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How to Find Legit Work-From-Home Jobs

Want to learn how to find legit work-from-home jobs? We share our 4 best remote job search tips to help you land your dream role and avoid job scams now!

If you’re itching to start working remotely, your first step is learning how to find legit work from home jobs.

Online job scams are everywhere, from social media influencers promising to help you get rich to fraudsters reaching out on LinkedIn with freelance remote gigs.

So we’re sharing four ways to find legit work from home jobs and avoid sketchy scammers in this guide.

These four tips can help you find legitimate work from home jobs and save yourself the hassle, headache, and embarrassment of falling for a fake opportunity:

1. Learn How To Tell a Legitimate Remote Job from a Scam

Before you get too deep in your remote job search, it’s essential to learn how to avoid employment scams.

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Fake job offer emails and fake online job listings usually share a few traits, such as:

  • Vague job descriptions
  • Nonexistent company histories
  • Crazy high salaries
  • Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors
  • Requests for confidential or sensitive personal information (like your driver’s license or Social Security Number).
  • Caveats that you need to buy something before you start earning or must invest in supplies, a background check, starter kit, training materials, etc.

2. Skip the Giant Traditional Job Boards

Once you know how to identify fake job offers online, you may automatically jump to well-known job boards like LinkedIn or Indeed. But these sites are pretty much the last place you want to check.

Fake job postings on Indeed are almost too numerous to keep up with. Sources say Indeed removes “tens of millions of job listings” that fail to meet its quality guidelines every month [*]. Still, users often receive messages from phoney recruiters like this:

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Job scams on LinkedIn are even worse. These scammers go the extra mile to impersonate real companies by creating fake employee profiles, setting up bogus interviews, and sending phishing emails with imaginary job offers.

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Scammers aside, these giant job boards aren’t geared for finding remote positions anyway. So you’ll need to spend extra time just sussing out WFH roles amidst the gobs of on-premise jobs. And that seems like a massive waste of time.

3. Build Your Remote Job Portfolio with Gigs from Freelance Marketplaces

Whether you’re changing careers, just graduated, or dipping your toes into the idea of working from home, freelance marketplaces give you the experience and taste of remote work nearly risk-free.

That’s because these sites act like a middleman between clients and creators. The platform ensures you get paid for your work while providing recourse for customers if they’re unhappy with what they receive.

These are a few legitimate freelance marketplaces remote hopefuls can start with:

So let’s say you’re hoping to break into graphic design. You can start designing logos, packaging, or websites for paying customers until you land a full-time role with a remote company.

Further, each job you complete can be added to your remote job portfolio, work experience, personal website, etc. When potential employers look you up online (and they do!), they’ll be able to see you have the self-discipline, motivation, and tech skills for remote work.

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Freelance marketplaces are great for starting your WFH journey and building your personal brand. However, we don’t recommend them as a long-term career strategy.

Here’s a rundown of all the pros and cons associated with freelance WFH gigs:

Pros and Cons of Freelance WFH Jobs

A freelancer works independently and operates like a small business. They can charge their own prices for services, set their own hours, and only work on projects that interest them.

The downsides of being a freelancer include:

You’ll also need to pay a commission or fee to those marketplaces on everything you produce, which will definitely eat into your earning potential.

Pros and Cons of Being a Remote Employee

Remote employees work for a company. This organization may be 100% remote, with fully distributed teams working around the world. Or it may just allow specific employees/departments to WFH (like Amazon work from home jobs in customer service).

Remote employees are entitled to perks like:

  • An ongoing hourly wage or annual salary
  • Paid time off
  • The best company benefits
  • Mostly hassle-free income taxes
  • Career advancement opportunities
  • Social events (like company retreats) and team-building activities

You can still travel while working remotely as an employee. But you may not have as much flexibility with your work hours as a freelancer. On the other hand, employee perks and income stability are why many people choose the remote employee route rather than grinding away in the gig life.

4. Go Directly To a Remote Job Board like We Work Remotely

WWR began in 2013, long before WFH became a way of life for the world. Not many job boards can say they’ve seen the rise of WFH and grew as a remote-first company along with it.

We’ve posted over 28,000 remote jobs from the top companies around the globe. You’ll find legit WFH jobs from industry-leading titans like Google, Amazon, GitHub, Automattic, Toggl, and Basecamp to up-and-coming startups.

You’ll never have to worry about online job scams when browsing remote roles on WWR, and that’s a huge sigh of relief.

Search for Roles By Company

You’ll only find jobs on WWR from legitimate work from home companies, and we make it a piece of cake to find them.

💡 Check out these roundups of the best remote employers:

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We also just recently launched a new feature for job seekers with Curated Jobs accounts: Followed Companies. With this, you can follow (and unfollow) the organizations you’re interested in. So every time a company that you follow posts a new job, you’ll receive an alert.

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Now you’ll always be one of the first candidates to apply for the hottest roles at the remote companies you’re eager to work for.

Use Our Advanced Job Search to Laser Focus Your Hunt

Our Advanced Remote Job Search is the real MVP when it comes to finding legit WFH jobs lightning-fast. Navigate to this section from the WWR homepage, and you can search remote jobs by adding specific job titles or keywords in the search bar.

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In addition to refining your job search by company, you can also narrow results with these drop-down options:

2. Region. Remote companies must comply with local labor and tax laws, meaning they may only be able to hire remote employees from specific regions.

Save yourself time and filter jobs by companies accepting candidates from the USA, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, the UK, Africa, EMEA, or anywhere in the world.

Like regions, some companies may want all their remote employees working and communicating in the same time zone. Others will want to take advantage of remote workers in opposite time zones to continue the workday around the clock. Find your perfect time zone match with this filter.

4. Job type. You have a choice to filter by full-time remote positions or contract remote work. Once you select one, the others will be weeded out automatically.

Start using our Advanced Search, and you’ll score more legit remote jobs to apply to in half the time. And that gives you more time to tailor your resume for your dream role.

Take Advantage of the Top Remote Job Searches

You can find and apply for WFH jobs by browsing through the most popular search terms and keywords for finding remote work.

It’s just like running a query in your favourite search engine, except the only results you’ll receive are legit WFH jobs. 🥳

While online job scams are a serious issue for remote job seekers, the tips you picked up today should help you find legit work from home jobs in no time.

Want to supercharge your remote job search? Create your WWR account now!

We know job hunting can be tedious and noisy. So let us find the best remote opportunities tailored for what you’re looking for. You’ll be able to curate and accelerate your remote job search as soon as you sign up. 😊

Disclaimer
This article was originally published on We Work Remotely | Blog. We have manually curated it from a publicly available RSS feed. The content and pictures in this piece are the property of their respective owners. Report an issue

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