Is it easy to move to Germany? My personal job search statistics

Germany is a very popular direction of IT relocation in recent years (and not only IT, of course). But is it just to move there? No, unfortunately not easy.

I have had many interviews with German companies (and not only) over the past 2 years. I think this experience can be useful to those who also want to move here to better understand this process in terms of numbers.

Of course, all this is quite subjective and depends on experience, skills and even luck. So to be more precise, I am a full-stack web developer with 7 years of experience in PHP, JavaScript, MySQL and other technologies that help build websites at this time. Even after 14 total years of working as a developer, I still like programming, so I was looking for a job solely [senior] developer. By the way, there was no suitable citizenship, so I still needed a BlueCard visa.

So, let's go to the numbers.

I responded to only about 39 vacancies in 32 companies that I found interesting. Honestly, there were a couple of random companies, but most of them were chosen because I was interested in their products. Sometimes he responded several times to vacancies of the same company (for example, after 6-12 months from the last interview). Usually it may take 15 minutes to respond to a vacancy, so at this stage I spent up to 10 hours.

29 of my responses were successful and were followed by interviews and / or tests. This is about 75%.

In total, I had about 42 interviews. Usually one takes around 30 minutes, so here I spent at least another 21 hours (actually more, since some of the interviews take about an hour).

I passed at least 12 test items. The minimum time for one is 4 hours, so here I spent another 48 hours (most likely more since some tasks take a couple of evenings, but on the other hand some of them are 1-2 hour tasks on platforms like HackerRank).

And finally, the most interesting part. I received 5 personal interviews and 4 job offers (14% of successful responses). This means that a minimum of 5 days was spent traveling. By the way, I almost received personal interviews twice, but there were some obstacles like a missing visa to Ireland, for example (yes, there were a couple of other countries as a backup plan).

In my experience, German companies always have some delay between the moment of response and the actual first interview. It could be a week or even two. Plus, there may be a week between interviews, and another week to check the assignment and so on, that is, in other words, this process is rather long.

Based on my mail, I decided that the average process length was around 28 days. Median - 21 days. The maximum waiting time is 93 days.

More interesting data on successful responses that ended with offers. Two of them were received in 39 days. One - for 43 days. There was also one exception - 11 days (my previous employer was Adcash; it was 3 years ago in Estonia, but I still included it here, because the case is interesting). So, I would say that in the case of a job search in Germany, it is worth expecting 40 days.

By the way, if you add up all the waiting times, we get around 3 years (1094 days). Funny. And sad.

So, to summarize: 5 days on the road and about 80 hours of interviews and other related activities. 39 feedback and 4 job offers. That's all.

Now the list of companies where I tried to send a resume. You can try them too! Most of them are normal, I promise.

If you're still reading, thanks for reading.

One last tip. If you want to move to Europe, but Germany is not fundamentally important, you can also try other nice places like Estonia or Ireland. Companies from there, in my experience, process feedback on work faster.

PS There were also actually several interviews with recruiters / agencies. Most likely, about 10 or more. But for some reason, none of them led to an interview. I do not know why. They are not included in this statistic.

This is a translation of my originally English-language article. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/so-easy-relocate-germany-my-personal-job-search-aleksandr-karpov/