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Over about five months I applied to roughly 50 positions, almost all through LinkedIn, with a handful via Glassdoor. No networking events, no warm introductions, no carefully crafted cover letters. Just a well-put-together profile, a clean CV, and a lot of scrolling through job alerts on Sunday evenings. I'd always assumed that breaking into a better-paid in-house Legal Counsel role would mean knowing someone on the inside, or at least having a former colleague put in a word.
The process took around 150 days from first application to accepted offer, which felt like an age at the time. There were weeks where nothing moved at all, and I wondered whether I was pitching myself at the right level or aiming at the right sectors. Out of 50 applications I got three interviews, which sounds like a low conversion rate, but each one was for a role I'd read carefully and felt I could do well. I didn't spray applications around. I made sure my experience matched the specifics in the listing before I applied. Everything clicked in the third interview process. The role was hybrid, based in the UK, and came with a salary of £60,000, a meaningful step up from where I'd been. There were also travel perks built into the position that I hadn't even thought to look for when I started. I signed.
I came to Germany as an international worker with self-taught frontend skills and a portfolio built from online courses and personal projects. It felt almost impossible. The rejections arrived quickly, hundreds of them. Some were automatic, some were short and polite, and a few were detailed enough to hurt. Every time a good application stopped, I had to tell myself not to read too much into it.
What helped was persistence and using many channels at the same time. I was active on LinkedIn, on Xing, and on the German Make-it-in-Germany program, which exists to help international workers enter the local job market. LinkedIn gave me the best results. I improved my profile, started to contact recruiters directly, and put my portfolio links at the top. I tried to treat every rejection as information and not as a verdict. If my HTML and CSS projects got no attention, I worked more on JavaScript. If a cover letter did not work, I wrote it again. Slow work without glamour, but methodical.
In the end a company was willing to look past my unusual background. The interview process had four rounds, from a technical skills test to a conversation about cultural fit, and each one felt like a real test of my progress. When the offer arrived for a full-time junior frontend developer role, hybrid, at 45,000 EUR, I accepted the offer.
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