Looking for a job in Denmark: Your Danish cv (And why you might want to consider a Danish nickname)

Hello and welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kay Xander Mellish. This is the second in our 5-part series on looking for a job in Denmark. Now, I've applied for jobs in Denmark and I've been hired. I've also been the person doing the hiring and sorting through applications. Here's the truth: it's really no fun on either side. On the applicant side, you can feel like a beggar, desperate for someone to recognize and reward your talent. It wears on your confidence, particularly in a long hiring process, which is common in Denmark, even for Danes. And on the hiring side, you're facing a huge stack of applications, mostly from people who know nothing about the company, nothing about the job, and are sending you a standardized letter or CV that gives no indication why they're a good fit. For example, when I was hiring for a copyediting position at a financial company in Copenhagen, I got a letter in flawless English from an Eastern European woman who was a display artist at IKEA. She put together the sofas and pillows to give the imitation living rooms a chic and homey atmosphere. It's noble work, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the job we had advertised, and she'd given no indication of how her skills would transfer. So that application got trashed, and so will yours if you don't take the time to explain why you're the right person to work at that particular company in that particular job. It's not really the employer's role to look through your CV, or resume as the North Americans say, and imagine how you might fit with the position on offer. It's your role to show why you're right for the position and can start adding value right away. That's why I recommend a Danish CV that highlights the projects you've worked on and how your contribution to those projects relates to the job at hand. For example, an acquaintance of mine applying for an administrative job had a degree in Shakespearean literature, but she'd also spent several years as a volunteer event planner at her son's school. The second role, even though it was unpaid, had more relevance to the job she wanted since it involved scheduling, budgets, dealing with suppliers, and juggling a wide variety of stakeholders and egos. I encouraged her to go into detail about this organizational experience on her CV. Unless you have a long and complex career, your Danish CV shouldn't be more than one page, and if it is, the most exciting information should be on the first page where it can easily be found by a lazy or overwhelmed hiring manager. Personally, I rarely read past the first page, particularly when office job applicants used the later page to go into detail about restaurant and babysitting jobs they'd held decades ago. Keeping things short means you may have to decide what aspects of your experience to emphasize. It can be a bitter pill to swallow that the things you are most proud of may not be things that Danish employers care about. Titles and grades and long descriptions of examinations— unless, of course, they're required for the job, as they are for accountants and architects and engineers— they're not a golden ticket to employment in Denmark. Even if you've attended an excellent school. What most Danish employers are looking for is someone who is plug-and-play, who can do the job on her first day at work and be a good social fit on the team. Poor social fit is another thing Danish employers worry about when they're hiring foreigners. As much as they need foreign skills, particularly in technical industries, and want to see themselves as culturally relaxed and open, Most Danes grew up in a monoculture where there's a certain Danish way of doing things, and they worry that you may not know what that is. Make no mistake, if asked to choose between a technically excellent employee who won't fit into the team and a less gifted employee who will, Danish hiring managers will choose the second employee every time. Teamwork and group work is extraordinarily important to Danish society. Now, if you're not Danish, you don't have to pretend that you are, but showing your openness to Danish culture and the Danish way of doing things will be a point in your favor. For example, indicate how far you've come in your Danish language classes, or at the very least that you're studying Danish online with a program like Duolingo. If you've been living in Denmark for a while and have been involved in sports clubs like running clubs or community activities like Copenhagen Volunteers or your building's tenant organization, Make sure to add those to your CV too. My acquaintance had a son who played football with the Danish kids in a neighborhood club, and I told her to make a big deal about this in her job applications. Football clubs have deep emotional resonance for Danes. Many secretly believe that the integration crisis could be solved if more foreigners would just sign up for soccer. A Danish CV generally includes a photo, although one is not required. I've noticed that people from cultures in which work is a serious business tend to choose photos in which they're grim, unsmiling, and wearing their most formal work clothing, a bit like a passport photo. Now, this is the wrong approach for Denmark. Your Danish CV photo, which can also be your LinkedIn photo, should show you smiling slightly, as if you don't take yourself too seriously, which is an admired trait in Denmark. You should look as if you'd be a pleasant person to share a coffee break with. Invest in a good photo. In a country where nearly everyone has a smartphone, there's no excuse for a badly lit or blurry one, or one in which you're in wedding attire. I've seen a lot of that. Do a quick modeling session on a sunny day with a friend as a photographer, and wear what you'd wear on the job in Denmark. This will probably be a solid color sweater, maybe set off by a bright tie or scarf or a simple headscarf. Alternately, you can choose a photo that shows you on the job, a surveyor on a construction site wearing a hard hat, or Or a nurse in a hospital setting with a stethoscope. If your name is very long or difficult to pronounce, you might want to consider using your initials or coming up with a nickname that the Danes can handle. Having something short and pronounceable is particularly useful when calling on the telephone or trying to leave a telephone message. My advice to a job applicant named Ovidius was that on the telephone he should be Ova. Ove has the extra advantage of being an actual Danish name, although an old-fashioned one. Some Chinese speakers coming to Denmark even go ahead and choose a Danish nickname for their time here, much as Westerners choose Chinese names when doing business in China. You don't have to do this, although it's certainly an attention-getter to see a Danish name like Mette or Magnus in the middle of a given name and surname that's clearly African or Urdu. It goes without saying that your CV should be in flawless English. You want your employer to focus on your excellent skill set, not that you failed to capitalize the name of your university, or that you've typed three mysterious commas in a row. Comma comma comma. I've seen both of these mistakes and much much more on the resumes of disappointed job seekers. I frequently recommend the Fiverr. A website where native English speakers from around the world will copy-edit and sometimes critique your CV for as little as US $5. That's 35 Danish crowns. It's well worth the investment, and you can also use Fiverr to check your cover letter and LinkedIn profile, which is what we'll talk about in the next installment. That's the How to Live in Denmark podcast for this week. You can get the How to Live in Denmark book on Amazon, on iTunes, On Google Play or on saksu.com. Or you can order it from any bookstore in Denmark. Come leave a comment at howtoliveindenmark.com or on our How to Live in Denmark Facebook page. See you next time. See you next time.