You should be able to demonstrate code/projects and thinking that show you are the one for the job. You might need to be willing to move; Booking.com is still hiring in the Netherlands for example, and there are Perl jobs in parts of the US like Texas, California, Florida, and some of New England, and Old England for that matter but the pay in Greater London looks ludicrously low compared to the cost of living. There are telecommute jobs but you’re competing with the rest of the world so those jobs are harder to land.

“Solid experience” in Perl could, frankly, mean senior spaghetti producer making life miserable and helping destroy Perl’s reputation as a serious tool. Not saying you are, just to be clear the range of Perl chops is huge and not dependant on years served. So, have something to show that demonstrates clear, clean, modular, forward thinking, testable code that leverages existing tools. If that means taking 6 months to play catch-up and dig into things like Catalyst, Lucy, DBIx::Class, Plack/PSGI, App::cpanminus, WWW::Mechanize, WWW::Selenium, XML::XMLlib/XML::Twig, App::Ack, Test::More, Task::Kensho, etc to have a solid feeling for the corners of the Perl ecosphere in which you have interest, that’s better than flailing with a perl 5.4 skillset in a world where the Perl that’s survived tends to be a little leaner than the fat of the land in 2000. If you haven’t already, spend a day or two going through a couple hundred questions on SO#perl. Many of them are difficult. Could you answer some/most/any? If you have an account there already and are answering questions, more’s the better. Same here at PM but the pipeline of questions at SO is bigger, though the answers tend to be more terse and less edifying.

I’ve been waiting to tell this story but this seems like a good time. During our last hiring drive we had a candidate who had huge experience on paper, having built a crucial customer webapp at a large and successful company’s backend, and worked up to tech management. Everyone in the hiring committee was super excited to get him in for an interview. I had worked with him on a contract though and vetoed him categorically. His code base was essentially 500 client copies of the same code without warnings, without logging, without strict, without scoping, and without revision control. All his work was being replaced with Java as fast as was prudent because it was too hard to maintain. He also spent most of his work day screwing around but I didn’t have to say anything other than: he eschews strict. That was all it took for my dissent to be accepted as a veto.

Not using strict cost him a six figure job with benefits at a Fortune 100 corporation. It wasn’t as simple as that obviously but it does boil down to it nicely and the attitude behind it.