Premise
Unfortunately, the startup where I was working could not find enough funds to maintain the operations, so we started the process to gracefully shut it down. As a consequence, I had to start looking for a new job.
Spoiler: I found one!
Job boards
Since my last job hunt in 2021, I kept collecting websites and resources in the full-remote jobs communities. I follow podcasts, read posts and success stories, and I keep myself informed on the current trends. I’m genuinely interested in the topic because I see that it may be impactful in the coming years.
The first thing I noticed in 2023 is that the situation with the job boards changed quite a lot.
Cord 👎
In 2021, the best platform for me, also the platform where I found my past job, was Cord. In 2023, Cord did not change much: it does not explicitly support contractors and it’s focused on the UK. It does not make it very clear if the company is open to full-remote within the EU or not, but the biggest change for me was the response rate. In 2021, everyone replied quickly, possibly with a kind “no thank you”, but there was a 100% response rate. In 2023, many remained completely silent leaving me in the classic situation of doubt:
Didn’t they get my profile, or is my profile, not a good fit? If I am not a good fit, then why?
I covered all the announcements in a few days and the rate of new job postings was very low, so, unfortunately, this platform was a waste of time for me in 2023.
Power To Fly 👍
A recent discovery is Power To Fly. The platform focuses on minorities, but the job postings seem open to everyone and, in general, the same posts appear on other platforms too. There are no evident restrictions. I found only a few interesting job postings, but an ex-colleague found his new company here, so it is definitely in the group of winners.
Remote Europe 👎
I had a lot of hopes for Remote Europe, but it was a disappointment. I found some interesting opportunities, but I got no replies at all. A total failure although the website has the potential to be the best one for EU-based workers.
Wellfound (former AngelList) 👍
Wellfound is great if you look for a startup. The only disadvantage is that it is focused on the US market, but I’ve got several contacts nonetheless. It is a difficult platform in general, but probably more because the startups are very diverse in terms of maturity. Some are well organised, reply quickly, and have an established hiring process, while others are… a bit messy. It wasn’t the platform where I found my next company, but it’s definitely recommended.
LinkedIn 👍
In 2021, LinkedIn was the worst website to find remote jobs. In 2023, it was the best one, hands down. LinkedIn still has idiotic limitations in the job posting because it forces the hiring manager to specify only one country for the hiring, therefore it is impossible to say “Remote in the EU”, for example. Most companies overcome the limitation by making it explicit in the post, but it is still very far from being ideal.
If you are looking for a remote job: search for full-remote jobs in the UK, in Germany, or wherever you want, and try to understand from the post if they are open to cross-border hiring or contractors. It’s annoying and tedious, but this is how I got most of my replies and eventually a job.
Other platforms
I kept my eyes on Devsdata, Dynamite Jobs, and Remote Ok, but I had no luck. It is also very time-consuming to follow multiple job boards, so I could dedicate way less time to these. Others may be lucky.
Platform I discarded 👎
These are platforms I had on my list and I discarded them immediately because I couldn’t find anything relevant. I add them here anyway: 4 day week, Authentic Jobs, BuiltIn, Cleverjobs, Climatebase, Daily Remote, Dice, EU Remote Jobs, Growmotely, Hack A Job, Hired, Jobs Factor, Jobspresso, JustRemote, Lets Work Remotely, Remoters, Truly Remote
Platforms I didn’t try 🤷
And then there are platforms I have in my list but that I never used, mostly because it is really too much to check! Of the following, I just want to mention Otta which apparently was really helpful for some ex-colleagues, but I have never tried it personally.
Here the full list: Cryptocurrencyjobs, Dribble, FindAsync, Flexa Careers, FleX Jobs, Flockingbird, Go Remotely, Infosec Jobs, Jobgether, JSRemotely, Landing Jobs, Meet Frank, NoCommute, NoDesk, OfferZen, OpenTalent, Otta, Pangian, People-First Jobs, Product Hunt, Remote.co, Remote Leaf, Remoteng, RemoteHub, Remote Junkie, Remote Leads, Remote Tribe, Remote Work Hub, Remoters, RemoteWoman, RemoteWX, Remotive, Skip The Drive, Snaphunt, Smooth Remote, Talent.io, Techloop, YCombinator, We Work Remotely, Workew, Working Nomads
Some numbers
Here are the raw numbers:
I applied to 81 companies
- 45 never replied
- 32 rejected me
- 17 for no specific reason: the classing thanks, but no thanks
- 4 saying that they got too many candidates
- 7 for unspecified geographical restrictions
- 2 because I failed their test
- 2 after the first interview and, in both cases, I have the strong feeling that they were looking for someone experienced in JavaScript while their job posting said Java 🤦
- 4 proceeded with the selection process
Note: on top of the above there were a few (5-6) Italian companies I did not count. See down below.
