Getting a Job in Australia -How To Land Your Dream Job As A Non-Native English Speaker
It’s Esther here and I have Karalyn Brown with me here! Today, we’re going to talk about getting a job in Australia if you’re a skilled migrant.
Karalyn is the founder of Interview IQ and has 15 years of experience helping hundreds of people find satisfying jobs, including helping many skilled migrants rapidly find their feet, and overcome the barrier of having no local experience. Karalyn has headed up recruitment practices in the private sector and managed the recruiting team for a large New South Wales government utility. She’s also sat on private and public sector interview panels as an independent and assessed as an expert in several assessment centres.
Karalyn has just launched the exciting Straight To Short List challenge which helps her clients ramp up their chances of successfully finding a job by learning how to network, and as a bonus, find jobs before they even get advertised. Her clients come from all over the world but have one thing in common. They care about making a difference in their careers.
The Challenges Skilled Migrants Face When Looking For A Job in Australia
Q: What are the challenges that you feel skilled migrants face in seeking work?
A: There are a few:
- How do you navigate the employment system?
- Is it more culturally acceptable to network? Do you apply online?
- Which are the big websites that you should use? What do recruiters do? Just the whole sort of job-hunting system is quite challenging.
Getting a Job in Australia if you Don’t Have Local Experience
Q: How do you think migrants can improve their chances of getting over the barrier of no local experience? What tips do you have for people on that front?
A: 1. A lot of employers are concerned about:
- Communication skills
- Whether the job candidate will fit into their team
- How their skills translate to them
- How hard it will be to train somebody up
2. Any good job search starts with going back to the basics around you. Believe in your strengths. Think of what your motivations are and the values that you’d like to deliver to the organisations that you’re interested in.
3. Applying online is not the only way, have a much bigger focus on networking your way to a job and do as much as you can in terms of making connections with the local community and making professional connections to help you feel confident around presenting yourself. Because when you’re making those personal connections with people, you’re breaking down those stereotypes and you’re presenting as a living, breathing human, and we hire on trust. So you’re not a faceless resume. You are a person that has the right intention, the right attitude, friendly and positive. If you can do that, all of those things that we put under the bucket of local experience, become less important.
4. Setting up LinkedIn profiles.
5. Being clear is the main thing. Great job skills combined with good communication skills, will help you find a job. This is where Speak More Clearly’s American, Australian and British accent courses come in. It’s really important to speak to other people speaking English as well, not just speak to people who have the same native language / background language as you.
How to Prepare for Job Interviews – Go Into a Job Interview with the Right Midnset
Q: I have two questions:
How can people prepare for job interviews? And, what are some mindset and motivation hacks, people can use to improve their chances of securing work?
A: You’re not going to present everything that you’ve done to the interviewer. The interviewer is buying a certain set of skills that you have. So really focus on what you’re going to do for that particular job. To start off with, try and look at the accountabilities that you have in the role, and then come up with examples using the STAR approach – Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
- Try and anticipate the questions that they might ask and come up with examples that show that you can perform that accountability.
- Also, the more that you practice, particularly if English is your second language, the better you’ll become. Not by rehearsing and memorizing your lines, but just being able to get somebody to ask you the question and get you to answer, that process makes you more confident. If you can’t get an interview coach, make sure that you practise with a friend who can give you some good feedback.
- Make sure that you do something before the interview, that lets your mind think about other things and gives you energy in a different way because you’re going to carry that confidence and that energy into the interview.
- Do the prep work, then go and do some energizing confidence boosting fun stuff and carry that mindset, into the interview.
Soft Skills to Learn for the Australian Workplace
There are soft skills as well that people need to look at:
- It is important to have politeness because that’s a thing that’s expected of people somewhere.
- Greetings. Think of how you’re going to greet people when you walk in.
- Smile and don’t be nervous.
- Attitude
- Have empathy for other people.
- Mindset – don’t stop after a rejection, don’t lose hope and don’t give up.
It’s the same with the speech, if you do a bit every day, then you will notice after a month or two you become clearer. It’s the little steps and the little wins that keep you getting to the big goal.
Build your Professional Network to Find the Right Job
Q: How can people rapidly build their network?
A: Work on the Stretch Shortlist Challenges. Get your LinkedIn profile up, doesn’t need to be perfect, just needs to be clear. Then start to use LinkedIn and Google to search out people, somebody that’s gone down your path but also another great person or type of person to reach out to is a hub. A hub is somebody that has a lot of connections in your professional community. A hub could be somebody who’s an organizer of a meetup group. It could be somebody who runs podcasts and live streams or could be somebody that runs a LinkedIn group. See if you can go and meet them and simply for the act of saying why you find them interesting. And would it be possible to seek some advice from them about a specific question like understanding the local market and where jobs might be and try to get yourself in front of them. The act of asking for somebody’s advice is building that relationship.
Just like this saying, “It’s like, seek a job and you’ll get advice, seek advice, and you’ll get a job.”
Have a look here at the previous discussion I had with Karalyn for more job interview tips.
