Interviews

Half the vacancies on this site were written by someone at a construction firm or a small logistics company between two other tasks. They list the job, a city, and an email address. When you answer, that email lands in an inbox that already has sixty replies in it, most of them saying "I am interested in this job, please find my CV attached".

Those sixty look identical. Yours does not have to.

What the person reading actually needs

They are checking four things before they open any attachment: can you legally work here, can you start when we need you, can we talk to each other, and have you done this work before. Answer those four and you are already ahead of most applicants.

Here is the whole message:

Subject: Tiler, Tallinn — available from 15 September

Hello,
I saw your vacancy for a tiler in Tallinn. I have six years of experience in wall and floor tiling, mostly on residential projects in Romania, and I can bring photos of finished work.
I hold a Romanian passport, so I can start work in Estonia without a permit.
I speak English and German, and I can start from 15 September. My phone and WhatsApp: +40 XXX XXX XXX.
CV attached. Thank you,
Andrei

Why this works

The subject line contains the job title and your availability, so the message can be found again in a full inbox. Your right to work is stated plainly instead of being discovered three emails later, which is the single most common reason applications die halfway. The phone number is in the body, not only in the CV, because the fastest reply is often a call.

It also does not oversell. If you have six years of experience, say six. Employers who hire trades check on day one, and the ones who hire office staff check during the probation period.

What to leave out

Skip the paragraph about being a motivated team player with excellent communication skills. Everyone writes it, so it carries no information. Skip your date of birth, marital status and photo unless the ad asks for them; in most of Europe employers are not supposed to consider them anyway. Skip the long story of why you want to leave your country. It may be the most important thing in your life and still not the thing that gets you an interview.

Do not attach eight files. One CV in PDF, named with your own name, and photos of your work only if the trade calls for it.

If nobody answers

Wait five working days and send one short follow-up in the same thread. One. Then move on and apply somewhere else. Silence usually means the position was filled or the person is on site all day, not that you did something wrong.

And answer your phone. A number from an unknown country code, on a Tuesday morning, is often the employer.