concern is regarding hiring me?”

2. “Which objections do you still have that we haven’t discussed so far?”

The second question will help to spot the ice that is hidden under the surface. Address these objections as best you can.

“You Don’t Speak German” How to deal with the mother of all objections.

Let’s be honest here. If you don’t speak the company’s work language, that will impact the whole team. Because you can’t communicate with them in their mother language (while living in their home country), everyone you interact with will now need to cope with additional nuisances. If you ask a traditional German employer to hire you in this situation, you are really asking them to reform their whole organisation. In many cases, this is a good thing. The company will be more competitive if it can integrate international talent. Still, your future employer might dread the confusion and the inevitable conflicts among the team.

The employer will only make this effort if you can provide value that exceeds the additional costs of money, thought, energy, and change required to accommodate and train you. This is one reason why it is vital to focus on the biggest problem of the employer. If you can solve the biggest problem, then you automatically provide the biggest possible value. Still, it takes a lot of faith from the employer to take this risk. How can you help your future boss to make the decision in your favour?

I got my first job as a finance journalist with wallstreet:online. It was the year 2000, just before the Internet bubble was about to burst, when wallstreet:online was the biggest stock exchange community in Germany. For several years before that, I had worked as a radio journalist and news anchor. I had absolutely no knowledge about the financial world, especially the stock market. But it was Christmastime, and my main client, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), had no budget left for the year. I had a family but no way to feed them till January.

Pure necessity pushed me to apply for the job as a finance journalist with wallstreet:online. I was not surprised (but was deeply frustrated) when they rejected me. “You don’t have any experience in finance.”

For two full days, I considered my options. Then I picked up the phone and called the hiring manager. I made my case. The conversation got pretty heated, but finally, he said: “Okay, come to a job interview. We will sit down with you. And then, you don’t get the job.”

I went to the job interview and explained my daily work as a radio journalist. Every day, you write news stories, meaning you have to consider the facts that are presented, find the facts that your interview partner would like to hide from you, evaluate all of them, and understand how important each of these facts is in the greater picture. Then you have to simplify this huge amount of information into one minute, thirty seconds on air.

In short, my argument was that I had years of practice in learning, evaluating, and presenting new information. Learning about the stock market didn’t frighten me. I then made the hiring manager an offer: “Look, I’m not asking you to make guesses or to just trust what I say. Allow me to work for you for one week, free of charge. If you like what I do, hire me. If, at the end of the week, you feel that I can’t match your expectations, I will still be grateful for the opportunity.”

The manager agreed. After seven days, I got the job. Two months later, I was leading my own department. Another six months later, the competition offered me twice the money to start a stock exchange radio for them—so I left. (Don’t tell that last bit to a potential employer.)

Share the Risk

If an employer has only German-speaking colleagues, and you want to start in English and learn German on the job, acknowledge that you ask a lot of faith from your future boss. Be fair. Offer him or her a chance to test your performance and see personally if you can get the needed results. A short internship will tell your boss (and you) more about your abilities to get results than a ton of university degrees or fifty letters of recommendation will. What counts in the end is what you deliver.

Even if you work for free, you still need to sell your services. There are two concerns regarding a free internship that you should address if you want the employer to agree to your proposal:

1. Make clear that the employer has no costs. (You work for free but not for longer than two weeks.)

2. Point out that it is okay to say no to you at the end of the internship. “If it doesn’t work out, I will still be grateful for the opportunity.”

Despite popular belief, most people are decent. They don’t want to lead you on. They don’t want to take advantage of you and then toss you out. And they don’t want to feel bad for rejecting you after you already worked for them. You need to show that your relationship will be intact, no matter what they decide.

Ironically, the German aversion against uncertainty will become your ally once you get an internship. If you show up for work every morning, then you are the “safe choice.” Your colleagues will get to know you. They will see that you keep your promises. They will respect that you deliver results. If every new candidate is now the question mark, you are now what they are used to. Change is nothing more than a question of perspective.

*(If you are an employer and consider hiring English-speaking candidates for the first time, I can advise you on how to smoothly facilitate the transition. Please get in touch with me.)

Step Eighteen: “They Offered Me the Job!”

