So, something happened to me the other day.
I opened LinkedIn and found a message from a business owner looking to expand his SEO agency with full-time and freelance positions.
The company was globally dispersed, operating between several continents, so I assumed the gig was fully remote. The general job description was up my alley, so I sent off my resume, and we agreed to set up a call to continue the conversation verbally.
The call lasted nearly an hour. We spoke at length about the company’s needs—both for the role itself and its overall vision. As we chatted, vibes aligned, and I felt pings of excitement for the position.
Toward the end of the call, I asked the most important question of the discussion, “Is the role fully remote?”
To my disappointment, the business owner replied, “At the moment, yes, but we’re working towards in-office presence at least twice per week in the near future.” “Oh,” I responded with a heavy sigh as I realized I’d played myself.
What did I do wrong in this scenario? My CV didn’t state that I’m fully remote. Rookie error, Lisa.
Dear reader, this article aims to help you avoid the same scenario by explaining how to write a resume for a fully remote job. Standard resume writing rules apply, but if you’re aiming for a remote role, it’s 100% key to construct a resume geared for the career and terms you’re after.
In this post, I’ll share several tips to help you create a resume that showcases your brilliance and declares your remote position. To help you along, I’ve also included a remote job resume example or two to illustrate best practices.
My hope for you is that, once you read this post and create your resume with the tips I’ve included, you can avoid sticky situations like the one I found myself in.
This way, for your next remote job application, a business owner or hiring manager will know your career intentions from the jump, and you can avoid finding yourself on promising calls where your needs aren’t aligned.
Tips for Creating Your Remote Work Resume
Your resume or CV is your first introduction to a company. The job seeker market is saturated, especially for remote work, so it’s essential that you share your skills and experience in a way that will stand out and pique HR’s interest.
If you’re aiming for a remote career, your resume must reflect your desire to work in a remote environment, and there are a few ways to do this.
Below, I’ve shared several tips for building a compelling and effective remote work resume.
Whether you’re a seasoned remote worker or are just beginning your remote journey, use the tips below to review or build your resume so that you can stand out in the highly competitive market and land the remote job of your dreams.
Remember: As you are looking to work remotely, you need to promote your hard skills and soft skills or traits that demonstrate this, such as the ability to self-manage, self-govern, manage time, and autonomously accomplish tasks without someone looking over your shoulder.
If you have previous remote experience this will certainly help your case as well. If not, I’ve offered a workaround.
State Your Interest in a Remote Role
When applying for a remote position, it’s crucial that you define this straight off the bat to make it blatantly clear to the hiring manager or potential employer you’re in contact with.
The simplest way you can do this is in the contact section. Here, you’d typically list your geographical location, but in this case, you’d want to declare your remote preference.
Along with your contact information (email and contact number), you could either state that you’re remote and leave it as that or include your location as an optional addition. Some examples could could be:
- Fully remote
- Remote worker in Los Angeles, CA
- Remote, based in San Antonio, TX
- Remote, originally from Chicago, IL
- Based in Miami, FL. Open to remote work.
Another place to introduce this information is in the professional summary section. This is where you include a brief resume summary of your title or skills, and add a few insights that showcase your experience and achievements.
It’s key that you explicitly state your interest in being a remote employee and make this clear from the start. Sometimes, some job descriptions may appear remote but actually aren’t so this will help align your application with the correct potential remote opportunities.
Highlight Your Remote Work Experience
The previous employment or work experience section of your resume is the most crucial component as it declares your skills, technical capabilities, and experience in the context of prior companies you’ve worked with.
Standard practice is to list this in reverse chronological order, showcasing your most recent employment first.
If you have extensive work experience, you can refine the selection to previous positions that best align with the current job you’re applying for. Only include the most recent and relevant roles.
Here, for each work experience entry, as standard resume practice, include:
- Your job title (reflecting the position stated in the job description)
- The company’s name
- Your employment period, including starting and ending dates or if you are currently employed at the most recent position
- A description that states your responsibilities, achievements, or successes, possibly listed as bullet points (if you can use figures, numbers, or data-driven insights here, this is a plus)
Nothing proves that you can successfully accomplish your tasks remotely than prior experience. It takes a lot of discipline to work remotely, whether it be working from home or working remotely on the road. The best proof is hard evidence—you’ve done it before, and you can do it again.
