5 Top Secrets to Finding a Professional Work-From-Home Job

Despite the plethora of work-from-home job scams, and the negative historical stigmas associated with working from home not being a “real job”, the truth is that there are a growing number of highly professional work-from-home jobs with fantastic companies.

In fact, for 50 percent of you, your job is already compatible with at-home work. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. With all of the workforce and mobile technology available nowadays, telecommuting has been growing fast because working remotely is a natural evolution of the modern workplace.

Having said that, there are some tricks and secrets to knowing how to actually find the good, professional work-from-home jobs amid the sea of scams and “too good to be true” offers. My company, FlexJobs, has helped almost 1 million job seekers in their search for legitimate, professional-level flexible positions, including work-from-home jobs. We have a team of job researchers who scour the internet for legitimate flexible jobs, and they estimate that for every one real work-from-home job they find, there are 60-70 scam jobs to sift through.

Based on our team’s experience, here are the top secrets to finding a professional work-from-home job without losing your hope (or your sanity!):

1. Use the right keywords in your search. Everyone recognizes what a “work-from-home job” is--it’s a job you can do from home! Unfortunately, it’s also the most common keyphrase used by scammers. In fact, it’s such a problem, the FBI designated it as a top scam phrase back in 2011. Avoid the phrases “work-from-home” and “work-at-home” when searching for this kind of position. Instead, use phrases like “remote job,” “telecommuting job,” and “telecommute job” to find more legitimate listings.

2. Know how recruiters refer to their virtual teams. Companies with robust telecommuting or remote work programs use different kinds of language to describe their teams and their open jobs.

• “Distributed teams” or “distributed workforces” are often talked about as those whose employees work from home in a variety of locations.
• Jobs that are “geographically neutral,” “open nationwide,” “at-home” or “location agnostic” also have no particular location requirement and will allow you to work from home.
• “ROWE” is a results-only work environment, where location and hours take a backseat to productivity and results.

3. Search for companies, as well as jobs. More employers are openly stating that they support working from home on their websites, so be sure to do company research. Early in 2014, we released a list of the Top 100 Companies for Remote Jobs, and we also created a list of 26 completely virtual companies that operate mostly or entirely from home-based offices.

In addition to those, research companies that hire for telecommuting and other flexible jobs in your area or industry to check out what their flexible work policies are. Companies often have information about their flexible work options on their websites, even if they don’t mention them in their job postings.

4. Steer clear of job scams. As job seekers get more savvy about job scams, thescammers get more sophisticated. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen scams where fake URLs and websites are copied directly from legitimate company websites to fool job seekers into thinking they’re looking at a legitimate at-home job.

Other red flags of job scams include job postings with limited details about the company or job; generic contact info (a gmail email address instead of a company email); requiring an investment or payment in order to get the job; being asked to transfer money through Western Union or move money from one bank account to another; and any job listing that focuses only on how much money you’ll make working from home, but says very little about the actual job you’d be doing.

5. Know the most common work-from-home jobs. While there is opportunity for remote work in almost every career you can think of (we’ve seen listings for remote neurosurgeons and golf instructors!) and many great high-paying work-from-home jobs, there is an abundance of opportunities in the following career categories: medical, customer service, administrative, sales, marketing, web development, education, accounting, and data entry.

Some of the common work-from-home job titles arewriter, consultant, customer service representative, software/web developer, sales representative, account manager, case manager, adjunct faculty, travel counselor, graphic designer, bilingual interpreter, marketing manager, medical coder, and project manager.

Bottom line: professional work-from-home jobs exist if you know how, and where, to look.

There are great telecommuting jobs available at all career levels, entry-level to executive, in all career categories, ranging from part-time to full-time. So if you want to work from home, keep hope -- remote jobs are out there, and more are becoming available every day.

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Sara Sutton Fell is the CEO and Founder of FlexJobs, an award-winning, innovative career website for telecommuting, flexible, freelance, and part-time jobs, and Founder of the 1 Million for Work Flexibility initiative. She was named as a Young Global Leader (class of 2014) by the World Economic Forum for her work in technology and the employment fields.