As for finding Perl jobs, I'd contact the nearest perl mongers group and attend conferences and workshops (not only perl, but also other programming stuff) in the broader region, and talk to the people there.

There is lots of advice on the internet on how to decide whether or not work at a particular company. When it comes to Perl and programming specific question, I asked my potential employers some of those, in no particular order:

• Some from the Joel Test (in particular about version control, bug database, daily builds)
• What Perl version are you using? (and if it's older than 5.12, why they you using an unsupported Perl version, and what are your upgrade plans?)
• What kinds of testing do you use? (automated unit and integration tests, usability tests, staging for test users, ...)
• What's the policy for using CPAN modules?
• What big CPAN modules do you use? (if there are none, then likely the product is full of badly reinvented template systems, DB layers and so on)
• What's the policy for contributing back to CPAN? (for example bug fixes)
• What development methodology do you use? (waterfall, whirlpool, "agile", test-driven, ...)
• How hard would it be to use a different programming language of a well-defined, isolated task?

If you combine the answers to these questions, you get a pretty good impression about whether that company considers development a necessary evil that must be tightly controlled by management, or if they really strive to build a good piece of software and do what's necessary to get there.

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