Your Remote Job Search: 3 Steps to Stand Out

When polled, 68% of millennials said they value flexibility—specifically, the option to work remotely—when considering a new employer. And they are not the only professionals to prize the ability to work when and where they choose.

An increasing number of fully remote companies—many of which are startups—are redefining work culture in our digital age. We’re experiencing a major shift in the way we spend more than half of our lives.

Maybe you’ve already worked from home, or held a role with partial telecommuting, and are embarking on a remote job search for your next opportunity.

Or perhaps you haven’t landed a remote role yet. You may feel as if the train has left you behind at the station. I assure you that this isn’t the case. Depending upon where you are in your career, you can definitely find a remote role suitable for you—whether you’re just starting out, seeking to change professions, considering a move overseas, or are looking for an internship to bridge your experience gap.

Regardless of where you sit on the remote work continuum, you can set yourself up for success in your next remote job search.

Here’s how you can best highlight the skills, experiences, and professional attributes you likely already possess that’ll set you apart from the (ever-more-fierce) competition during your next remote job search:

Sell your transferable skills.

Chances are, your traditional work experience shares plenty of commonalities with the type of remote position you’re seeking. After all, much of the work you’ve been engaged in doing probably hasn’t been done fully face-to-face—and even if it has, leading meetings in a boardroom requires similar competencies to running conference calls with a distributed team. This could include strategic planning, organizational communication, operational process design, and situational analysis, just to name a few.

Once you get started listing your skills, you’ll notice patterns across onsite and remote roles, and will be able to easily map out how your knowledge work can seamlessly translate to a home-based position. You most assuredly possess a variety of transferable skills; how you’re able to communicate those in a remote context will impact your chances of landing a location-independent job.

Make a killer one pager.

Whether you use a resume, online portfolio, or LinkedIn profile as your professional billboard to the world, it’s recommended that it not only align with the tone and needs of the organizations you’d like to work for, it also has to look outstanding. (Note: although you can’t change LinkedIn’s interface, you can select professional profile and cover photos, and you can ensure that 1) all organizational logos are present; 2) any media you’ve uploaded or linked to appear properly; and 3) your copy is not only free of errors, it’s compelling as well.)

With resumes and online portfolios, you have a lot more visual latitude. Instead of traditional word processing programs, consider creating yours in a user-friendly design application like Canva. If you’re extra creative, you can design from scratch; if that sounds like a nightmare to you, thankfully there are also a ton of helpful tutorials and stunning professional resume templates that can easily be tweaked.

Speak the language.

Know your way around VoIP or video conferencing technologies, CMS templates, website sandboxes, email clients, shared documents, online databases, team channels, support tickets, or messages in project management systems? (I could go on…) While the list of available tools grows by the day, you needn’t panic: no one expects you to be an expert in all of them!

That said, while plenty of new and emerging tech may have been hesitation worthy a decade or more ago, its current prevalence means you can’t be shy about embracing it. Identify which tools you need to be familiar with in the remote role you’d like to have, and spend time learning how to use them or incorporate them into your existing work. The bonus for new users is that companies are continually trying to adapt their processes, and a fresh perspective can often serve to help simplify them.