Now Hiring: Finding The Best Work-At-Home Job Opportunities

The new year is a great time for discovering new opportunities and finally landing that “dream job”. We’ve been delivering ideas to your virtual fingertips the last few weeks on landing your ideal remote job — and even a good handful of ideas as to where to start your work-from-home career. In addition, we want to piggyback on those posts with this one (lats of the series) by stressing the importance of 3 key points that we haven’t talked a ton about yet.

So, let’s dive right on in …

Before you even start applying for remote jobs, time needs to be spent developing the right resumé.

For instance, jobs where you’re expected to be in the office require a resumé that highlights more of your past experience than your skills. They want to see that other companies have hired you, what you did for them, and for how long. While that’s important, it’s not the make or break, or even really that much of an asset for most remote jobs. So, highlighting your skills is by far the most important thing on your remote work resumé, listing anywhere from 5 to 10 skills — and please oh please list them from strongest to not-as-strong! Also, to note here, there’s no fibbing allowed. Because remote work is so focused on your actual skillset, it’ll be discovered quickly if you actually don’t know how to do something.

The next important thing to include would be any training you’ve completed. Employers, even smaller sized startups, love seeing the initiative and investment in your own personal development. Even if a certificate or certain level of training has expired, but is relevant to the position, include it. Because you can always renew it, if needed!

Also, on your resumé should be a brief synopsis of your past work experience, but not as much detail as what you’d include for in-person positions.

With all of this in mind and recognizing the differences in hiring styles between office and remote work positions, it should also be pointed out that not all remote employers will ask you for your resumé. Instead, they are very likely to base their interest in you on your online profile — specifically, LinkedIn!

LinkedIn is used by most companies big and small, so having a profile and updating it regularly is absolutely crucial. There are many tips on the best way to set up your profile, but here are a few to get you started:

• Write a strong “About Me” section. Spend the time researching how to do this and ask for help writing it if you find yourself stuck. It is the first thing people see and you want them to continue scrolling through your profile and not leaving immediately.
  
  
• Include a visual portfolio of your work if it’s relevant. This is a great opportunity for designers, web developers, writers — all sorts of creatives — to showcase their work. Set a reminder to update this every few months if you have any new projects you’d like to include.
  
  
• Include your past work experience that supports your career path now. If you worked at a coffee shop for 3 weeks, maybe opt to leave that one out as it’s not adding any value.
  
  
• Encourage those you’ve worked with to endorse you for certain skills. This shows potential employers that other people trust you with those skills, and that can go a long way.

Lastly, determining your target salary range while applying for jobs is a great way to gauge the current market and understand your worth. If you are a freelancer, research what others in a similar position as you are charging. If you’re only able to find position salaries for in-office roles, simply multiply it by 1.5 to account for the extra charges we incur as contractors and then you’ll have a more realistic idea of what you should be charging.

It can be tricky to determine your salary / hourly rate when you’re first entering the remote workforce. Especially as a freelancer, you’ll be charging much higher than your in-office counterpart as there are more costs that go into our side of the business that companies typically cover when you’re in-person. This is why we encourage taking the time to properly research what others in your industry and geographical area are charging so that you can accurately set your rates.

Just ensure that you’re increasing them annually (or bi-annually at the very least) to account for inflation — just like you would get a “cost of living” raise in-office.