(Editor’s note: This post with tips for finding a tech job in London is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech and careers because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and managers.)
If you’re looking for a tech job in London – or any job, for that matter – you probably know “tough” is one of the most used words to describe the current market. Yet with a projected growth of 1.4 percent in 2025 by CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce UK, there’s still hope to land a long-dreamed position in a tech company.
Roles in AI, cybersecurity and data science seem to have expanding opportunities in London and beyond including hotspots such as Manchester and Edinburgh. But experts also argue that remote jobs in non-coding positions can also be found, especially when the candidate knows how to play the “hidden market” game.
To find out more about the UK tech job scenario, Dispatches Europe talked to the founders of TechTalk, a platform built by two expats in London, Roxanne Taku and Joana Rocha. The platform has helped more than 200 professionals secure positions across five countries in 2024. We asked them about their own journeys as well as tips and advice on job search, CV building and networking to help highly skilled internationals looking to break into tech.
An interview with Dispatches and TechTalk’s own Roxanne Taku, left, and Joana Rocha
Free advice … get that job before graduation
Dispatches Europe: You both have experience as immigrants in the UK. What was it like trying to get a job in tech in London?
Joana Rocha: I’m from Brazil and have been in the UK for about nine years. I was studying engineering, but I left and started over here in the UK, doing business with finance. Rox and I lived together in China for a year and became friends. I applied for thousands of jobs and got rejected, until I finally got a job in customer support at a tech startup. I worked a little bit with that, a little bit with recruiting and operations, and in the past couple of years, I was leading the marketing team at a fintech startup in London.
DE: What were the visa challenges for you?
Joana: It was actually worse than it is now. We have a lot of changes in immigration right now, like the salary threshold and the graduate visa. Back in my days, a graduate visa didn’t exist. I literally had three months after graduation to get a job, or I would be out of the UK. It was definitely another layer of pressure. But what I did – and recommend to anyone studying in the UK – is to get a job before graduation. I got an internship about eight months before I graduated, managed to build momentum and trust, so when I graduated and needed sponsorship, that company was the first to say, “We’ll sponsor you”. Now there’s the graduate visa, so you have two years to gain as much experience as you possibly can to have more leverage with those companies.
DE: Roxanne, how about your tech story in London?
Roxanne Taku: I’m half French, half Cameroonian, grew up in Cape Town (South Africa), and came to London for university. I was always very drawn to the tech industry, but I had no idea what kind of role I wanted. I left university during COVID, so I went back to Cape Town and applied for jobs remotely. I was just so stuck.
You’re very proud of your degree, but you have zero idea how a company works or what departments exist, so I didn’t know what I should be looking for. After a lot of applying and trying to figure things out, I landed my first role as a sales development representative for a Belgian fintech startup in London. I learned a ton in a year and a half, then moved into business operations. After working at a big tech company, I worked for a scale-up, leading their revenue operations team. Definitely a squiggly career, but I always ended up on the go-to-market commercial side, on the non-coding side of tech.
DE: And how was the visa situation for you?
Roxanne: I didn’t need a visa because I have a French passport, so I came in the year of Brexit and got the pre-settled status. If I had come a couple of months later, it would have been a completely different story. But I was a recent graduate with no experience, and it was a completely dried-out market because of COVID, so companies were not hiring.
I really leveraged my international background. I was positioning myself as “you’re an international company, looking to scale internationally, so let me be that person that will grow with you because I’ve lived in a lot of different countries, so you’re looking for somebody who’s adaptable.”
I used the story of somebody who’s not from the UK as my power.
The hidden job market on LinkedIn
DE: How has the job market changed since you both started?
Joana: Everyone says that the job market now is really, really terrible. But realistically, it’s just changing all the time. Five or six years ago, we didn’t have AI in the mix. So, you had to apply for the job, the company would see your application and call you for an interview. The number of applicants wasn’t that high, especially before COVID, because remote work wasn’t a thing. Now, a lot of the jobs are remote and hybrid, so you don’t need to be in the UK anymore, and the number of applicants per position has increased significantly.
