Remote jobs are still around. Can your resume help you land one?
For every executive who’s proposing a return to the office in order to get workers to voluntarily leave their bloated tech giant, there’s another startup founder who needs to offer great perks in order to pull in the best talent. Fully remote work is popular with employees, and so it’s here to stay.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to land a remote position. It’s a tough job market right now, and you may need to apply for many positions in order to land the perfect one for you. It all starts with your resume: You’ll need to know how to craft a resume that positions you specifically for a remote-first job.
Highlight Your Remote Work Experience
Let’s start with the obvious. If you have done previous remote work, you’ll want to make sure that’s clear on your resume. Any employer will prefer someone with experience, and this applies to remote experience just as much as experience with a specific software or job responsibility.
Add “remote” in parentheses after the physical location when listing previous jobs, or just replace the entire location with the term.
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Don’t have any remote positions in your past? Consider including any major projects that you worked on entirely remotely, whether they were stand-alone gigs or as a part of your in-office nine-to-five.
If you want to highlight your versatility, consider creating a two sections in your resume; One for your in-office and one for your remote work. This might prove the best solution for anyone searching for a hybrid position.
Highlight Your Remote-Friendly Skillset
This is the biggest way you can prove your Wi-Fi-powered chops to your potential employers. Living an entirely remote work life takes a certain type of person with a certain set of skills. You just have to prove that you have those skills.
Your resume can show off these skills within the descriptive section of each of your entries for previous jobs. You’ll also want to highlight them in job interviews when you get there. Here are the skills that remote-friendly workplaces will be looking for.
Independence and self-motivation
The biggest skill needed for remote work is the ability to be a self-starter. You won’t have a team around the office to keep you in the swing of things, so you’ll need to be the sort of person who can sit down and lock in.
Highlight any projects that you took the lead on, or any major projects that you owned from start to finish. Did you come up with any ideas that panned out and helped the entire team? Make sure they’re mentioned.
These examples can be remote, but don’t have to be — any independent projects that you accomplished will prove that you have the mindset for remote work, even if they weren’t remote themselves.
Good communicator
Your independence won’t do much good if you can’t work with a team, however. When you’re working remotely, communication becomes even more important for allowing your team members to know what you’re up to. There’s no water cooler to catch up with your team around, so you’ll have to Slack them constantly to stay in touch.
To show this skill on your resume, make sure to note any projects that required frequent communication. Bonus points if you can find a way to mention a time you were praised for communication specifically.
Problem solver
Working remotely means you can’t always flag someone down to ask a quick question. If time zones are a factor, you may even need to wait until the next day for a response to a simple problem. You can show off your problem-solving ability on your resume by highlighting both the problem and the solution you came up with.
Project manager
In practice, self-motivation results in better project management. Find some examples from your past jobs that will prove you can handle the entire process, from ideation to cost and time estimations to addressing unforeseen challenges as they come up. You might not be able to fit all of that onto your resume, but you can briefly touch on it — you can always follow up during an interview.
Time tracker
Most remote jobs don’t come with timecards, thankfully, so you’ll be managing your own time. This is a key part of project management, and something that remote managers might be suspicious of. Fairly or not, many executives suspect that remote workers aren’t working a full day.
To address this, consider if there’s a simple way to note in your resume that you met all your deadlines or kept all your projects under budget.
Sending Out Your Resume
Actually getting your resume in the hands of the right person is harder than ever, thanks to a flagging job market. The US actually overestimated the number of jobs that were added to the economy between March 2023 and March 2024, missing about 818,000 jobs — so we’ve had a bad job market for a lot longer than you might think.
In short, competition is tough right now. How can your resume stand out?
You’ll have to stay in it for the long haul, according to many jobseekers who are saying they needed to apply to hundreds or even thousands of positions in order to land one job.
The same route that has worked for the last decade is still a good bet: Use job boards and websites, and set up Google alerts for the exact positions that are a fit for your skill and history. You may have better luck if you don’t apply directly through a job board, however, and instead look up the official website of the business that you find on the listing and apply through it.
Creative solutions can give you a foot up as well, although they’re more difficult to come up with. One job-seeker even found success by looking up the physical locations of several hundred different recruitment companies and mailing their resume to them.
Following Up With Interviews and Beyond
Once your resume is ship-shape, you’ll need to keep that momentum going with your job interview. Check out our guide to the top 39 most common job interview questions, and have some questions ready to ask your interviewer, as well.
Once it’s all over, you may want to wait two days and then send a follow-up email just to say thank you. We’ve created a few templates for what that might look like, too.