Such a failure!
Looking at the numbers, the first thing it comes to my mind is “Wow, I suck!”, but probably it’s not true.
I hired on LinkedIn, and the hard truth is that a job posting may get 100 replies of which 70 are totally irrelevant. Replying “no, thanks” requires effort, and adding motivation is a full-time job. Personally, I did not reply to candidates that looked great for reasons like “this guy would never work for us” or “we already have too many solid candidates”.
A word on the tests
I did what I could to avoid companies doing tests such as coding challenges on Codility or HackerRank because it’s the number one red flag that tells me that the company does not know how to hire.
Let me be clear: I am fairly good ad those tests because I like to do those challenges in my free time. I’m not the best, but I can solve most easy and medium challenges very quickly and with a good score.
However, even if one is good, bad days happen, and that was one of the two failures. The other failure was just a ridiculous test with not one but two steps with coding challenges: I passed the first one which wasn’t too difficult, but I miserably failed the second one requiring two complex algorithms with bizarre criteria.
If the company has experts in software development, they also have people able to do a real interview asking questions that are realistic and relative to the job. Companies using Codility or HackerRank are usually disorganised or scared of hiring, and the selection process is often a roll of the dice. I never worked in a company doing those tests even if I’m sure I got their offers and probably that is not a coincidence.
I wish companies could be upfront with those filters just to save me time. Glassdoor is a good indicator, but it’s not bulletproof.
The winning 4
Of the 4 companies that started the whole selection process, two weren’t very interesting and I was aiming to the others. One in particular was clearly and without a doubt my favourite one, and, in fact, it’s the company where I’m going to work. No big surprises.
- Very quick to respond, fast process constantly advancing over time
- Clear and transparent about the job
- Clear feedback after every interview
- They were showing interest and excitement
In comparison, one of the other three (that was not even the worst one)
- Confusing process with interviews with several people giving me the idea that they have no idea how to select people and are very scared of hiring the wrong person
- No feedback except a “you made it to the next step” after a pause of days
- No excitement at all. I always had the feeling that they were about to say “Sorry, you are not what we want”
But the worst issue was definitely their communication:
- Lots of delays in the replies
- The hiring manager went on holiday and left me hanging for a couple of weeks
- They canceled an interview with no reason and did not reply to my messages asking if they wanted to proceed
Apparently, they were actually interested, but the communication was so all over the place that I concluded that they ghosted me and I signed with another company before discovering that they wanted to have a final interview. I felt sorry to decline, but, at the same time, come on!
Contracts
A word on the contracts.
I was a freelance and I wanted to remain a freelance because, from the legal point of view, it gives me a bit of freedom to be my own boss. It’s not a big thing, but since I’m going to be based in Italy, the subtle differences between freelancers and employees make me prefer the former solution.
No company wanted freelancers.
None.
Compared to 2021 when everyone wanted to hire freelancers to have a B2B contract across countries, in 2023 everyone either had an entity in Italy (where I am registered) or wanted to use an EOR. What’s an EOR, you may ask. An EOR is a middleman with an entity in your country of residence that hires you on behalf of the company for which you will work. Examples of such companies are Remote, Deel, and Omnipresent. There are probably more, but these are the three I know better (I worked a lot with Deel in particular).
Is an EOR a problem? It depends on the point of view. Their process may be a bit impersonal and messy: I did two onboarding with Deel, one was smooth and the other a bit bumpy. The employee contract has nothing very special in it, but legally I’ll be a full-time employee with permanent position at Deel and there will be no relationships with my future “real” employer. At least in theory, my future employer could fire me following rules in a B2B contract they have with Deel and that I can’t read. At that point, Deel would probably “nudge me to the door” assigning me to an office on the other side of the planet with 30 days notice. It’s ok because I’m not a rookie at his first experience and, as a contractor, it would have been the same thing, but for some people, it may be a dealbreaker.
I hope one day it will be easier to hire cross-border at least within the EU.
