Professionals can now secure a job in advance and relocate with their job. They can scroll through opportunities in the best international job search sites so they can relocate with a position already secured.
If you want to find work abroad and land a job before you even set foot on the airport’s tarmac, you should ask yourself some questions (and involve your significant other or family, of course). You can rephrase each of these tips as a question, and if you realise you’ve been through them, you’re ready to start a job.
The best way to search for international jobs is through specially curated websites, in particular those that match workers with companies that can help them relocate. We’ll list them immediately.
Are there job opportunities with relocation in your field? Confirm it. Once you’ve selected your source for jobs, check what the demand is in your target country. If you’re a full-stack developer but the market demands backend engineers that can relocate, consider rethinking your CV. Just remember that demand for certain roles is still steady, with Europe still short of around half a million software engineers.
Cope with the fact that, unfortunately, not all countries have clear-cut visa instructions, such as Australia or France do. Once you’ve decided on a country and a role, start checking if you’ll be able to relocate there at all, and start striking out countries from your list until you got those that are feasible. Or, find a company that’s willing to help you relocate to whichever country they’re at.
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If you want to search for a job abroad, these are the best websites to apply for international jobs.
Are you a tech professional aiming to try a new life in a new country? Relocate.me might be exactly what you need. This site focuses on helping tech professionals find developer jobs and IT jobs abroad, and it specifically curates those that will help you relocate.
The platform will connect you with the companies that will help you move abroad with a job so that you can be supported through this confusing process.
These are Relocate.me’s features and resources:
Getting a Tech Job Abroad: 5 Simple Steps →
Easy Expat is an information hub that also lists jobs. Plenty of jobs on Easy Expat are for seasonal work such as baby sitting and au pairing. A great website if you are looking for unskilled work, but if you’re an office worker or professional, you can skip this site.
The site offers information and services that you’ll end up needing if you’re away from your home country, like hiring international movers, obtaining health insurance, and finding housing. Also, Easy Expat provides a good overview of work opportunities by sector, and it should save you time during your job search. Expect to find positions from low-skilled work to white-collar roles. Lastly, Easy Expat has a reasonably frequented forum. Since people still ask questions and share testimonials, it’s a fairly updated information source. The forums with the most activity, by far, are the UK, Spain and Germany sections.
Overseas Jobs is a part of the About Jobs Network, which focuses on providing resources and information for individuals seeking work abroad. The platform allows you to search for full-time, part-time, and contract positions in around 50 countries. Their job listings are constantly updated in part because they import jobs from other sites.
Since the search engine scrapes job postings from other aggregating sites, it’s unclear if all of these postings are for jobs with relocation. For example, many jobs advertised in Australia don’t explicitly mention if the company offers relocation assistance. So be aware that some jobs advertised might be intended for the local market. A number of jobs on the platform even include the by line “You need to be eligible to work in Australia to be considered,” which obviously rules out international applicants who want to have a job that will help them relocate.
EURES is run by the EU and aims to help workers relocate within the EU. It sounds super promising, right? Still, EURES won’t work for people from outside the EU, unfortunately. The EURES portal is available in different languages but exclusively for people in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and EU member states.
EURES is not a job board, strictly speaking, though, but it does have a portal. To use the job portal, just create an account, and upload your Europass CV, and you’ll be visible to EURES advisers and employers.
Relocation Packages in Tech. Industry Insights →
Finding a remote job is also another pathway to moving abroad. Many companies want to access the international market without paying the costs associated with relocation. It makes sense that a smaller company would want to ensure they have the right candidate before investing time and money. It’s not a cheap process.
If you’re not in a rush to leave your home country, find a remote gig offered by a company headquartered in your dream destination. Down the line there will be a pathway to relocation. Here are some remote sites to get you started:
We Work Remotely is one of the oldest — it was founded in 2013 — and most popular boards in the niche. There are over 200 active job openings in areas like programming, design, or admin. The site curates a list of the top 100 companies right now by the experience they have in hiring remote workers. But less than 25% of their listed top-100 companies are actively hiring. The site is evidently active and hasn’t been left behind by job advertisers, but with most of the “top” companies not even offering open positions, techies who prefer a less extensive but more carefully curated platform should head somewhere else.