I can see the smile on your face when you tell your best friend. If you follow the steps in this book—not only by the letter, but by their spirit—I guarantee that you will find a great job. It will take time and effort and sophistication and empathy, but you will build a great career if you embrace the spirit behind these steps. It’s the spirit of those who want to make a contribution in the world, those who seek to add the biggest possible value. Because they understand what Zig Ziglar meant when he said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”

Step Nineteen: Final Step—You Add Value

Adding value by building a meaningful career—not just “getting a job”—should be your ultimate goal here. Idealism is not naive in the digital age; it is actually the most profitable mind-set in the world. Software and robots take over the jobs that demand only obedience. The best-paid—and safest—jobs are those that require constant change, learning, empathy, and connection with other people. These are the tasks that software simply cannot do. (Excel will never love you like I do.) Skills can get you a job, but attitude gets you a career.

Embrace the Immigrant Spirit!

- Optimism. Believe in your ability to build a good life.

- Vigour. Don’t wait for permission. High energy makes things happen.

- Courage. To avoid all risks means not to live. Take calculated risks to get ahead.

- Stamina. No pain, no gain. Carry on when times are tough.

- Openness. Build friendships based on values, not heritage.

- Give back to society. In doing so, you make our lives richer.

Part Two

Recommendations

Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people.
If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for a person.

—Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn

New Friends, Old Friends, and a Kind Word that Leads to a New Job

She doesn’t know it yet, but Shiena (name changed) might get a job soon. Two months ago, the young woman joined a coaching session with me. She had just graduated from Goethe University with a master of science in money and finance. Now she has eighteen months to find a job in Germany, or she will have to return to China.

But Shiena didn’t want to find just any job. She wanted to find something that she loved to do. Her dream was to work in a responsible position in the field of accounting. That’s quite a challenge for someone who is fresh from university and whose German is not yet absolutely fluent. Who would put the financial faith of a company into the hands of someone who comes fresh from the classroom?

Someone who is building something new, for example. My friend Joost (name changed) has just started an exciting company in the pharmaceutical industry, in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute. His company licensed a revolutionary technology, one I absolutely don’t understand, but I do know that it will save corporate customers a ton of money.

Joost has great experience in the industry. He also knows how important diversity is for a company that seeks to sell to customers from around the globe. That’s why he is building his organisation in English, allowing him to hire the best professionals, instead of “the best of those who speak German.” Shiena would never have found Joost on her own, though. As I write this, his company is still in stealth mode. There is no website, no phone number, no way that Shiena could find out about this job opening—unless someone with a personal connection told her about it. Up to 75 percent of all job openings in Germany are filled in the hidden job market, Barbara H. Lutz of Hunting/Her claims.

Shiena is very accurate in her work, as I could experience first-hand in our coaching session. Joost is a great manager with many years of experience at Mitsubishi Pharmaceuticals. They both profit from knowing each other. And after the job interview on Friday, Joost might offer Shiena a job. She couldn’t find a better mentor.

Forty-seven percent of all active candidates find their next job through a personal recommendation, according to research by Lou Adler and LinkedIn. For passive candidates (those who aren’t actively looking for a job) the number is nearly 90 percent. This fits my personal experience with thousands of expatriates over the years.

The people you seldom think about could get you a job.

Here is the good news for everyone seeking a career in a foreign country: it’s the people you seldom think about who could get you a job. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler offer a simple explanation in their wonderful book Connected: Our close friends tend to be very much like us. They live in the same circles, meet the same people, and hear the same rumours as we do. Acquaintances, on the other hand, hear news that may never enter our filter bubble because they make different experiences and are connected to other people. That is why they can connect us to employers that offer jobs we would usually never hear about—just as I did with Shiena and Joost.

If you are a stranger in a foreign country, then recommendations provide a vital service for you. They reassure a potential employer that you are trustworthy, both in terms of your abilities and your character. People vouch with their own credibility for you, so if they make a recommendation, don’t disappoint them.

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman is absolutely right: find the people and you find the opportunity.

You Know More People than You Know

I offer you more homework. The little exercise that I am about to show you has helped me to find the investors for Immigrant Spirit GmbH. I was still young and stupid when I left Germany in 2001. All my thoughts were set on my future, and I didn’t bother to keep ties to my old life and my former colleagues and friends. Today I know: your personal network is your personal net worth.

You can have as much money in your bank account as you wish, but what really makes you safe and successful is the number of people you can call your friends—and the number of people you can call up for a favour when you really need it. The exercise you are about to start has helped me to find five extraordinary entrepreneurs who invested six figures into my company, enabling me to build a business around an issue about which I deeply care. I didn’t know any of them a year earlier. But I digress. Here is an effective task that you can do right here and now, one that will increase your chance to find a great job. Please find a pen and a piece of paper. I will wait until you are ready.

Great, you are back. Shall we start?

Write down everybody you know who has any relationship with Germany.

