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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. That assumption was costing me confidence I didn't need to lose.
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 genuinely 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 without hesitation.
A few things stand out as genuinely useful. Reading the job listing properly, not just skimming it, meant I could speak directly to what they wanted once I was in the room. Not having a referral clearly didn't disqualify me, so I'd push back on anyone who thinks LinkedIn applications are a black hole. And when the salary conversation started, I didn't undersell myself. I knew what the role was worth, and I held that line. It paid off.
I didn't have a relevant degree, and I won't pretend the search was easy. I'd come to Germany as an international worker hoping to break into tech, with a self-taught frontend skill set and a portfolio I'd built through online courses and personal projects. From the outside it probably looked like a long shot. From the inside it felt like one too. 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 finally arrived, it was for a full-time junior frontend developer role in a hybrid setup at 45,000 EUR a year, and I accepted without hesitation. If you're trying to break into tech abroad without traditional credentials, the rejections aren't a verdict on you. Patience and volume, through the right platforms, got me there.
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