Winning Swedish Tech Jobs: CV & Interview Insights from Ellie King
Practical lessons from our Data & AI Stockholm session on what hiring managers in Sweden actually look for.
On Friday, we hosted an online session with Data & AI Stockholm on a topic that cuts across roles, seniority levels, and career stages:
How to stand out and succeed in the Swedish tech job market, with CV and interview advice that is actually useful in practice.
It was great to see so many people join the conversation and bring thoughtful, honest questions. Especially on a Friday afternoon.
Meet our speaker: Ellie King
We were joined by Ellie King, an experienced tech recruiter with over a decade in the Swedish tech market and co-founder of Equal IT.
Ellie has recruited across a wide range of data roles, from analytics and engineering to data science and machine learning. What stood out was her ability to balance encouragement with clarity. Not vague motivation, but grounded insight into how hiring decisions are actually made.
From the start, she set the tone. Be interactive. Share your experiences. And do not be too hard on yourself. Job searching is demanding, and there is a lot of conflicting advice out there.
Her framing was simple and helpful:
Take what resonates, make it your own, and improve through iteration.
Start with your “why”
Before talking about CV structure or interview techniques, Ellie focused on something many people rush past: self-reflection.
Your “why” matters. Why you chose this path. Why you are applying now. What motivates you. What you enjoy. What you want next.
This is not abstract mindset work. Ellie framed it as a practical foundation for storytelling.
Understanding your “why” helps you:
identify your strengths, both technical and human
collect concrete examples that support them
understand your values and assess company fit
feel more grounded in interviews and “tell me about yourself” moments
One recommendation that landed strongly was to ask others for input. Friends, colleagues, or former teammates often describe your strengths with more clarity and better examples than you would come up with alone.
What hiring managers care about most: impact
Ellie built the session using direct input from Swedish hiring managers she had spoken to recently. One theme came up consistently:
Strong CVs show impact, not just activity.
A sentence that stuck with many participants was essentially:
“I want to understand the needle you moved, not just the tools you touched.”
Instead of listing tasks like:
Worked with data pipelines
Used Python and Kafka
Contributed to project X
Hiring managers want to understand:
What problem existed
What you did
What changed because of it
Impact does not need to mean large revenue numbers or senior titles. Ellie gave examples such as:
making messy code understandable
improving a process that saved time or reduced errors
turning vague requirements into something shippable
improving reliability, testing, or maintainability
asking the question nobody else asked
A simple test she suggested:
If a hiring manager finishes your CV still thinking “So what did you actually do?”, it is probably still written too much as a task list.
CV structure that works in Sweden
Ellie shared clear guidance on CV structure, especially relevant for the Swedish market:
Start with a short profile or “About me” section
Use four to five bullet points that highlight your strongest differentiators
Keep experience sections tight, impact-led, and honest
If you lack industry experience, move projects higher up
Avoid long paragraphs, inflated language, and overly long CVs
A recurring idea throughout the session was to make things easy for the reader. Hiring managers are busy. Your CV should help them understand you quickly, without effort.
Projects, GitHub, and personal sites
For people earlier in their careers or transitioning roles, Ellie emphasised the importance of projects.
She encouraged treating GitHub as an extension of your CV and shared that she has seen candidates hired purely based on their GitHub activity.
Another strong signal for hiring managers is a personal website or portfolio that tells a coherent story.
When documenting projects, Ellie recommended keeping things structured and readable, for example:
Challenge
What you built
Result
Lessons learned
Clarity and intention matter more than volume.
Interviewing well means thinking out loud
Ellie spent time not just on what to say in interviews, but on how to show up.
A key theme was thinking out loud during technical tasks and exercises. Hiring managers want to understand your reasoning, trade-offs, and communication, not just the final answer.
Her advice included:
do not over-engineer and lose sight of the requirements
clarify when something is unclear
be honest about what you do not know and explain how you would learn it
speak openly about failures and trade-offs
She also cautioned against leaning too heavily on AI tools during interviews. They can support preparation, but answers that lack ownership or reflection can quickly undermine trust.
Preparation that actually helps
One of the most practical parts of the session focused on preparation.
Ellie suggested going beyond the job description:
check the company’s GitHub if relevant
look for talks, podcasts, or interviews featuring the company or interviewers
analyse the job description to spot repeated themes
prepare at least three thoughtful, specific questions
bring a notebook, take notes, and set expectations upfront
She also shared a smart approach to follow-ups. Instead of a generic “just checking in”, follow up with a thoughtful question you said you would send. It feels natural and shows genuine engagement.
Community Q&A highlights
The Q&A covered a wide range of practical concerns, including:
how to show impact from internships when outcomes are hard to measure
how detailed a project portfolio should be
ATS concerns and keyword optimisation
what to prioritise in skills sections when space is limited
how to work with non-technical recruiters
how to show learning when you have not used a tool in production yet
Across her answers, Ellie consistently returned to the same core principles:
Impact. Honesty. Clarity. Storytelling.
If you joined the session, thank you for bringing your questions and experiences into the room. If you missed it, we hope this recap gives you something concrete to apply in your next application or interview.
We will keep hosting conversations that stay close to real decisions and real work.