Any job offers *without* visiting NZ..?

[PeKaJoSa]

I visited the NZ Expo in London last weekend, and was given the following very blunt warning by one of the recruitment agents at the show:

"Even in the IT job market, unless candidates are willing to fly over and sit face-to-face with an employer in NZ, there is no chance whatsover of getting a job offer... and I don't mean that its only a 5 percent chance, I mean a zero percent chance. End of story."


No doubt that it makes the agent's job of earning their commission vastly easier if candidates do travel all that way, so it's understandable that they would like us all to believe that you cannot get an offer unless you visit NZ.

Whilst I'm sure that the chances of getting a job offer would indeed be greatly increased by investing the necessary time & money into a trip to NZ, I also know for a fact that some people on this board can disprove that "zero percent chance" statement.

Assuming that you are in a position to say "I'm ready to emigrate right now, but I just need your job offer letter to push through my PR application" then I'd hope at least a few employers who would be willing / able (or desperate enough!) to make a job offer without you actually sitting there right in front of them in NZ....

I'd really like to hear from people in the IT field who *did* manage to secure a job offer without leaving the UK. If you did, was it for a WTR visa or a PR application? Did you do telephone interviews, webcam inteviews, or visit a UK branch of that business?

Any info much appreciated!

Cheers!
Pete

[melly]

OH is a computer engineer. Had a phone interview and then the company paid for the flight for him to come to NZ for a face-to-face interview. Although we were living in Australia at the time.
Other piece of advice is if you see a job advertised through a recruiting company, try figuring out who the actual employer for the position is and then apply direct to the company (IT companies usually have their job ads on their own websites too). This means you avoid having somebody who doesn't really know about the job sifting through your application and making the decision about if it you are suitable or not based on some superficial criteria. A lot of IT jobs ask for you to have experience in very specified application areas, but even if you don't have all the experience they talk about in the ad, if you can actually get the employer to be looking at your application they are able to make a better judgement on you suitability. I hope this makes sense.

[Jon-and-Lou]

I tried very hard to secure a job offer from the UK, and failed.

The first stumbling block was time scales - I couldn't commit to a patrticular date due to visa not yet granted (despite telling them it's be rapidly speeded up with a job offer), and we had to sell our house.

Even after selling the house, and getting our PR it still proved an effort. I had a lot more interest from job applications and had a few telephone interviews but employers STILL wanted to do a face-to-face inteview before that all important job offer.

I have heard of a few people securing offers just from a phone call, but that wasn't my experience.

HTH
Lou

BTW, I'm a software engineer ...

[Familyofmonkeys]

OH was told the same thing by NZIS stand at the Expo......and less than an hour later he had spent time chatting people working for the larger IT companies recruiting and was told the opposite. He got a telephone interview a couple of days later and a written job offer by the end of the week with the detailed paperwork following shortly after. At no point was he required to travel to NZ before we emmigrated. At the time we had just submitted our EOI and it had been selected, but we hadn't recieved our ITA yet.....as soon as we faxed details of job offer the ITA stuff we got a case officer straight away and it was all fast tracked although we couldn't travel for another 7 months as I was pregnant at the time. I don't know if it made a difference with me being with him and also chatting to the recuiters even though i'm a SAHM, but they could at least see that the whole family were happy to make the move. His company paid for rather posh accommodation for our whole family for our first month as well as parking space and car hire for large family vehicle, free mobile phones etc. They got someone to meet us at airport, paid for minibus for us and our stuff to hotel and had arranged our lunch in a restaurant for when we arrived. Not a small outlay on their part.

They only thing I would add is that according to OH the IT market is slower now that it was a year or so ago, so i'm not saying what we got is typical of what you might expect. But.....there are companies willing to offer jobs without you coming to NZ first.

[clg]

Very good advice from Melly about avoiding recruitment agents! I only work with them if the employer is using them directly. Otherwise avoid them. I am sure you can trust some of them the problem is figuring out which.

It is possible to get a job without being here but you will need to be in some sort of in demand area where there are no local candidates. I am sure there are some IT areas that are still like that but there are more good applications coming through than there have been in a while so local options have improved.

[AmJem]

I am arriving in NZ in December, without a Job Offer, and that I not for want of trying!
I am an Electronics Engineer and have been told the same thing as you by nearly everyone I've approached - 'you'll have no problem getting a job in NZ, but you really need to be there' - quite a leap of faith.
I think in this situation you've just got to back yourself and go for it

I've also heard of others who got job offers from just a phone/video interview (mainly IT, teaching, and nursing), so it sounds like it is possible

[CJ22]

We happened to meet the guy at the Manchester expor who eventually offered us both jobs. It was bit of luck, as we work in quite a specific IT field and he was the guy who ran the dept. for a major employer. But it is possible. We did, of course, interview with him while he was in the UK, so I guess not quite what you meant

[thezorbster]

OH was offered a job in IT without even being interviewed, on the basis of his e-mailed CV. It can happen!

[TonnyTessa]

I had a phone interview first and on the basis of that the university I will be working for soon paid for me to fly out. Not entirely the same, but at least it didn't cost me any extra money (other than the cost of the two week holiday I attached to it )

[M-Squared]

We visited in April '07. My employer wasn't hiring for my expertise at that time. So I had nothing to apply for. But a couple of months later they advertised. I applied, had 4 phone interviews, each about an hour long. got job offer. However, offer was processed in a far-less-then-timely manner (by someone who is no longer with the company) and so I did not get it in time to get a proper work visa before we left the US. We went on visitors visas, and I had - per advice from my employer - destroyed all evidence of a job offer as I would have been in deep, deep trouble if I'd entered as a tourist with a job offer! Applied for a work permit and got it 2 weeks later. After 1 day of perm employment, I submitted our EOI with 215 points.

The rest, as they say, is history.