Some e-mails Hi everybody! Today I'd like to practice some e-mails related to (or with?) my work routine. I work in HR and currently I'm in a transfer moment to another company where I'll need to use my English. So, I've just made up some situations I usually deal with. 1) Dear Maria, I've just interviewed the candidate Fabio about whom we talked yesterday. As I thought his experience is totally into (in, adequate) the profile your Company is looking for and he is also open for new career opportunities. However here is one detail he might not be suitable for your position: he's not available for business trips as it's required during the next 3 month. I'd like to know if, even then (so), you'd like to talk with him? ("I'd like to know if you still would like to talk with him?") His CV is attached. Thank you and have a nice week. Sincerely yours, Ekaterina. 2) Dear Maria, Fabio has just called me asking to reschedule his interview with you for the next Wednesday or another day on next week suitable for you. Could it be possible? I'm sorry for noticing you at the last hour. Thank you!

Work in Brazil (part 4) Hi everyone! It’s been 4 days I haven’t written a new post but now I’m back and if you could correct me, I’ll really appreciate it. On Sunday it was the Fathers’ Day here in Brazil but I don’t know if it’s an International Day, is it? Or it’s only a Brazilian one? So, coming back to my post subjects, today I’ll tell a little about the interview process here. There are 3 famous sites here for job searching (or seeking?) which are Catho, Infojobs and Vagas. All sites have .com.br at the end. The first one is the most efficient comparing to others but it’s paid as for job seeker as for companies. The other two are for free but are not so good. Linkedin is also very useful here. For some positions more sophisticated it's more efficient than those sites I wrote above. I've already been hunted by Linkedin so I confirm that it totally works. Interviews here never starts in time. Most Brazilians are not responsible at all in terms of time so if you have an interview scheduled at 2, for example, be sure, it is going to start at 2.30 at least. They love to make you wait to confirm that you are interested in the position they are offering to you. A lot of Brazilians employers are not really familiar with laws and are afraid of hiring foreign people because they are not sure about if it's legal or not so they choose not to ask you for the interview. So to write at your CV that you have a work permit is as important as describing your experience. Tomorrow I'll share some more experience I had and if you have some questions, please, feel free to ask me. Thank you all for your attention and patience with my English :)

Work in Brazil (part 3) Hi everybody! It’s my third note talking about working in Brazil. Please, feel free if you want to ask me something and of course to correct my errors! =) Since I moved here I’ve met a lot of foreign people who work here and there is a fact: if you don’t speak Portuguese your chances to find any job here are bitter low, even if you are a native English or Spanish speaker. It could be easier to find a job if you are a technical or IT specialist. Brazil has a certain shortage of qualified technical specialists and in this case it’s not necessary to speak fluent Portuguese. A good intermediate level will be enough. A friend of mine is a web-designer and got a job without any effort with intermediate Portuguese. My case was completely different. As I work in HR I had not been able to perform my job before I had learned the local language perfectly and even with fluent Portuguese it was hard. I went on at least 15 interviews and it took me more than 5 month. It’s a really long period but I know people who had been looking for a job here for more than 1 year… It’s really sad… Tomorrow I’ll tell about how an interview process here is done! If you have read until here, thank you for your attention! =)

Work in Brazil (part 2) Hi everybody! This is my second post telling about work in Brazil in general and my “work story”. I’m asking you to correct my post, please, and also make questions if this subject is interesting for you. As I wrote yesterday, I’d been working as a freelancer and as a Russian teacher for a while but since my work permit was issued I started to look for a full-time job. Those who start to work in Brazil legally need to know that it will take them at least 1 year to get your first vacation. I really don’t know how it works in other countries, but in Russia you can take the first 2 weeks’ vacation after your first 6 months of work and another 2 weeks 6 months later. It’s also absolutely normal to take some days-off per year at your own cost. Here in Brazil you can rarely see it. When you start working you need to wait for 12 months or more (usually it’s more) to take your first vacation. According to the law you can work up to 44 hours per week but it depends of the company you are working for. If it’s a big one, you will probably work only 40 hours/week, but if it’s a small local company they might make you work all 44 hours. Sometimes I think that this 44 hours system was developed because Brazilians take a lot of coffee pauses during the work day and work less that they should! =) But take care, if you tell it to any Brazilian they’ll deny it =)

Work in Brazil (part 1) Hello! If somebody has already read my “first note” knows that I live and work in Brazil. I’d like to start a daily series of notes telling about the peculiarities of working in Brazil for foreign people, their labor code, work policy and the local job market. The first step, of course, is a visa. You can legally work in Brazil if you have: 1) a work visa, what means that some company needs to invite you to work in Brazil and pay a special tax for the Brazilian Government. 2) a residence permit (what happened in my case because my husband is Brazilian) 3) extra USD 15.000,00 (I could have a wrong number) and invest this money in some local business creating new jobs in Brazil You can’t work in Brazil if you only have a student visa. In my case I have a residence permit, but it’s not as easy as you think. It took me more than 2 years to be allowed to work legally. That time I had been working with different freelance projects and it wasn’t too difficult to find them. I taught Russian and made a lot of translation jobs. I was really surprised about how many Brazilians want to learn Russian. It’s easy to find a job as a foreign language teacher and if you give many classes you can definitely survive here! I also finished my second university here and took some extra courses. But then my work permit got ready and my “work journey” here started. P.S.: please, feel free to ask any question you want about the job process in Brazil and I’ll try to answer you in my next posts.

First note Do you remember what happened at the beginning of 2009? When the crisis started I was working at an executive search company in Russia and from January on we had not gotten any open positions. In May the Company closed. Now, let me ask you a question. Have you ever searched for a job and haven’t found anything? I tried to go to some interviews but it was just a waste of time and the companies which invited me for the interview in reality hadn’t gotten any open positions and were just creating a database. This situation continued for almost an year and then the market has started to grow slowly and I finally got a new job. But in August of 2010 I moved to Brazil and saw that here they didn’t have a crisis and the market was at a really good moment. Some Brazilians said that this crisis helped the Brazilian economy to grow. There were a lot of job opportunities during and after the crisis and a lot of emigrants were coming here from different parts of the world.