Don’t limit yourself. Put down anybody with a relationship to Germany. Your friends, colleagues, people you went to university with, your pen pal from childhood, your cleaning lady whose son went to a German university—anybody.

Be generous at this step, because any tie to Germany will do. Maybe one of the people you remember is married to a German. Maybe she used to work for a German company five years ago. Maybe you met someone at a business event who has clients in Germany. Or this person has a German family name. If your cousin’s girlfriend’s uncle has a dog—and that dog is a German shepherd, put the uncle on your list. Here is the catch, though: don’t stop before you have at least a hundred names.

The goal of this exercise is that you remember people in your life with whom you have only loose contact—the girlfriend of a former co-worker who has ties to Germany; the husband of your training partner at the fitness club; a former teacher’s cousin you once met at a school reunion.

Don’t give up when it gets tough to find another name. The really valuable surprises will come only after you run out of people with whom you have close contact and that you therefore remember easily.

Once you have a hundred names (or as close as you can get), go through each of these names and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Where does she work?

2. Where did he used to work?

3. Where did he go to university?

4. Who is her partner?

5. What is she or he doing for a living?

6. Where did you meet this person?

7. Who else was there?

Thinking about these questions should spark some ideas. Maybe you realise that a former colleague is now working for a company with German clients. Could this person help you to get one step closer to your goal?

We have a tendency to think of people as frozen in time. For example, I met Laura-Lucia Wehner three years ago when we filmed a promo video together with Home24. Laura-Lucia was the public relations manager at Home24 AG at that time. But since then a thousand days have gone by, and now she works for Zalando. Wouldn’t it be a shame if you were trying to find a job with Zalando and didn’t realise that you already have a contact there?

Use your magnifying glass when you consider possible allies! Put contacts with potential into your short list. Be realistic here; you are not looking for people who can employ you. You are looking for someone who can get you one step closer to employment. This is important! You are not looking for a magic carpet that will fly you to your ultimate goal. You are looking for a good pair of shoes that will take you the first step towards your new job in Germany.

Magic carpets don’t exist, but good shoes do. Therefore, look for good shoes.

Friends and Favours

Everybody does anything for you, as long as they have to do nothing. I have been in business for twenty-seven years now. My experience is that nearly everyone that you meet is a decent person. Most people are very helpful. They want you to be successful, and they are glad to offer support—if you ask in a respectful manner.

At the same time, most people are lazy. They will promise help but then do nothing. Don’t blame them. They have a busy life to live, just like you do. Instead, ask yourself who has the biggest interest in your success? Is it the friend you’ve asked for a favour? The future employer that will pay your salary? Or is the person with the biggest interest in your success and personal happiness, maybe—you?

We have a proverb in Germany: “Hilf Dir selbst, so hilft Dir Gott.” Roughly translated, this means “Help yourself, then God will help you too.” You can get all the help in the world—as long as you are willing to do all the work yourself.

This is especially true for the hardest work: thinking. That’s the one thing that everybody is trying to avoid. Our brain represents only a small fraction of the overall weight of our body, but it uses 20 percent of our energy. If you are the facility manager of your body, and you want to save energy, which power drain will you switch off first? There is a reason why television is so popular: switch on TV and switch off your brain. What a relief!

It’s pointless to fight this. Instead, you need to adapt your request for help, so that it fits human nature.

How to Ask for Favours and Introductions

“First of all, Chris, I have to congratulate you. You just phoned me yesterday and asked me for an interview. I said no problem, but then you said, ‘In English,’ and I said, ‘No way,’ because I’ve never done this before. And it took you only five minutes to make me say yes. You did an excellent job.”

They call Henrik Zaborowski “the Martin Luther of recruiting.” Henrik challenges everything about the traditional ways of hiring in Germany. He is human; he makes decisions based on common sense. He finds the right fit for people, instead of trying to make them fit into any slot that is available. His enthusiasm inspires lots of other human-resources specialists to change their attitude. Maybe that’s because Henrik puts reason in rhyme.

Here is the catch: Henrik does all of this in German. For him to come on my show and explain his ideas in English and even answer live questions from international professionals with all kind of accents took a lot of courage. I can’t think of too many other professionals who don’t speak English on a daily basis who would have done this, for fear of embarrassing themselves. But Henrik said yes to me in five minutes because we have a good relationship—and I never ask for favours without asking myself the following six questions first:

1. What is it that I want—exactly? Write down your request in one short sentence.

2. Does my friend have the power to give me what I ask for? Or do I need to ask for something else?

3. Is my request reasonable? Consider this the new Golden Rule: “Never ask anyone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.” I once got an e-mail from a jobseeker who demanded that I send him a list of suitable job offers, adding, “you can find my information on LinkedIn.” I never answered, can’t really remember why.

