Quick Answer
Julia, a senior QA engineer who moved from Moscow to Amsterdam, sent 52 applications over six months, had 26 interview calls and got one offer. Her six lessons: referrals beat cold applications, small talk is part of the assessment, most tech companies run the same interview loop, talking about your own impact is a skill to practise, tracking several processes needs a system, and at senior level culture fit often decides the offer.
52 applications, one offer
This is a guest post from Julia Morozova, a senior QA engineer and Mockly Premium member. She moved from Moscow to Amsterdam in 2022 and, after two years at a Dutch e-commerce company, decided she was ready for something new.
| Six months of job hunting | Count |
|---|---|
| Applications sent | 52 |
| First-round invites | 9 |
| Interview calls in total | 26 |
| Final rounds reached | 2 |
| Offers | 1 |
| Summary | She has just signed a contract as a senior QA engineer at a SaaS company in the Netherlands. |
1. Referrals are extremely valuable
Cold applications brought limited success. Staying in touch with old teammates and classmates on LinkedIn and Telegram was far more useful: most of Julia's first-round interviews came through referrals. Without a network, she says, look for communities where you can build one.
2. Small talk is not wasted time
Every interview started with five minutes of warm-up: 'How are you finding Amsterdam?', 'Where are you based?'. At first Julia gave short, closed answers and waited for the 'real' interview to begin. Then she realised the small talk was part of the assessment: a first test of culture fit and of what she'd be like as a teammate.
She started preparing two or three casual answers before every call, each one sharing a little about herself:
“Interviewer: Hey Julia, how are you doing today? Julia: Good, thank you. Keeping warm! It's been snowing here in Amsterdam for a few days now.”
Interview tip
Turn a one-word answer into one sentence plus one detail. That gives the interviewer something to reply to.
3. Most tech companies interview the same way
Julia was surprised how standard the process was. Almost every company, not only the big tech one she applied to, ran several rounds: a recruiter screen, a technical session, one or two behavioural interviews and a final hiring-manager call. Most roles had five or six sessions.
4. Talking about yourself is a skill
In Russia, Julia says, interviews are often transactional: you list your experience and answer technical questions. Talking about your achievements feels uncomfortable. So in her first English interviews she was very modest, saying 'the team managed to reduce…' instead of 'I introduced X to reduce…'.
Then feedback from one company said: own your impact. It took time to build the habit.
| Sounds modest (example) | Owns the impact (example) |
|---|---|
| The team managed to reduce flaky tests. | I introduced test retries with quarantine, which cut flaky failures by 60%. |
| We worked on the release process. | I led the move to weekly releases and wrote the regression checklist. |
| I helped with automation. | I automated the checkout regression suite, which saved about a day of manual testing per release. |
5. Juggling several applications is harder than it looks
At her busiest Julia had five processes running, each at a different stage. Remembering which company used which stack, what she'd told which recruiter and which version of a story she'd told where was exhausting, on top of the stress of waiting for decisions.
What helped was a simple spreadsheet and notes written straight after every call, which she reviewed before the next stage.
6. Culture fit can beat technical skill
Julia reached a final round and met the team onsite. The next day the company said it was choosing between her and one other candidate, and sent an extra take-home task about communication and how she'd handle situations. They offered the role to the other candidate.
It was hard to accept, but it was a turning point. At senior level, technical ability is often assumed; what companies decide on is how well you fit the team. From then on she took the 'non-technical' parts of interviews much more seriously.
What she'd do differently
Julia expected a long search, but not six months, and some rejections made her question everything: her English, her experience, even her move. Looking back, she underestimated how much the soft-skills and cultural layer of English interviews mattered: owning achievements, making small talk feel natural and finding the right tone. Those took focused practice to fix.
She found Mockly halfway through her search and thinks she could have halved the time if she'd started earlier.
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