Positioning yourself for remote work

Remote work is picking up these days. Its easy to find people, in countries like India, who are working remotely for a company which is located elsewhere. And there are a lot of predictions which say: by 2020, there will be 50% workforce will be remote. Companies like Basecamp, Stripe, etc have remote teams and encourage them to be remote.

But how do you land a remote job? Especially when you are a fresher.

Imagine you are the recruiter looking for a remote candidate. What would you search for? You would obviously look for the work the person has done in the past. Its easy if the person has some previous experience in the same field. If not, you could check his github profile and the projects that they have done. He/She has a blog and write about the technology regularly? Then its an added advantage. The person knows what they are doing, that’s why they care to explain it in their blog.

Hope that has all the answers you were looking for.

Landing a remote job is hard and there is some luck involved. But I feel hard workers are the luckiest.

Number one rule -

Build a profile

Tell people about the projects you have made and write about the decisions you took while building it. If you need more content, journal daily while building the projects.

Create a basic website that tells about you. Portfolio websites are the modern resumes. Its very easy to get started these days, with companies like Netlify offering free hosting.

Write about technology that you care. Write about what you are learning. Help others start off, as well.

Push all your projects to Github and let people, and potentially recruiters, know you can code.

Community

Join a community, preferably with remote devs, so you can get help and know about job opportunities. If you are from India, Remote Indian is such group. Its a very active and good place to hangout with remote workers from India.

Find people on Twitter or dev.to (or Reddit) and talk to them. Get to know how it feels to work remotely and ask them if they can refer you to any job that they know of. I’d be happy to help if you hit me on Twitter.