[EnKopVand]

Disclaimer, I don’t know nothing about how remote jobs or hiring work.

I’m Danish and I’ve been involved with hiring a few people and the best thing you can do to prepare here is to be yourself and be honest. Not brutally, but we don’t like people who don’t know how to fail because everyone fails and if you can’t own up to it when you do then you’re a liability on any team. For us it’s typically a lot more about finding the person we think will be the best fit into the team rather than who is the better technical candidate. Because the truth is that unless you’re searching for a phd level research position then chances are that you could randomly hire any of your candidates that are good enough to interview and get someone who is “good enough” technically, but since the most expensive mistake a manager can make in our line of work is to hire the wrong person, we try to find the one we think will be the best fit. Often this involves HR personality tests, which again aren’t really tests as much as they are tools to get applicants to open up and talk about themselves in a controlled environment.

That being said, practice helps. It’s one thing to think you know yourself and your technical background. It’s a completely different thing to sit in a high pressure situation and talk about it. At my previous job I gave presentations on public sector digitalisation, when I gave my first one I practiced the whole thing word for word for three days straight and I still gave a presentation that one I could pull out of my ass right now if it was on a subject I know about. Because practicing talking about things makes you mind blowingly better at it. Job interviews are exactly the same way, and since we are going down anecdotal road, I passed the first and then got into the second for an absolute dream job straight out of university, and I bombed it completely because I got so intimidated by a room full of 8 people who were all much better than me and because I hadn’t tried it before. I honestly still interview a few times every five years to keep up with the skills of applying for jobs and if you want to work in Europe I can only recommend that you get some practice in before you apply for that real job.

On a side note, I would never waste my time at a Danish company that has you doing technical tests if you have education and experience enough that they should trust you actually know what your CV and application tells them. Not so much because technical tests can’t be good, but because I’ve been in the business for a few decades and the Danish companies that run those tests underpay and overwork their SWEs immensely.