The job board features remote job listings worldwide — almost 70% of their active openings can be performed from anywhere in the world. Around 15% are for the US only, and the other 15% for Europe only, but since some opportunities use the “only” tag somewhat loosely, some of those opportunities are also for Latin America or Africa as well.
Working Nomads, founded in 2014, lists remote jobs from disciplines such as design, accounting, HR or development, for people seeking to become digital nomads, which means “working from anywhere while travelling.” This site blew up during the pandemic because being a digital nomad — someone who’s working remote, but not working from home — surged in popularity when the lockdowns began to ease down.
News sites first portrayed the platform as, merely, a site where workers could find home-based gigs and make extra cash. After the pandemic hit and, in the US alone, workers who perceived themselves as “digital nomads” grew by almost 200%, the site became a hub for jobs for people who want to work remotely without joining video calls from their living rooms. That’s why they break down their roles by region, starting from “Remote from Anywhere” and then, subsequently, into Latin America, Europe, and other regions. It’s a good board for non-techies because it has HR, accounting, and customer success remote roles. For a specific tech job abroad, it could be better to check niche sites instead.
The best international job search sites also collect shorter-term jobs. These sites offer work that’s for a season. Some of them are for more definite but volunteer opportunities, or other more casual gigs like pet-sitting. Check them out.
BUNAC is an organisation that arranges work and travel programs for young people, primarily for the United Kingdom and North America. It focuses on holiday jobs (“working holidays,” where you get a visa to work a limited range of jobs for a short period, like a year), internships and summer camps. BUNAC programs are typically designed for individuals aged 18–30, so it’s not the best fit for a techie with a 5-year seniority. BUNAC programs are open to citizens of all nationalities. But if you’re not from the UK, Ireland, or the US, you need to apply for a visa on your own.
The Jobs Abroad Bulletin (JAB) is described as a monthly newsletter, guide, magazine, blog, and Facebook group for travel-minded people. (From this description, it doesn’t look like it’s about jobs, but it does have some). It will work better for workers looking for casual gigs like sitting pets or volunteering for cheap salaries or for free. It’s better for professionals who want a change of air but aren’t concerned about taking a hiatus on their careers.
Go Overseas is a good portal to check opportunities for teaching English in countries such as Costa Rica, Japan, South Korea, or Spain. It also lists internship opportunities in Europe, but they don’t give such a prominent place to those. It seems like the site is aimed specifically at over-21 Canada and United States citizens because teaching English abroad (at least what they’d call abroad) requires an exam that only them can sit for. There are alternative courses for a person who’d love to teach English as a job abroad but falls outside that demographic. Still, it’s not just as straightforward.
Go Overseas bases its credibility on community reviews. They currently list around 15,000 programs on its website and plenty of reviews.
GoAbroad.com is a well-rounded platform for workers who want to take a gap year, or volunteer abroad. They do list volunteer and gap year opportunities, and the opportunities are listed as “programs.”
Just as you can purchase a holiday package, they rank their “programs” (packages) by score, allowing you to pick an option quickly even if you do not know what you want to do next. It’s a very good place if you want to volunteer but don’t know where to begin.
Lastly, GoAbroad.com can help you get certified online if you are interested in an English teaching job. Just click on TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and complete the certification from your dining room. Also, consider that this step functions as a filter for most English teachers’ employers.
The most reliable way to find jobs abroad is by matching with a company that will hire and help you move to that country. Many interview processes are cut short when the recruiter says that, unfortunately, they just realised they can’t hire you because they can’t bring in workers from this or that country for legal or payroll reasons. Finding job openings that need your talent is not the same as finding a job that will hire you, and a very detailed job board that won’t help to get the job aboard won’t cut it.
Relocate.me is a platform that connects top talent that wants to relocate with employers that will help them do that. It’s a niche IT board, and the opportunities the platform lists are all from organisations that need, and want to, facilitate their way into a new location.
If you’re a tech professional looking to relocate and be hired internationally, head to our job board. Good luck!
Andrew is a serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of recruiting experience in the tech field. To date, he has founded four startups, including Relocate.me and GlossaryTech. In the off time, Andrew is a long-distance swimmer and coffee taster.
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