One note on Italy
⚠️ rant warning ⚠️
I don’t like rants, but some things must be written down.
My next job will be again for a British company. I applied to a lot of companies based in the UK, some in Germany, some in the US, a few in the Netherlands, but also in Italy… with a caveat.
None of my applications to Italian companies were very serious on my side. I was interested in the jobs and I would have accepted too, but I did not believe the offer could be any good.
Indeed that was the case all the time.
Getting a first interview or a chat with Italian recruiters was actually quite easy. Almost everyone replied, they loved my CV and seemed very positive until we touched on two points: remote work and money.
Remote what?
I will never understand why a company would advertise a job as “full-remote” just to clarify during the call that it is “full-remote” only 2-3 days a week. One recruiter told me that the job was “full-remote”, but I was supposed to start working full-time in the office for a while and then “we’ll see”. That’s idiotic and part of a culture that lacks respect for the employees. It’s some that I didn’t miss and never found in almost 10 years abroad.
All about the money
The second problem was the salary. I was prepared for poor offers and I was also prepared to accept one that was not too bad, but what I’ve heard was ridiculous. They weren’t just around half of what I was making, but, in one case, the offer was lower than the last salary I got in Italy 10 years ago before moving abroad. When I told it to the recruiter, her answer was that unfortunately unemployment is high and that recently salaries went even down a bit.
Yes, down, with 8% inflation.
One company offered me €25/hour.
Professionalism
If that wasn’t enough, in Italy, there is also a big problem of professionalism. In most cases, the job posting looks for employees able to cover the functions of an entire IT department. Frequently the job posting looks for someone able to develop in Java and Angular, manage Kubernetes, manage databases, implement automation, do the testing, and be “versatile”. Then at the bottom they say “Salary depending on skills” .
There is nobody who can do all that properly. Nobody. It’s too much knowledge and experience for a single person. People I know who can do part of that stuff usually charge €700/€1.000 a day and do not work full time for long for a single customer. Probably these companies offer €1.500-€2.000 neat per month and are looking for someone who can improvise and make it work. Therefore those job posts are a good indicator of poor quality and the amazing thing is how common they are. No surprise that Italy has serious deficiencies in digitalisation.
It’s really sad that Italy is still at this stage with IT. I am sure that no hospital is hiring a single doctor expert in cardiac surgery, dermatology, oncology, and hair transplants, willing to work at night, “salary undisclosed”.
In IT, this was the norm 20 years ago, it was the norm 10 years ago, and it is the norm still today.
The Italian contract
I signed my contract with the EOR and I have no complaints: it was all pretty standard, but I couldn’t avoid noticing the Italian touch.
First of all: 37 pages. Ok, it is in two languages, but still, it’s massive. My contracts in the Netherlands and in the UK were just a few pages long and they were describing what I was supposed to do, while this Italian contract only specifies things like
- lots of rules to work from home, including applicable laws. Really? Why do we need to make everything complicated?
- rules about termination, where to work, what wifi to use, and so on
- a long list of options to get time off including special leaves if I become an amputee, I decide to help with calamities, or to donate my bone marrow. Seriously.
The interesting parts:
- maternity leave: 5 months
- paternity leave: 10 days + 1 day “in agreement with the mother” (what?)
- child care leave for working mothers, transferrable to the father only if the mother does not use them
In Italy, people complain that women do not have access to well-paid jobs, often are left jobless and nobody knows how to fix the situation. Then it’s normal to have clauses in standard contracts that clearly paint the picture of how the gender roles are assigned here.
There was also this gem:
Given the employment level and role of the Employee, the latter is expected to work even beyond the normal working hours where necessary and will not be entitled to overtime pay as provided by law.
In Italy, you are supposed to work more than 40 hours a week and the overtime is not paid.
The stereotype is that Italians do not work and live on welfare burning EU money, but we are supposed to work overtime and sometimes even our contracts stipulate that.
I remember when I moved to the Netherlands many years ago. I was working a bit longer than 8 hours as I was used to. It was probably the end of the first week when my manager called me. “Why do you stay longer than 8 hours? Are you unable to do the job or do we give you too much work?” I explained that in Italy one is supposed to stay in the office at least 9/10 hours a day not to be considered a slacker. She told me that it was ridiculous and ordered me to leave a bit earlier the next day to recover the extra time because in the Netherlands it’s illegal to work more than 40 hours a week.
I do not have further comments.