Whenever you apply for a full-time position, employers will expect a thick package that documents your entire educational and professional career and is based on your CV or resume, known as a Lebenslauf. Like any CV, the Lebenslauf should include a listing of all your previous positions and responsibilities, in reverse chronological order, as well as any degrees and outside activities and your final grades. However, Germans also expect you to include your marital status, sex, birth date, number of children and a recent photo. Since these things are a required part of any CV, it’s hard to believe prospective employers don’t use the information to sort candidates by sex or age. Alongside the CV, applications should include written recommendations from all previous employers and copies of any degrees or awards. Employers want to know everything about you and omitting any of the above could keep you out of an applicant pool if the other job-seekers are predominantly German.

When applying for positions with a broader international scope, hiring managers are forgiving as long as they can paint a fairly complete picture of you and your past. Since it’s unlikely you can cobble together a complete application package, find everything you can, make copies and send it over – put only the details you feel comfortable divulging on your CV. Once they’ve found the right candidate, employers will send the package back to you. If you decide to go through a recruitment agency, they’ll be able to help with which documents are vital and which are unnecessary. They will also be able to say what your expected salary will be and discuss in detail any additional benefits.

The internet is obviously the best place to look for jobs at sites such as www.stepstone.de, www.jobpilot.de or www.monster.de. The pages of companies that have caught your eye can also prove useful. The Guardian’s job site (www.jobs.guardian.co.uk) often has English-language jobs in Germany. Conferences and professional associations can sometimes yield results, but Germans generally treat networking among anyone but their friends and immediate colleagues as insincere.