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In this video, Maria talks about her experience getting a job in Germany in the following video. Check it out.

Video transcription

Hello, I’m Maria. I’m an expat from Spain, living in Berlin. I moved to work here at KAYAK. I’m a Brand Manager, and I’ve bee working here for almost a year.

What brought me to Germany

What brought me to Germany was mainly the job offer. I got an offer from KAYAK. A headhunter recruited me and I went through a recruitment process with all the guys here and everything turned out ok – I got an offer on the table and I just decided to move. I used to live in Barcelona, I worked in advertising and this job at KAYAK seemed like a great opportunity to actually be able to work in an international environment for once.

KAYAK is a travel search engine where you can search for pretty much everything related to travel, whether you want to book flights or hotels or cars, even activities and trains now. It is a platform that is always evolving. I would consider it more as a travel hub now, that is the direction we are going towards. It’s a great company to work at and I’m really really happy to work here. There is a lot of smart people here, you learn alot, it’s a very agile kind of environment, so one day you are here and one day you are four steps further which is something I like a lot.

My experience finding a job in Germany

They found me through LinkedIn, they usually do.

Import your LinkedIn profile to post your resume on expatjobseeker now »

I think a lot of headhunters, at least in digital marketing, are pretty active on LinkedIn – they used to scout me alot, I got a lot of pings saying “hey we have this”, “we have that”,”you might be interested on it” and actually for the precise position it was actually a good fit because they were looking for someone with more than five years experience, and actually they needed to be Spanish so we could actually complete all the nationalities in the team.

My #1 tip for expat jobseekers in Germany

Make sure that you have your LinkedIn account super clean and with all the information that any recruiter would actually need to see from you – I think that’s kind of the main thing that I would recommend. Spanish people should write their profile in English, it doesn’t matter if someone in the Spanish market is looking for a Spanish professional, you should have it in English because you have more chances to actually be seen by other people.

Some of the tips that some colleagues gave me is like for example, for marketing people, we are used to using some weird/technical words for everything and sometimes our recruiters aren’t as technical as we are, so try to keep it simple. Try to not be super technical on what your skills are because no one will understand. But then afterwards make sure that your recruiter actually knows what this technical stuff is and that you actually share the same kind of knowledge because if not the recruiter will not understand why you are available for the company and what your knowledge is.

Some people think that moving to Germany is going to be tough because of the language. It’s something that I experienced myself but only at the very beginning with all of the admin stuff that you have to do here, but after that, especially in Berlin, you get to understand that if you can speak English very well you probably won’t have any problems, especially in startups and these types of companies that are growing more and more in Berlin. And on a day-to-day life too you can handle yourself pretty well so that’s nothing to be scared about. Plus it’s a very open society, it’s a live-and-let-live kind of thinking which is something that I love – At least Berlin, it’s amazing, it’s a great city, you can do pretty much everything. It’s an incentive to be here just for the sake of being here and actually being able to enjoy here (not as much in the winter, but I don’t that’s a huge deal). If you are looking for a job in Germany, make sure you check out expatjobseeker.de

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