Hey ,
Getting a remote job that pays in USD right now seems impossible. It's even worse for someone living in Nigeria.
I visited a popular remote job board, saw a job that was amazing,. When I was about to apply, I noticed that 3,000+ people had already applied in the past week.
That's a lot of competition. How do you stand out in such a crowd?
In this letter, I'll show you exactly how I apply for remote jobs and land first interviews.
I get quite a lot of interview invites, and a lot of rejections too. Over the years I've learnt a lot of tricks that helped me get more and more invites.
Three things you have to keep in mind when applying for remote jobs:
1. I search for companies, not job boards.
This is the first mindset shift that helped me increase my chances even more. I don't apply for jobs through job boards like Indeed or RemoteOk. Instead, I have a list of all companies hiring remotely from anywhere in the world.
List of fully remote companies
The list above will show you companies that hire from anywhere in the world, including their tech stack.
Next, I go to each company's website and check for open job positions.
This is the best way to find jobs that aren't listed on job boards. Now instead of competing against 3,000 applicants, you're competing against 300.
2. I target my resume to the job description
Most of the developers I talk with don't know about ATS (Applicant tracking systems).
90% of the time, when you receive a rejection mail, it's not coming from a human. A computer scanned your resume, compared it to the job description and rejected you.
If you don't make an effort to make sure your resume targets the exact job description, an ATS will reject you.
I'll give you examples of how to target your resume:
i) Make sure the job title appears in at least one of your experiences. If the job requires a Frontend Engineer, change the "Frontend developer" role in your resume to "Frontend Engineer".
ii) Add all the programming languages from the job description to your resume. If the job asks for Typescript, MongoDB, Github, make sure to add these in your resume "Skills" section.
iii) Add all the soft skills mentioned in the job description to your resume. If the company has values, add these as soft skills.
iv) Identify the keywords in the job description and include them in your resume. Keywords are indicators that ATS scans for to know if your resume is a good match for the job.
Examples of keywords could be algorithms, design patterns, team work, customer obsessed.
You'll usually find these keywords in the part of the job description talking about the team, and what they expect from a new hire.
3. I manage my expectations
The average callback rate in a down market is about 0.5 - 1%. This means for every 100 jobs you apply to, you get one invite for an interview.
This is very low, but it is the reality. With the tips I shared with you, this percentage might increase to 6%, so you get 6-10 jobs per 100 applications.
Applying for remote jobs is a full time job on its own. If you don't put in the work to research companies, target your resume to the job description, your chances will be very slim.
I encourage you to be honest with yourself. Don't say it's hard to get a job when you only applied to 10. Apply to a hundred over the span of 2-3weeks.
Remember: You only need one yes.
I'm going to attach the latest copy of my resume
Thank you for reading this week's edition of the Growth Letter.
See you next week!