Finding a job as a US citizen from overseas?

[albertoavena 0]

I will be filing for my wife's visa soon (we both live overseas) and was wondering if other US citizens had any experience finding work in the US from overseas, via the internet and Skype.

Is this an impossible task? How hard (or easy) was it to find a decent job when you came back to the states?

[Penguin_ie 5,994]

Very hard.

Unless you have exceptional experience, employers will want to see you in person before making a job offer; you may get an initial interview over the phone (even if you are in the USA, many first interviews are over the phone), but then they will want you to come in. Many employers will screen you out based on a foreign address alone, so you may want to consider putting your first address in the USA (friend, family etc) on your resume.

[albertoavena 0]

Very hard.

Unless you have exceptional experience, employers will want to see you in person before making a job offer; you may get an initial interview over the phone (even if you are in the USA, many first interviews are over the phone), but then they will want you to come in. Many employers will screen you out based on a foreign address alone, so you may want to consider putting your first address in the USA (friend, family etc) on your resume.

I see. I was afraid of that...

Thank you. I will look into putting a family members address and go from there.

[killercat 2]

I personally didn't find it that hard, but we weren't overly specific on where we wanted to live. I did a lot of work on making sure my resume was top notch and personalising the cover letters. In the end, I had interviews with 4 companies and 3 offers. I don't think I'm overly niche in my qualifications either.

The interviews were a combination and depended on the company. Spoke had a personality assessment or test first, them I had a screening interview. For one, they asked me to call them for the interviews (strange, but I think they just didn't know how to dial out). Another I had to go to one of their international offices for a conference call, another was on Skype and the last was a conference call at 1 a.m.

It I'd stressful and hard, but any job search is. All of the companies who interviewed me were large corporations though, the smaller ones I applied for did not want to know.

What sector do you work in?

Sorry about the typos btw, it's a new phone.

[Boiler 45,715]

If you have good contacts in your profession certainly possible.

[albertoavena 0]

Wow! Thanks everyone for giving me a ray of hope. I understand that it may be harder than if I were living in the U.S. but I'm happy it's not completely impossible.

I am/was in the IT field. I say was because I haven't lived and worked in the U.S. for the past 6 years since I moved and all the skills and knowledge I knew might be outdated.

But really any job would be OK with me. Enough to cover the costs of an apartment and to raise a family.

That said, how did everyone get an address after moving? Did you contact a tenant and moved in as soon as you arrived? Did you secure a job first then move?

[killercat 2]

We thought to ourselves we could either move to a specific place or for a specific job. We weren't really that fussed on where to go so I just bulk applied to jobs in my field (banking). I left our current address in the UK on and all of my experience is abroad.

When I got the offers we looked for housing after. The first offer was for a position in Phoenix and I found a few places on Craigslist (be careful, if it seems too good yo be true it is) and I did a FaceTime tour. They have a good vacation rental market with realtors, so if we had picked that one we would have done that until we found our feet.

The next offer was for Providence,Ri and as they offered more money I was going to go with that to make the visa app for my husband easier. The schools are terrible there and the property market is more old fashioned word of mouth than websites and realtors, so I found it very difficult.

Luckily, I got the third offer as I was resigning myself to a 45 min commute. The last offer was in Denver, and they are more geared to short term lets and websites, but not as much as Phoenix. We were really lucky though as I found a place on airbnb that I wanted to stay in for a week or 2 and the owner has agreed to lease it to us for as long as we wish. He even created a lease as we needed that for the school.

We also checked Zillow and Realtor.com as you can search for rental properties there, but we looked to see what was affordable before and during the application process and after the offer to find a place to live.

I imagine that IT would be quite in demand. I wouldn't sell your global experience short as US companies tend to look more for cultural fit than anything else. As I said I work in retail banking and I don't have the first clue what a 401k is but that is what training is for. I did check out Interviewing for dummies and it seemed to put me in the right mindset for the interviews.