Here are some ways to weave your remote intentions into the work experience section:
- When you’re listing your previous positions, make sure you mention whether it was a remote position next to the title
- If the company/companies you’ve worked at before have been remote, state this next to the company name
- Within the description or bullet point list, provide a brief explanation of how you were able to execute your tasks and reach goals without the need for in-person meetings or interactions
Gently weaving this into the previous employment section will show that you’ve had remote experience and result in a big thumbs up for those reviewing your resume.
If you don’t have previous remote experience and are aiming for a remote job, curate this section carefully. Focus on the description section and emphasize how you’ve handled tasks or projects effectively in a way that shows you could do the same in a remote context.
Another angle to consider is, if you don’t have previous remote experience is to demonstrate that you have the necessary skills at hand.
This could entail listing personal projects, side hustles, or any cases where you’ve been a self-starter and have taken the initiative to do something on your own. For example:
- Wrote and maintained a personal blog, publishing two blog posts each week for three years
- Created a website or app for a family member’s small business
- Set up a donation system for a local charity in a pro-bono project
- A relevant and related project you worked on during university or college
If this doesn’t fit perfectly into your resume, you could always include this in the cover letter.
Reinforcing the idea that you are more than capable of working remotely will improve your chances of making it to the interview stage.
Emphasize Your Remote Skills
When you’re applying for a fully remote role, it’s important to emphasize the skills that make you a great applicant. Declare these in a stand-alone section.
Skills can be split into two sections: technical, hard skills, and soft skills.
Hard Skills
These are the job-specific abilities typically gained through education, training, and hands-on experience. Your previous remote work experience, which is explained in the section above, will demonstrate this.
Beyond your technical capabilities, it’s important to highlight other hard skills that speak to your abilities. Remote jobs require unique capabilities that are not necessary when working from a physical location:
- Proficiency in the role itself
- Tech-savviness
- Ability to work and communicate digitally
- Experience with communication, collaboration, project, and team management tools
Remote teams use a mix of tools and platforms to execute tasks. If you have previous experience with such tools, it’s important to declare this as your potential employer will appreciate that you’re already familiar with them.
Some of the most commonly used tools between dispersed teams include:
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Hangouts
- Slack
- ClickUp
- Asana
- Hubstaff
- Basecamp
- Zoom
If you have used these or similar tools, state your experience and proficiency with them.
Soft Skills
Beyond your technical know-how for the position, remote hiring managers look for certain soft skills when onboarding a new resource. Sometimes, these soft skills will drive the decision, and we want the decision to be in your favor.
As a remote employee, you’d need to be able to self-manage and self-motivate, have a strong work ethic, be able to work with and support others, and be reliable for the position without too much micro-managing.
If these qualities describe you, make sure that your resume declares this, too. Also, if space allows, don’t hold back from providing examples of scenarios where you’ve done this successfully.
Typical soft skills to mention can include:
- Accountability and strong organizational skills
- Assertiveness and proactivity
- Collaboration, teamwork, and an awareness of others
- Flexibility and adaptability
- Creativity, originality, and critical thinking
- Leadership skills (particularly for managerial roles)
- Analytic and problem-solving skills
- Productivity and time management
- Stress management
If the company is global, stress your abilities to work as part of a worldwide team and that you understand how that works.
Sometimes, it requires more flexible working hours and attending meetings in different time zones—mentioning your adaptability to these types of situations as it will make you stand out from the host of other applicants. If this can’t fit within your resume, mention this in your cover letter or during the interview.
Try to back up your declaration of your soft skills with examples, such as a metric of hours saved during a project as a testament to your time management and productivity skills or a scenario where your flexibility and adaptability helped steer a project to success.
If these examples don’t fit into your resume, keep them for the cover letter, or write these examples down and have them ready for the interview.
Soft skills are key. Hiring managers are inspecting whether you have the chops for the specific job role and that you will be an asset to the company in its remote setting.
Definitely include a section for your soft skills and also reflect them in your cover letter, expounding on the projects you’ve successfully executed in a remote setting. This helps reinforce your innate strengths and makes you look appealing for the role.
