Job search in the Czech Republic on their own experience

Good afternoon, dear habrachiteli! In this article I would like to share with you my experience of finding a job in the Czech Republic and tell you about some useful sites that can help you in this difficult task. Who cares, I ask under the cat.

A few words about yourself and the situation with the IT sector in the Czech Republic

First, tell about yourself. I have been living in the Czech Republic for more than three years now and am studying at the fourth year of postgraduate (doctoral) studies in the city of Brno. Since the main scholarship is barely enough for living, from the fifth year the scholarship payment stops altogether and I have no other source of income, I began to seriously think about finding a job here in the Czech Republic. During these three years at the faculty, I programmed in C ++ and some Python, so I began to consider working as a C ++ or Python developer.

In Brno, as in the Czech Republic in general, there is no shortage of IT jobs. In Brno there are several rather large technology centers, many international corporations and companies have their offices here (Motorola, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, NXP (formerly Freescale) and others). Brno is a student city, here are two world-famous universities - the Technical University of Brno (where I study) and Masaryk University, as well as many others that have IT training programs. Therefore, there are no shortages in IT students, and therefore there is fertile ground for the development of IT business and the deployment of development offices. Recently, however, an acute problem of a shortage of IT specialists has appeared (as Red Hat wrote that it cannot recruit enough workers from among students), so good IT specialists are worth their weight in gold. Among the most popular IT areas in Brno are development under embedded (microcontrollers for motor control, control in the transport system, smart transport systems, robotics, Internet of Things, etc.), electron microscopy, and network and mobile technologies. In addition, there is now a tendency to increase wages for novice developers. Novice programmers with little experience and university graduates can claim a salary of 25-30 thousand kroons.
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Job search through the Internet and recruitment agencies

So, you study at the university for an IT specialty in the Czech Republic and you have the opportunity and desire to find a job in a profile specialty for part-time or full-time. How to start? When searching for vacancies, first of all, you should turn to the Internet and use one of the numerous special portals for headhunting. One of the good services is techloop.io . The service provides a convenient interface for creating your portfolio - a kind of online summary:



You can indicate your education, previous jobs, projects, skills and knowledge with a level of mastering. Everything is very convenient and allows you to quickly enter information about yourself. The main advantage of the portal is that the interface language is English and the data is required to be entered in English.

By creating a portfolio in techloop.io, you create your public business card for recruiters and if you are lucky, HR specialists will find you when searching for candidates. A recruiter from Seznam, the main Czech portal and a search engine like our Yandex, contacted me in this way. Recruiters, if they are interested in your portfolio, will write you a message directly in the service using the built-in messenger.

You can also publish your resume on such portals as Monster and Superkariera . Here it is possible to place a resume in several languages ​​(Czech and English most often). As in the case of techloop.io, robot owners and agents from recruitment agencies will also contact you themselves.

The response can be expected for quite a long time, but do not forget about the active search. There are several portals for this: ITJobs.cz , jobs.cz , cz.indeed.com , profesia.cz and Jobs Contact . ITJobs and Jobs Contact are recruiting agencies that help in finding candidates. At ITJobs, you can register and upload your resume in Czech and English (for each vacancy it is indicated that it is necessary to send a resume in two languages), specify your contact details and preferences. In this case, when responding to a job, you can easily download resume files by selecting them from previously uploaded files.

Under the description of each vacancy on this portal there is a response button that opens the application form for a vacancy. You can write a short cover letter and attach a resume.
As soon as you apply for a vacancy on such a portal, a company representative will contact you within a few days and offer you an interview at the agency to clarify the details and build some idea of ​​you as a candidate. I waited for a response from the ITJobs portal for several days, an employee of Jobs Contact wrote an email to me on the same day.

Interviewing and basic requirements for candidates

An interview at an agency is a good training and test of your strength. An employee of the agency can test your knowledge by asking standard questions about programming technologies and languages, clarify information about your candidacy and can suggest the most appropriate option for the direction of employment. The information he uses to improve your resume. Now a very important requirement ("must have") for IT vacancies in the Czech Republic is knowledge of the English language, since there are a large number of international companies and corporations, and many Czech companies have offices in other countries and employ foreigners. Therefore, during the interview you can check your level of English proficiency. For example, at one interview in the company with me they organized a conversation with a member of the development team from the USA.

It is also possible to interview the recruitment agent by phone. After a response to one vacancy, a girl from a consulting firm (in Czech, personálně-poradenská služba) Randstad contacted me and conducted a short telephone interview. She presented me for several vacancies in two different companies and two days later she invited me for an interview at one organization, offering several options for the time to choose from.

The competition procedure for the position is standard here: first, an interview with an HR employee or a lead developer, sometimes a development manager, and then an interview with the team members with a test task and verification of the candidate for compliance with the required qualifications. They often give tests on a computer or on a piece of paper on the knowledge of various technologies that need to be completed in a limited time. Some firms are also asked to perform test tasks before interviewing on a special online portal. Sometimes the sequence of interviews is reversed: first, a technical interview with a leading developer or team manager is held, to which position the candidate claims, and after that an interview with an HR employee takes place.

I can give a few life hacking, which I checked on my own experience and that can help you in presenting your candidacy at the interview. You can make a small list of your projects with a short description and links to github or another source repository. It makes a good impression on HR workers or company managers. It is also sometimes very opportune to bring a printed resume in case a person could not get it or forgot to print it. Another very useful in cooperation with a recruitment agency can be the presentation of their expectations and preferences from the future place of work. For example, I was able to get a job in a company that was offered to me by an agent based on my interests and work experience. It is not worth while searching for vacancies limited to one technology or language of development. It is better to compile a wider list of keywords (programming languages ​​and technologies) and thus you can find more options.

I hope this guide will be useful to you when looking for work. I wish you success in your job search and early employment in the company of your dreams!