Finding a job in Denmark as a foreigner: what helps

Why does an unanswered application hurt this much?

You are not only being passed over for a job, you are being passed over somewhere you have no standing yet.

At home, a rejection lands inside a context. People know your work, a former manager would vouch for you, and there is a reputation in the background absorbing some of the blow. Here that context does not exist. Your degree is a line on a page nobody can place, your previous employer means nothing to the person reading, and the whole weight of the refusal lands directly on you with nothing underneath it.

That is why the 30th application here feels so different from how the 30th would have felt at home, and why people who were robust about rejection elsewhere find themselves undone by it in Copenhagen.

Is this the market, or is it me?

Both are usually true at the same time, and most people can only hold one of them at once.

There are features of hiring here that have nothing to do with you. A great deal of recruitment happens between people who already know each other, Danish is asked for in roles where it is barely used, and a foreign qualification takes an employer effort to interpret that nobody obliges them to make.

Among first-generation migrants in Germany, those who searched only through informal channels such as friends and family were around 12 percentage points more likely to end up overqualified for the job they took, and those whose networks consisted mainly of other migrants around 14 points higher again.³ That study used 2 survey waves, measured overqualification by how people rated their own job, and cannot show which way the effect runs. What it points at will be familiar: an expat network is warm, immediately available, and connected to very little of the hiring that actually happens.

And some of it is you, in the ordinary sense that everybody applying has gaps. Holding both at once is the difficult part. Decide it is entirely the market and you stop adjusting anything. Decide it is entirely you and each rejection becomes further proof, which then shows in how you apply.

What is the waiting doing to you?

It reaches your sleep and your appetite before it reaches your opinion of yourself.

Most people describe the physical part first. Waking at 5 and reaching for the phone. A flatness in the middle of the day that does not feel like sadness so much as nothing at all. The thoughts arrive later and sound reasonable while they are happening: perhaps I was always overrated, perhaps the last role was luck.

A pooled analysis of 20 cohort studies found unemployment associated with a modestly raised risk of later depressive symptoms, an odds ratio of about 1.19, with insecure employment slightly higher at about 1.29.¹ The authors found evidence of publication bias among the unemployment studies, so the real figure may be smaller. It describes a tendency across populations and predicts nothing about you. What it does say is that what you are feeling is a response to the situation rather than a flaw the situation has exposed.

Why does taking a lesser job feel like a defeat?

Once you have moved countries, the gap between what you can do and what you are paid to do stops being a practical matter.

In a large Canadian health survey, being overqualified for your job was associated with fair or poor self-rated mental health among immigrants, at roughly 1.6 times the odds, while among people born in the country the same mismatch showed no such association.² The data are cross-sectional and were collected in 2003, so they cannot establish cause, and Canada is not Denmark.

The reading I would offer is this. For somebody born here, an unmatched job is a bad year. For somebody who moved, it attaches itself to the decision to come, to what the move cost the people at home, and often to a partner who is watching. That is a different weight resting on the same job, and it is why the advice to take something and start somewhere lands badly so often, even when it is sound advice.

What helps, and when more applications are the wrong instrument

Work the search as a system, and keep a separate and honest account of your worth that the search is not permitted to touch.

• Keep the 2 accounts apart. One holds what the market is doing this quarter. The other holds what you can actually do. Letting the first write entries in the second is the most damaging thing I see in this work.
• Make the search narrower. 10 applications to roles where your particular experience is unusual will do more than 60 to roles where you are one of 300 plausible people.
• Build Danish contacts, not only expat ones. Professional associations, alumni groups, the Danish colleagues of people you already know. Warmth and usefulness are not the same network.
• Fix something in the week that is not the search. Teaching, a language class, volunteering, anything with a deadline somebody else set. The structure does more than the content does.
• Decide what a lesser job is for before you accept one. A deliberate bridge is survivable. A quiet concession is not, and the difference is a conversation you have with yourself beforehand.

There is a point at which more applications is the wrong instrument. If you have stopped opening the replies, if you are avoiding the interviews you do get, if the search has become the reason you see nobody, or if you have started describing yourself in terms you would not have accepted 2 years ago, then the problem has moved. It is no longer the hiring that is upsetting you, it is your own standing with yourself, which the hiring now feeds. That is workable, and it is the work I do with internationals in Copenhagen.

Questions people ask

Can therapy do anything when the problem is the job market?

Therapy does not find you a job, and I would not pretend otherwise. What it can do is stop a long search from rewriting what you believe about yourself, which is usually what people arrive with.

Is this going to be about confidence?

Not mainly, because confidence is usually the symptom rather than the subject. It is more useful to look at what the rejections have come to mean to you, and where that meaning was formed.

I am not depressed. Is it still worth coming?

Yes, and most people who come about this are not. Coming before it settles into something heavier is generally easier work than coming afterwards.

My Danish is poor. Does that matter here?

Not for the sessions, which are in English. It may matter for the search, and that is worth looking at plainly rather than anxiously.

Should my partner come as well?

Come on your own first. When one of you is working and the other is not, the subject turns very quickly into a disagreement about effort, and your part of it is clearer without that in the room.

If the job search here is wearing down your confidence, I can help you hold on to who you are in career crossroads therapy while you look.

Sources

1. Kim, T.J. and von dem Knesebeck, O. (2016). Perceived job insecurity, unemployment and depressive symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective observational studies. International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health, 89(4), 561 to 573.
2. Mawani, F.N., O’Campo, P. and Smith, P. (2022). Opportunity costs: underemployment and mental health inequities between immigrant and Canadian-born labour force participants. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 23(3), 1443 to 1470.
3. Kracke, N. and Klug, C. (2021). Social capital and its effect on labour market (mis)match: migrants’ overqualification in Germany. Journal of International Migration and Integration, 22(4), 1573 to 1598.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.