4. Is my relationship with this person strong enough to ask this favour? Your spouse will go through a great amount of trouble to make you happy. The guy you met at a business convention two years ago? Not so much—especially since you never bothered to talk to him until you needed something.

Relationships make or break your career. The time to build relationships is when you don’t need them. You cannot show up after ignoring someone for years and immediately ask for a favour. Just because you are drowning doesn’t mean that “this guy” has to throw you a lifebelt. No one likes to be used.

5. Is my request easy to understand? Remember: we are all janitors. We want to save energy. We don’t want to use our brains. The more complicated your request is, the more likely is it that your friend will do nothing. The best requests can be answered with a simple yes or no.

If you need something complicated, can you break it down into several easier parts? Start with the easiest one. Once people start to help you, they are much more likely to grant you an additional favour. Take it one step at a time.

6. How do I show gratitude? No one owes you anything. Therefore say “thank you” when you ask for a favour and say “thank you” again when you got what you wanted—and remember what this person did for you. Look actively for ways to return the favour. This is also a great way to build strong relationships.

I am lucky to have a network of friends in the German HR community. Some of the thought leaders of our industry are really close. How did this happen? We started to help each other, simply because we could. It was simple to retweet a good post, so why wouldn’t we? Soon we started to mention each other in our speeches, making each of us more prominent in the industry. Over time, we build the trust to recommend each other to clients who asked for advice. This cooperation makes us more successful, but it also makes our work more enjoyable. The same idea is behind the Immigrant Spirit Contributors, by the way.

Attention to Details

Many professionals struggle to be precise in their request for help. Do you remember our conversation about the TV show Friends from the beginning of this book?

What did Ross want more than anything else?

a. A person to love?

b. A woman to love?

c. A blonde woman to love?

d. A blonde and tiny woman to love?

e. Rachel?

It’s time to talk about your “Rachel.” The more concrete your request is, the more likely it will be granted. Why? Because the person you ask for help is not going to spend energy wondering how she can help you. If you tell her precisely what you want, then she only needs to decide, “Do I help—or not?”

Rule of thumb: Everything you can do for yourself, do! Ask only for things that you cannot possibly do yourself. Remember that you rely on the goodwill of these people. For example, asking, “Do you have open positions in your company?” would make many people angry. Why? Because you can find this information easily on the company’s website.* People would think, “Do I look like your secretary? Find out for yourself!”

Can you blame them?

Show respect. Be prepared. In this example, you should know which jobs are available and in which specific position you are interested. Use the one favour that you can hope for to ask specific questions about that concrete position.

Here is what you do: For each person in your short list, write down exactly what you want in one short sentence. Let’s pretend that one person on your list is named Sandra, and you want her help. Which of the following questions do you imagine will yield the better result?

a)      “Sandra, do you know someone in my industry?”

b)      “Sandra, I see you know David. Could you introduce me to him, since he might be able to give me advice?”

In the first case, Sandra might answer, “I don’t know. I will think about it and get back to you.” Then she hangs up the phone.

Moments later, the door flies open and her boss storms in. “Do you know what happened? We have to deal with this immediately!”

And Sandra just forget everything she promised you...

In the second case, Sandra does not need to think. She just needs to decide if she wants to introduce you to David or not. Remember that we all want to save energy. We all want to avoid thinking.

Guess what: It takes much less energy to say yes than to come up with reasons to say no. Therefore, it is very likely that Sandra will agree to introduce you to David.

Congratulations: You got your first ally. Now here’s how we make sure she keeps her promise.

* There is one exception to this rule: Many companies hire internally or rely on recommendations for filling their positions. They don’t advertise their jobs. To learn about these hidden positions – read again the chapters about calling the HR manager and focusing on the employer’s needs. You find hidden positions by asking acquaintance’s about their biggest challenge, not by asking for a job.

How to Turn Promises into Deeds

You hang up the phone, and you smile. Sandra is a good person, you think, but she is also very busy. How could you help her to help you and make sure that she keeps her promise at the same time? With a small—but important—twist in your approach.

How does our original request for help compare to this upgraded version?

a)      “Sandra, I see you know David. Could you introduce me to him, since he might be able to give me advice?”

b)      “Sandra, I see you know David. If I send you an e-mail for David, would you forward it to him? He might be able to give me advice.”

What do you think is the biggest benefit of your revised request?

