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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 agonisingly slow 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. The third interview process was where everything clicked. 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 accepted.
I came to Germany as an international worker with a self-taught frontend skill set and a portfolio built through online courses and personal projects. It felt like a long shot. The rejections piled up fast. We're talking hundreds. Some were automated no-replies, some were polite one-liners, and a few were detailed enough to sting. Every time a promising application went cold, I had to talk myself out of reading too much into it.
What kept things moving was persistence and casting a wide net through the right channels. I was active on LinkedIn, Xing, and Germany's Make-it-in-Germany program, which exists specifically to help international workers find their way through the local job market. LinkedIn was where I got the most traction. I tightened up my profile, started connecting with recruiters directly, and put my portfolio links front and center. I tried to treat each rejection as a data point, not a verdict. If my HTML and CSS projects weren't getting attention, I pushed harder on JavaScript. If a cover letter wasn't landing, I rewrote it. Slow, unglamorous work, but methodical.
Eventually I got through to a company willing to look past the unconventional background. The interview process had four rounds, covering everything from a technical skills screen to a cultural fit conversation, and each one felt like a real test of how far I'd actually come. When the offer arrived for a full-time junior frontend developer role in a hybrid setup at 45,000 EUR, I accepted.
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