With AI, it’s very easy with tools that let you upload your CV, click a button, and apply to 100 jobs a day. Companies are being completely drowned with 5,000 applications, and they can’t really spot the good applicants. They can look at 10 percent or 20 percent. The problem is visibility. It doesn’t matter how many jobs you’re going to apply for if that recruiter or company doesn’t see your application to start with. You need to create that visibility for yourself.
Networking has really increased and is playing a huge role. When I see that someone has posted a job on LinkedIn, at the end of the description, they say recommendations or referrals are preferred. It’s much cheaper and faster to hire someone from their network than to browse 10,000 CVs.
Companies are using more of what we call “the hidden job market,” where they go on LinkedIn and try to find people to fit a vacancy before even posting it.
It’s not about applying for jobs. It’s about increasing your visibility, either through networking or by making your LinkedIn more optimised, so people will find you.
Roxanne: Companies are moving with a lot more intention. Before COVID, tech companies could fundraise quicker or easier or even pre-revenue, without even showing that they were profitable. But since COVID, companies need to show that they’re profitable if they want to go for a second or third round of funding. There’s less money going around, so companies have become more intentional and picky about who they want. They need to make sure that this person will be there for the long run, not somebody who’s going to test it out for six months. They need a strong culture fit, so the interview process has become longer because companies want to see that job seekers are being very intentional. That’s why networking, personalising your CV, and positioning yourself to that company, role, and team are so important. Culture fit and soft skills are really what they’re looking for.
Optomizing your profile
DE: Joana, could you elaborate on the hidden job market?
Joana: The moment companies post a job, they’re going to be inundated with applications and messages on LinkedIn to recruiters, hiring managers, everyone working at that company. They are postponing posting the job online and, instead, searching for candidates themselves. The main tool recruiters and companies use to do that is LinkedIn. For example, if I’m looking for someone who works in B2B marketing at a fintech company, recruiters can type in the search box and see a list of profiles.
When you’re looking for a recipe on Google, you’re going to see websites that come first and websites on page 200. It’s more or less the same principle. The better you optimise your profile for search specifically, the more likely you’re going to be one of the first people that come up when the recruiter is looking. Then, they build a list of 20 or 30 people to reach out to and put straight into the interview process. A lot of the recruiters who reach out to me on LinkedIn are for confidential roles. People who are only looking for jobs posted online are missing out on a lot of opportunities because jobs are literally not being posted.
DE: Roxanne, what would your advice be about positioning yourself as a strong candidate?
Roxanne: First, you need to think: what role do I want to go for? What type of company? What size? A startup, scale-up, big tech? What characteristics, mindset and experiences are they looking for? Do I want to work more in the B2B or B2C space? The more targeted you are, the more you can optimise your entire LinkedIn and CV, to focus on the companies that fit within the middle part of that Venn diagram.
Keywords are very practical things that you can do on both LinkedIn and CV, so that it shows up in the search. The headline is the first part they see in the LinkedIn recruiter tool. The next thing recruiters are going to look at is your previous experience, to see if that matches what you’re going for next. You can also add keywords to your summary and to the descriptions under work experience.
For your CV, make sure you include a role title under your name, so a recruiter can see it is very specific to this role. Have keywords in the summary because a recruiter spends only five to six seconds looking at your CV. Having your areas of expertise and your skills section at the top is really good.
But, to be honest, where most people mess up is in the interview stages, where they tend not to think deeply enough about what the hiring manager is looking for – things like culture fit. If I’m working with a startup, I want to show them that I like building things from scratch, I like experimenting, I’m comfortable with making decisions even if I have little to no answers, and I’m comfortable failing and making mistakes.
DE: What are the in-demand opportunities now? What are the roles with the biggest opportunities in the UK?
Joana: Tech is an industry that is booming. You can have tech sales, marketing, all of these roles, because SaaS and tech companies are coming up every single day, especially with AI, both B2C and B2B. To some extent, every role is in very high demand now. More specifically, engineers and data analysts are always the positions with the highest demand in comparison to others, like marketing and HR. But there are opportunities in every single position.