Choosing Which Skills to Share
You have a good idea of who you are and your value, but how do you select the best traits for your remote job resume? Here are some tips:
- Separate your hard and soft skills so that they’re distinct. We want to make sure that you stand out so include two individual sections for “hard skills” and “soft skills.” It’s also a good idea to include the tools or platforms that you’re familiar with, both role and industry related (i.e. Python, Java, etc and remote collaboration tools (Slack, ClickUp), so add a list for those too. If you’re in a more creative field, it could be cute to use the logos of the remote collaboration tools to break the monotony of text saturation.
- Research which skills are in demand for remote roles. I’ve shared a brief list above but feel free to dive deeper into this and enhance your resume according to your findings.
- Reflect relevant skills. If the role requires very specific remote skills, make sure your resume reflects those as per the job description provided and align these with keywords.
Use an Appropriate Resume Format
Employers and hiring managers receive a lot of resumes—probably an overwhelming amount for the top jobs.
When scouring through resumes to find the right candidate, hiring managers may wane in attention, and it could be easy for your resume to get lost in the pile.
Another thing to consider is that hiring managers may use an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) to help speed up and organize their hiring process.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, ATS is a software program that automatically scans a resume for key terms and words that are cross-referenced with the job description. Once complete, the resume is stored in a database, along with every other applicant’s entry.
An ATS will typically discard resumes that have bad formatting or don’t mention correct keywords.
You’ll never know if a hiring manager is manually reviewing your resume or using an ATS, and if they latter, your resume will, upon submission, automatically be sent to the ATS itself. Even if you have the best resume on the planet, if it isn’t optimized for the system, it may never be seen.
A good way to avoid this happening is to format your resume in a way that it is readable by an ATS by following some basic principles (this may seem repetitive from above, but concepts become concrete through repetition):
- Align your job title in your resume to what is listed in the job description
- Scan the job description for keywords and use the same language to feature this throughout your resume without keyword stuffing
- Include traditional, standard resume sections like “Work Experience,” “Skills,” and “Education,” rather than being overly creative with these title headings
- Use a standard font like Arial, Times New Roman, or Helvetica as these are easily scanned by ATS platforms, also they’re easy to read in general (no Papyrus, pls)
- Use many graphic elements sparingly as this may scramble the ATS (you can always link to a portfolio)
JobScan is an online tool for comparing the efficiency of your resume against an ATS.
With this tool, you upload both your resume and the job description you’re applying for, and it’ll compare how your entry will perform within the system.
JobScan will then give action points for improving your resume for the application in relation to the job description provided. By following the prompts and applying changes accordingly, your resume may have a stronger chance of standing out, particularly if the hiring manager is using an ATS.
JobScan has a free plan which includes two free scans per month, but there are also premium plans that have more robust features. This could be a good consideration if you’re a serious job seeker.
Formatting your resume to be ATS-friendly is a good idea in general, however, if you are applying for a more creative role or if you feel pulled to a more aesthetically pleasing resume, you may want your resume to have more pizazz.
You could opt for a tool like Canva to create your resume. You can use a free resume template and edit it for each role you apply for.
Another option is to use something like VisualCV which streamlines the process for you, or, experiment with an AI resume builder like Rezi.
Should You Add a Photograph of Yourself to Your Resume?
With the exception of those applying for jobs in media, entertainment or similar fields, adding a photograph to your resume isn’t a good idea.
It could open you up to a form of bias or discrimination, distract from your work experience, and it’s also not relevant to the job. Also, graphics like photographs could also mean your resume may be automatically disqualified by an ATS.
Adding a photograph will take up a lot of resume real estate which should rather be dedicated to your skills and experiences.
You have a beautiful face and have your profile picture up on your LinkedIn page, so leave it off your resume and charm the socks of the hiring manager during your interview.
Instead, use that space to flex your skills and experience or create an information-rich executive summary.
Wrapping up Your Guide to Remote Resume Best Practices
Writing a resume is tedious, sure, but as a job seeker, it’s a vital step in the job application process. There are a lot of things to consider when writing your first resume, but once this is done, you can always templatize the process to speed it up.
When tailoring your resume for remote job opportunities, it’s important to show you’re fit for the job. Not only do you need to prove your skills in your field, but also in your ability to work online from anywhere.
By using these examples and best practices, you can create a resume that stands out and lands you the job you’ve always dreamed of.
Once you’ve wrapped up your resume and cover letter, you’ll be set, and you can begin your remote job search with confidence!
