I've been planning a major career move. My desire is to leave Los Angeles where a small house costs upward of $700,000 and move to another city where I can afford a house on my programmer's salary. While it would be a fortunate thing to have paid relocation it is not a requirement for me.

I chose a few candidate cities ( Austin TX, Memphis TN, Seattle WA ) and set about searching http://jobs.perl.org and http://hotjobs.yahoo.com. I was able to turn up a number of promising postings that seemed to match my experience and skills well.

I submitted my resume mostly to HR email buckets or automated systems. Perhaps not surprizingly I received almost zero responses, one to be exact. The one response simply said "You resume looks good, but you are not located here". I followed up with my a message indicating my desire to relocate (I did not ask for relocation expenses). I did not get any response.

I also did a casual local job search and found a similar number of job listings. I also turned up an interview within a few weeks.

I am wondering if it is common policy to discard non-local candidates? Would you (or your company) consider non-local candidates? How much of a disadvantage would they have compared to a local? Can anyone share any tips on making this a successful effort for me?

Cheers
--Fred

-------------------------------------
Nothing is too wonderful to be true
-- Michael Faraday

In reply to Distant Job Search Challenges by freddo411

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