1. David will get an e-mail from a person he knows (Sandra) instead of a stranger (you).

2. Sandra can read what you write to David and ensure that you don’t embarrass her. (People are very protective of their reputation. It’s the most valuable asset that we have.)

3. David will also know that Sandra has read your message, and that means she approves (otherwise she wouldn’t have forwarded it). Her approval raises your reputation and makes you more trustworthy in David’s estimation.

4. It’s much easier for your busy friend Sandra. All she has to do is to forward your message. Takes three seconds, and she doesn’t need to think at all.

Remember: You want a message to be delivered. You are the one who profits from that message. It’s only fair that you are the one who writes that message. Save those who help you some time!

Bonus: Don’t underestimate the importance of momentum. Imagine this: One Sunday afternoon, I invite you to go to the gym. (This is a fantasy story, by the way.) You say, “Sure, that’s a good idea.”

In which case are you more likely to get up from the couch? When I come to you five hours after our call, when you just started a movie? Or when I ask you while I am standing in your living room, your stuff is already in the bag, and the car is parked in front of the door with the motor running?

If you are a pro, then you prepare your message before you ask for an introduction. You send it to your friend, right after she agrees to introduce you. She will still remember, and she will do it right away. You’ve just helped her strike one more thing off her bulging to-do list. By the way, sending your message right away is generous. Even though your friend is the one who is doing you a favour, you are giving her a gift as well. Why?

Think about the psychology: She promised to do you a favour. She kept her promise. She is a good friend! She gets a cookie. It’s psychologically rewarding for her to live up to her promises. You made her happy by allowing her to help you. That’s another way relationships get stronger. (Look up the Ben Franklin effect.)

The Message

Dear Katja,

Our mutual friend Anna told me about you. She explained how much your advice helped her adjust to the German business culture when she started to work for Commerzbank. Anna and I used to work together at Goldman Sachs in Paris, and she set an example for all of us there.

I recently moved to Germany and find myself in the same position as Anna once did. I noticed that BNY is hiring a client relationship manager for the institutional sales department. I am currently preparing my application for this position and would like to make sure that I understood the main challenges correctly.

Would you have time for a short phone call? I only have two questions.

Any advice you could give me would be highly appreciated.

With best regards,

Larisa

The people involved in this message:

- You (“Larisa”): You want a favour from a stranger.

- Your friend (“Anna”): She is the one who agreed to forward this message to her contact.

- The target (“Katja”): The person you need to reach. Katja knows Anna, but she doesn’t know you—yet.

The people not involved in this message:

- The hiring manager. If your friend can recommend you to the hiring manager, awesome. In most cases, you will need one step in between. But that’s okay, as you will see. If you handle your new contact with respect, then he or she will introduce you to the hiring manager—and you reached the last step of your journey.

- The HR manager. Dare I say it? The HR manager has nothing valuable to contribute. He or she will not be missed in this conversation.

Come, have a closer look at this message:

- Is the request specific enough?

“I…would like to make sure that I understood the main challenges correctly.”
Larisa wants to check the job description against the real challenges in the company.

- Is the request easy to understand?

“Would you have time for a short phone call?”
No explanation needed.

- Does Katja have the power to give Larisa what she wants?

“I…would like to make sure that I understood the main challenges correctly.”
Can Katja listen to Larisa? Sure.

- Is the request reasonable?

“Would you have time for a short phone call?”
Can Katja spare five minutes? Sure.

- Can your request be answered with “yes” or “no”?

“Would you have time for a short phone call?”
No explanation needed.

- Is Larisa’s relationship with Katja strong enough to ask this favour?

“Our mutual friend Anna told me about you. She explained how much your advice helped her to adjust to the German business culture when she first started to work for Commerzbank. Anna and I used to work together at Goldman Sachs in Paris and she set an example for all of us there.”

Katja does not know Larisa. But Anna basically “pre-approved” Larisa’s message when she forwarded it to Katja. Anna transferred some of her trust with Katja to Larisa. She basically vouched for her.

- Is Larisa’s request generous?

“She explained how much your advice helped her” and “she set an example for all of us there.”

Larisa is complimenting Katja and Anna in the best possible way, with a true story about Katja’s generosity and Anna’s high work ethic.

- Does Larisa show her gratitude?

“Any advice you could give me would be highly appreciated” and “She explained how much your advice helped her.”
Larisa shows her gratitude in words (“highly appreciated”) and in deeds (by showing how highly Anna thinks of Katja).

- Does Larisa herself have a crystal-clear idea what she wants?

