How to Find a Job in the US If You Are Left Without One: A Ukrainian's Story

Kharkiv native Artem Liubezny talks about life in Los Angeles and the difficulties he faced while looking for a job in the US.

We moved to Los Angeles a year ago. I had worked as a business analyst for five years at the Kharkiv office of Oro, and there they offered me the chance to try myself in the American office. The company helped with getting a green card and even with housing for the first period, but its sales went slower than expected, and in the summer it cut 30% of staff across all offices.

That is how I was left without a job in one of the most expensive cities in America.

How to Survive Without a Job in Los Angeles

Fortunately, California is quite a “left-leaning” state, and the Unemployment Insurance program helped me a lot to get through a month without work. In case of dismissal, a weekly benefit is paid depending on the salary you had. I was entitled to the maximum amount of $450 a week (after taxes, $410), because my earnings for the quarter were over 12 thousand.

The green card also saved me. If it had been just a work visa, then after leaving the job, violating the terms of stay and deportation would have threatened. With a green card, only the financial question is a burden.

Every two weeks you have to report on how your job search is going: you must state where you sent your resume, what responses you received, and what else you did. You also need to register on the California job search website, although in the IT industry you will never find anything there. 

If you finally get hired, you need to report which week you received the offer and from what date you start working, after which unemployment insurance payments stop. If after 26 weeks you still have not found anything, the payments also stop.

$410 is quite decent. It is not enough for a good life for two people, but it helped pay the rent so as not to end up on the street. After all, this is not two weeks of severance pay and goodbye.

Job Search in the States

If you have already worked in the US, finding a job is much easier than without local experience. Even if you worked in the office of an American company in another part of the world, it will hardly help much.

In terms of time spent, the job search turned into a job in itself. Each morning started with sending requests for vacancies that suited me. I updated my profile on LinkedIn and created profiles on other local job search sites. Besides LinkedIn, indeed.com can help in the States, while other resources turned out to be useless. If LinkedIn is built on the principle of a social network, then indeed.com is more like work.ua and rabota.ua, a catalog of vacancies and job seekers.

I made 20-30 applications a day, and in a month I ended up with about 500. They were similar to each other, except for the cover letter, where you need to explain why exactly you should be hired for this position and why you have dreamed all your life of working specifically here. The resume format familiar in Ukraine does not work here. There you make them look beautiful so HR managers notice them, but here resumes first reach the recruiter after being processed by one of 6-7 programs. You need to include keywords but write only the essentials, without fluff.

I got 50-70 replies. Half of them were “Thank you, but you are not a good fit for us”, and some could reply two months later in the style of “We carefully considered your candidacy, but decided to hire someone else”, although it could have been an autoresponder after the vacancy was automatically closed. In my experience, if they do not contact you within two days, do not expect them to contact you at all.

I went through about two dozen interviews. Either they called and immediately started the interview, or they wrote in private messages and offered to schedule a first conversation. Usually it takes place by phone with a recruiter who wants to get a minimal impression of you: whether you match what you wrote about yourself, and whether it makes sense to keep talking. At this stage about 20% are screened out, but if you are not among them, then the hiring manager who requested this position will talk to you next. They conduct the interview directly on the matter, first usually also by phone, and then they may invite you to the office.

New Company

If you see, for example on LinkedIn, that a vacancy has been updated a couple of days later, reapply: your application may simply have gone unnoticed. For the job I ultimately got, I applied three times on different sites. First I went through two phone interviews, then I visited the office, and the final one was also by phone, four in total. The offer was made verbally during the last one, and I officially signed the documents when I came on my first working day.

This is the startup Klickly. We are building a marketplace, and we have a technology that allows you to buy products with one click directly from banner ads.

The company is currently valued at $120 million, and that does not seem to be the limit. The office is located in famous Santa Monica, right by the ocean.

Because of the job change, we had to move. At first we lived in Hollywood, in an apartment in a four-story building, but getting to the new job from there takes an hour and a half and only by ground transport, which is constantly late by an average of 10-15 minutes due to the lack of a dedicated lane and, as a result, traffic jams.

Now we live downtown among the skyscrapers, but at least we can get to the office in 40 minutes by metro.

Moving from Los Angeles to another city during the job search was considered, but it was very unprofitable, because:

1. Our apartment lease ran until the end of October, and terminating it would mean a very large penalty. On top of that, we would have to look for new housing in another city, pay a deposit, and cover the first month
2. The move itself with our belongings would have cost from 3 to 5 thousand dollars
   

I applied for several vacancies outside LA, in other cities of California, in Seattle, Portland, Austin. Places where there are a fairly large number of technology jobs. They even called me back, but when I explained my situation, they said: “Oh, I see, we will call you back.” And they did not call back. 

One could understand them, because for us to relocate, we would have needed some kind of upfront payment from them.

Life in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a less concentrated city than Kyiv, but it is simply enormous. The scale is clearly visible from the plane. It descends for landing, flying over the entire city for half an hour, and then turns over downtown. As far as the horizon, you see a huge number of houses, and even then they do not end.

Last spring we went to a natural park outside the city, and it took two hours by car on the freeway — just to get out of LA. 

Multi-story development, like the stretch from downtown to Santa Monica, is what resembles a city here. Everything else is one-story, like a village.

At my previous job I earned 80 thousand a year before taxes, and now I earn 95 thousand (but so far without insurance). You have to pay a federal tax of 15%, then state tax of 5-7%, plus Social Security, plus Medicare. In total, about 25%.

With this money, two people can feel comfortable in Los Angeles and even save. 

My wife and I do not feel that we deny ourselves anything: we go to pubs and concerts, and when we lived in Hollywood, we bought a cinema subscription. The AMC subscription cost $20 a month per person and allowed three screenings a week. This is very profitable, and even more than personal free time and the number of interesting films would allow. A single ticket for one screening can cost from 15 to 30 dollars.

More on Working in California

• After the move, I worked for the same company, but the difference between the Kharkiv office and Los Angeles was strongly felt. In Kharkiv you can come in, drink coffee, and take breaks during work. In LA there is nothing like that: you come in and work.
• California law does not regulate vacation at all, everything is exclusively by agreement with the employer. The more valuable an employee you are, the better your vacation terms will be, while low-skilled workers may have no vacation at all.
  
• The law guarantees only two weeks of maternity leave. After that you either negotiate with the employer, quit, somehow manage, or hire a babysitter.
  

Yevgeny Blazhko