2020 has been full of surprises, to put it kindly. For many, this means looking at new jobs, but also new ways of working - specifically working remote or working from home. Remote jobs are far from new, but now more than ever, more traditional companies are transitioning more roles out of the cubicle and into your living room (or beachside cafe in Bali, whichever suits your life).
If you’re new to the remote job search, be sure to check out this post on where to find remote work. If you already have a shortlist going, keep reading for the top four tips for getting an interview and landing the remote job of your digital nomad dreams.
1. Refresh Your Linkedin Profile. These days it’s pretty safe to assume that if your resume makes it into human hands, that human is going to Google you. Immediately. The first thing that comes up? Your LinkedIn page. Make sure that your profile is up-to-date (current profile picture, job title and experience), professional looking and accurately represents the job you are going after. Need some help? Download this free LinkedIn Refresh worksheet.
2. Craft a remote work-friendly resume. Hiring managers and recruiters look for slightly different content on remote worker resumes compared to traditional roles. Instead of listing your ‘duties’ for each role, speak their language and make sure your previous role descriptions focus on:
Your achievements. For example: “grew the email subscriber list from 0 to 4000 in three months”
Statistics. For example: “increased team productivity by 20% YoY”
Your skills. For example: software you can use, coding and/or programming languages, project management, social media, database management, audio/photo/video editing, technical writing and big data & analytics. Demonstrate soft skills in your cover letter.
Instead of your address include your website or LinkedIn URL. If you are applying with companies based in the US, you may want to include a line indicating that you have legal rights to work there.
3. Make your resume ATS-friendly. Most companies now use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to automatically screen resumes as they are submitted. The ATS software scans resumes for keywords provided by the recruited. No keywords found? Your resume is automatically rejected and will never get into the hands of a human recruiter or hiring manager. Fortunately, there are two ways that you can make your resume ATS-searchable:
Manually look for keywords in the job posting and making sure the relevant ones appear verbatim in your resume.
Use a website like JobScan.co (not sponsored) to optimize your resume.
4. Create a professional looking resume (for $0). While you should save your ATS optimized resume as .docx to make it easily searchable, it’s still good to have a PDF version of your resume handy for when a human gets around to reviewing your application. While you can pay for a professionally assembled resume using UpWork or Fiverr, you can also whip one up for free yourself using one of the templates on Canva. I recommend the Minimalist templates, but depending on your desired role you can go for ones with more color and flair.
Good luck!
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