What is the most likely outcome of this new relationship? Katja is not working in the department where Larisa wants to apply. Larisa knew this before she reached out to Katja. (She did her research.)

Katja will agree to talk to Larisa because she has been polite, she has been generous, and Katja wants to keep her relationship with Anna in good shape.

Katja will realise that she cannot answer Larisa’s questions, because she is working in a different department in the company. Katja will also realise that what she can do is put Larisa in touch with the actual hiring manager. Clearly, that is the easiest way to get Katja the answers she seeks.

Katja is now in a direct conversation with the hiring manager. She also has been introduced by a co-worker of the hiring manager (Katja). Do you think that introduction will gain her additional trust?

Is it possible that Larisa knew all of this when she formulated her message?

Is it possible Katja also understood that Larisa knew this when she read the message?

Looking through Katja’s Eyes

Remember that Larisa will not send her message to Katja directly. She is a stranger to Katja. An e-mail from a stranger will most likely be ignored. Instead, Larisa will ask her friend Anna to forward the message to Katja. Look at this through Katja’s eyes. Katja gets a message from her former colleague, Anna.

This is the message that Katja will receive:

Dear Katja,

How is the family? It was so good to meet you again at the Leadership Conference. I would like to introduce you to a former colleague of mine. Larisa has worked with me at Goldman Sachs. She is the rare person who can work both with high accuracy and high speed. She is now in Germany and asked me to introduce you to her. Here is her message. Maybe you have five minutes to point her in the right direction?

Anna

Dear Katja,

Our mutual friend Anna told me about you. She explained how much your advice helped her to adjust to the German business culture when she first started to work for Commerzbank. Anna and I used to work together at Goldman Sachs in Paris, and she set an example for all of us there.

I recently moved to Germany and find myself in the same position as Anna once did.

I noticed that BNY is hiring a client relationship manager for the institutional sales department. I am currently preparing my application for this position and would like to make sure that I understood the main challenges correctly.

Would you have time for a short phone call? I only have two questions.

Any advice you could give me would be highly appreciated.

With best regards,

Larisa

Would Larisa’s message be stronger if she had send it directly to Katja? Or is it stronger because Anna agreed to forward it on her behalf? My advice: always formulate your message first and then ask your friend to forward it. Not only will it have much more impact—it is also much more likely your friend will actually do what she promised. Because it is so simple.

Katja will talk with Larissa. In this conversation, she will get a better feeling for Larisa’s character, her work ethic, and her level of sophistication. Based on that conversation, Katja will decide what to do next. If Larisa makes a good impression, Katja will introduce her to the hiring manager. From there on, Larisa will simply follow the script that we established in the standard application process.

Make sure you understood the biggest challenge correctly, and then formulate the cover letter with three paragraphs:

1. I understand this is your biggest challenge.

2. This is how I helped someone else solve a similar problem.

3. I would be glad if we could discuss this in a personal interview.

The one thing different from the standard application process? Larisa will send her job application directly to the hiring manager, not to HR. In other words, she will talk directly to the decision maker. That’s how you get a great job by being yourself, a thoughtful, proactive, and generous professional.

Did you notice this in particular? “Anna and I used to work together at Goldman Sachs in Paris, and she set an example for all of us there.” Larisa has also strengthened her relationship with Anna by praising her in the conversation with Katja. A few kind and true words can have a major impact on your relationships.

The most successful people in the world care about giving, because that’s how they get.

Finding the Hidden Door into Your Dream Company

So far, we’ve looked for the opportunities that grow naturally from your network of relationships. But what if you have a specific company in your sights? Can you choose the company first and then find someone to recommend you?

Absolutely.

This is more art than science, though. You will have to use not only your knowledge, but also your intuition.

You start on LinkedIn and Xing, and when you search, make sure that you have the correct name of the company. With major corporations, you might otherwise get way more results than you can handle. “BMW” for example will get you over ten thousand possible contacts. Better to search for the concrete subsidiary. Is it the BMW Group? BMW Financial Services? BMW (UK) Manufacturing Ltd.?

Now you have a list of potential contacts. Maybe there are hundreds of results. Maybe there are only four or five. Use your professional experience to identify the people who are most likely to work in your target department.

With some luck, you might find the head of the department. Even if not, any team member working in your target department would be a great source for inside information and a recommendation.*

Decide which person you would like to make your new “best friend.” Both LinkedIn and Xing will show you how many degrees separate you from that person. You might have heard that there are never more than six degrees of separation between you and any other human being in the world.