The thing now is really key: people who know how to leverage AI are definitely going to be hired, as opposed to those who don’t.
A lot of people say that AI is going to replace everyone’s job, but that’s not the case. What’s going to happen is that AI is making everyone’s jobs more effective. In a team of three, you may only need one person now. How do you make sure that you are that one person? No matter the job, you need to learn how to leverage AI in your day-to-day and embed that in your work, so you can focus on upscaling on things that AI can’t replace, especially soft skills, like strategic thinking. AI is really good at execution.
DE: Would you add anything, Roxanne?
Roxanne: Job seekers need to realise how important soft skills are. We’re seeing this more and more, even when we’re speaking to VPs and C-levels. Yes, they care about the skills, but they really care about the soft skills. A tool that we’re going to use today might be very different in three years, and I want to know that you’re the type of person who’s going to learn, whether it’s the tool that you’ve always used or a brand-new one.
A lot of new roles are going to be created, or the definition of the roles is going to change. Maybe instead of being a full customer support person, where your main job is to have direct conversations with clients, it might change into a customer support operations, where your role is to put together systems and tools that allow the company to use AI to talk to these customers. All of these project management operations skill sets are going to appear more and more in what would have been seen as just a customer support role. Can you implement tooling, frameworks? Can you use the knowledge as a software engineer to train AI and models?
DE: What’s your advice on how to keep up to date with all these changes and stay relevant to the tech market?
Joana: Educating yourself a lot, and there are a lot of different ways to do that. For me, the main thing is going to events because you can see how things are changing and evolving, and how companies are thinking. I also am a big listener of podcasts. I follow a lot of tech people on LinkedIn to see their different points of view. I also like being part of communities with these types of discussions and how people are using different technologies in their day-to-day.
Roxanne: You basically need to create systems versus thinking, “AI is the thing, so I’m doing a course on AI”. It should be more like making that information come to you naturally, like newsletters and the LinkedIn feed. I can get the opinion of a chief sales officer and how they think sales is changing, just because they’re building their personal brand. Look for the top five to 10 influencers you find very interesting, turn on their notifications and listen to them.
DE: What would be your advice on networking?
Roxanne: At events, you can probably create the best connections with people. It feels like the most natural. You also need to figure out what you’re going for at this networking event. Are you going to just generally grow your network? Are you going because you’re actively looking for a job? What is that event built for? The other thing, whether you’re looking for a job or not, is to set yourself a habit of continuously reaching out to people and building your network on LinkedIn. There are also platforms where you can network for very specific fields, such as ADPList.
Joana: If you’re starting to network for the first time, I would primarily go to more niche, smaller events because you can build better connections. A lot of people approach networking very transactionally, “I need to get something out of it right now”, but you need to approach it as you’re building a relationship over time. That’s the biggest mindset shift.
DE: Is there anything else that you’d add about the UK tech market?
Joana: Overall, the market is really tough now, but there’s still a lot of opportunity, especially for people who have the right mindset. You need to put effort. You need to be consistent. You’re going to get a lot of hits, a lot of nos, but you just need to keep at it because all you need is one person to call you for an interview. You just need one job offer.
Roxanne: So many things are changing externally, and a lot of people are internalising the fact that they’re not getting interviews, like they’re not good enough. The job market’s changed, so your approach needs to change. What’s always helped when things are quite difficult is gamifying it, almost collecting those rejections and saying, “Every rejection that I get is getting me one step closer to the yes”. The same thing with networking. Realistically, things happen in stages. Even if you set the goal, “Today I’m going to reach out to ten people”, and if you get two people to respond, you should document that as a win.
If you set different levels for your wins, then you can collect smaller wins throughout. It just helps build your resilience.
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Read more from Andrea Juste here.
Andrea Juste is a writer and editor covering health, psychology, travel, productivity, thought leadership, and more. Andrea was born and raised in Brazil, where she worked for a decade as a journalist before moving to Italy in search of her roots, then the UK, to connect with different cultures. Based in London, she manages content marketing projects for clients worldwide.