That is true. For this book, I double checked the way how Xing and LinkedIn work. One day, as I was procrastinating researching this book, I searched for Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn. Imagine my surprise when I found out that there are three people in my network who know him, people who could introduce me directly to the founder of LinkedIn.

Actress Jessica Alba is three degrees separated from me. Which means that she would have to get introduced to one other person, before she would have found someone who could introduce her to me. (Excuse me, why are you smiling? Isn’t it obvious that she would want to know me—not the other way around?)

Xing is much more useful for this approach. With the premium account it shows you the “missing links” in the middle, so you know exactly which person you need to connect with in order to get access to your target person. Xing is also the preferred network for most German professionals. Most potential employers will research you on Xing if they take an interest in your application.

Say Jessica Alba would be on Xing as well as on LinkedIn. She is connected to Reid Hoffman, and I am connected to Vivek Wadhwa, who is in turn connected to Reid Hoffman. How would she get to know me? She would ask Mr. Hoffman to introduce her to Professor Wadhwa. Once they have established a relationship, she could ask Vivek Wadhwa to introduce her to me. Done.

The number-two resource that you must invest into this process is time. The number one? Empathy. If you come from a place of generosity, you will find generosity in others as well. In the business world, generosity simply means that you always aim to create win-win situations.

* Even with the standard application process, analysing the profiles of those professionals who already work in this department can teach you a lot about the real challenges and preferences of the employer.

How I Use My Professional Network

Maybe it would be useful if we talk about your network and how you should cultivate it. I only connect with people with whom I have some kind of existing relationship—business partners, former colleagues, political associates, people with whom I have at the very least shared a handshake at an event. When someone is recommended to me, I will also add them.

I never accept contact requests from people I don’t know. If they send a personal message with their contact request, then they will receive a short answer. But for those people who can’t be bothered to write a few personal words, all I can say is I can’t be bothered to send any answer at all. My advice is that you handle your contacts in a similar manner.

Build meaningful relationships with people. Associate yourself with professionals you admire. Mentor others if you see their potential and they make an effort to develop themselves. I learn a lot about someone’s character if I see how he treats the people who are “below” him.

At the same time, you should set a minimum standard for yourself and for others who seek your support. When people ask for your help, give them a small task to do. Not to benefit you, but to benefit themselves. If they are not interested enough to put some work into their own future, why should you? This is a valuable filter to run on those who seek your help. When tasked to help themselves first, you will never hear from 80 percent of the people who ask you to help them. The remaining 20 percent? They deserve your attention.

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Start investing in your network today. Maybe you just finished university, but over the years, you will grow into more senior positions. Even if your field is very technical, your first team leader position will come with the responsibility to lead people.

The Oxford Dictionary defines a manager as a “person responsible for controlling or administering an organization or group of staff.” In other words, your job is not to do stuff, but to get your staff to do (stuff).

You will be asked to judge people based on their performance. You will be asked to hire people based on their applications. And more and more, you will be asked to find the people for your team. The lack of skilled labour will hit Germany harder and earlier than other countries, but it is a global phenomenon.

A professional who is well connected with the most talented people in his or her field will command a higher salary.

The employer is not paying for your work but for you to get the work done. If you can bring top people to your team, you are worth more money, you will get more interesting challenges, and you will have more freedom in your decisions. In short, you will have a more fulfilling career.

What’s Next?

A man went to church and kneeled in front of the statue of Holy Mary. “Dear Mother of God, I want to be a millionaire,” he would pray. “Let me win the lottery!”

Day after day, he returned. The summer came, and the summer went. The forest turned colourful, and autumn was there. The leaves fell from the trees, and winter arrived.

“Dear Mother of God, I want to be a millionaire,” he prayed. “Let me win the lottery!”

Then Christmas Eve arrived, and so did the man. He stormed into the church, stood in front of the statue of Holy Mary and screamed, “I prayed and I prayed. Every day, I was here. Why are you so cruel? Why do I not win the lottery?”

And the miracle happened. The statue of Holy Mary came alive. Graciously, she walked down from her pedestal. Her smooth hand of cold white marble gently touched his face, and with a kind voice, Holy Mary said, “When will you finally buy a lottery ticket?”

Thank You!

I thank you for the time you invested in reading my book. Now it is time for you to go and act. The methods I described in this book work. They are not the only way to get to your goal, but they have been tested many times, and they work.

Here is the biggest challenge that my clients face in the real world. They will leave the coaching session full of energy. After they are trained in this new approach, they will try it a few times—and it will not work right away. Nothing that’s worth something is easy. But set in their old mind-set of immediate gratification, they give up.

Three months go by. Finally the pain gets too big. They run out of cash or hope or self-esteem. Then they remember the strategy that we developed together in our coaching session, but this time they stick to it. And slowly, slowly, they get better. With every phone call made, they understand better how to communicate with HR. With every cover letter they write, they learn which companies are most interested in them. And after sixty to ninety applications, they look back.

They usually had ten to twelve interviews at this point. They are finally getting job offers, not just one, but often two or three at the same time. They choose the job they want, instead of the only job that is offered.

From the Expats Career Survey, I know that most expatriates hope for a monthly salary of 3,500 EUR. Which means that if you waste three months “doing what you always did,” you have also wasted three months’ salary. Can you really afford to lose 10,500 EUR of income?

No? This is what you do.

Find ten companies that fit the following criteria:

1. You fit the job profile.

2. They have a telephone number and a contact person.

3. You don’t want to work for them.

Why would you call companies where you don’t want to work? You will use them as your boot camp. There are lots of companies that advertise jobs they have no intention of filling. They publish these jobs for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they want to appear bigger than they are, sometimes they want to mislead their competition about their future plans, and sometimes it is simply the end of the year and they have to spend their budget if they want to avoid cuts in the next year. You don’t need to feel bad about calling them.

Call each of the ten companies, and follow the process I have described in this book. After each phone call, sit down and analyse the conversation.

- What was your overall impression?

- What did you learn that you did not know before?

- Was there a discrepancy between the advertised job description and the “biggest challenge” revealed on the phone?

My best advice? Don’t waste time looking for mistakes. Looking for mistakes is what Germans do for a hobby. (Just kiddin.’)

Instead, focus on one insight: what worked better than usual?

- How did you act differently?

- What exactly made the difference?

- How did your partner in the conversation act differently?

- How was the situation different?

- Is there a certain type of employer that seemed more interested than others?

- And always the big one: why?

Do you get better results in corporations or family-owned businesses? In the city or in the countryside? In Germany or the Netherlands? Mittelstand in the Black Forest or a start-up in Berlin? In this industry or in another?

Many of my clients find work in companies where something new is going on. That can be a start-up but also an established company that is restructuring. Often it is simply a new manager who wants to make his or her mark, someone who wants new team members who will be loyal.

Whenever your research shows that a company is doing something new, that could be a sign that better-than-usual opportunities await.

Go through the whole process with each of these ten companies where you don’t want to work. Learn everything you can, and then implement your best outcomes with the companies you are actually interested in. Keep analysing them, after each phone conversation. Keep refining both your target group and the way you approach employers.

Step by step, your results will get better. Remember, my clients started just where you are now. They made very slow progress in the beginning too. The successful ones all picked up speed. They get more confident with each batch of applications. At the end of the process, they know that for every ten applications, they could expect invitations to an average of two job interviews. Once you reach this point, everything else is just a numbers game.

I understand that this can be quite challenging, especially when you try to do it all alone. When you lack confidence in the process, you also lack confidence in your own abilities to implement the process, and you don’t see immediate results. Stick with it! As long as you analyse and refine, you will get better results.

If you feel that you would profit from some guidance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Together we will define your strategy, and I will be glad to introduce you to managers in my network that you find useful contacts. From past experience, I can tell you that when I introduce you to ten people, four to five of them will answer you within a week. You have read this book, so you know why.

I am very glad we had this conversation. I hope you learned something useful. I hope even more that you will implement the strategies we discussed here. But most of all, I hope you embrace your true self as a thoughtful, proactive, and generous professional who will soon start a new career in Germany. (Or New York, Frank.)

I know the best employers will love you.

I wish you success.

Chris Pyak

Düsseldorf, June 2017

“Well done, Chris!
I still remember our discussion when I first moved to Germany
and how spot-on were all of your remarks were when I reflected on your feedback a year afterwards.”

—Maria Stavroula Salourou

“Hello Chris,
I would like to thank you for your help.
The jobs posted on your page as your advices, proved very handy.
I have a job offer and I am moving to Germany.”

—Anamaria Crisan

“I forgot to tell you that I was offered a contract in München three weeks ago.
It was a big accomplishment achieved to a large extent due to your help.
So, I just wanted to thank you once again.”

—Ing. Jose Mendes, eGym GmbH

To book an appointment for a consultation with Chris Pyak, click here.

Click here to book a coaching session with Chris Pyak

“If Germany wants to withstand the global competition,” says Pyak,
“it cannot expect all specialists to speak German. Instead, it needs cosmopolitans.”

—Berliner Morgenpost, 29 June 2017

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