Making remote job seeking less of a hassle
How we search for remote jobs now, and what we can do to make it easier
As part of my UX bootcamp at Mento Design Academy, I started my first end-to-end project. A very exciting step of course, but also one that is going to challenge me in many different ways!
I am currently rounding up my research phase, and stepping into my ideation phase. To start ideating and designing, I had taken the time to sit down and reflect on my research project and my findings. In this article I would like to share a bit about my process, and also give some insights into the topic of my project: to find ways to makee the process of remote job searching on online job boardsless frustrating for remote job seekers.
The why
A little over a year ago I started searching more seriously for remote roles. But man, it was frustrating, and there were a number of reasons for that:
- I did not particularly study something that can be practiced in an online environment -> as a result I was limited to jobs that required little to no professional education.
- A lot of the jobs that were fully remote were actually contractor jobs and pay per task jobs — I learned to appreciate those later on, but at that time I was looking for something more stable — It was hard to weed through the long lists of Appen and OneForma job ads on a lot of the main job boards.
- I did not get to see fully remote jobs, the majority of the jobs, whether on remote job boards or regular job boards, had some kind of location restriction. They either showed jobs in my geographic area, even though I did not list that, or remote jobs that required you to be here or there and no matter what I tried, I could not get the location restrictions ‘turned off’.
I eventually found a job, although it took a while, and I have been working remotely for a little less than a year. Once I settled into my job, I started looking to the future again. I was interested in developing skills that would make me more eligible for the remote job market.
In July I started my bootcamp with Mento Design Academy, and when I had to come up with a design problem for my first project, I knew that this was something I wanted to explore further. I thought that I can’t be the only one who experienced this while searching for remote jobs, and I needed to validate whether or not that was the case, and whether or not others ran into the same problems I did.
This started from a very personal problem, but also something I am passionate about. I am convinced that remote work is the future for many reasons (which may be food for another article), and I think that the existing job boards do not do a very good job facilitating that market — even the job boards that were specifically created for this purpose!
As such, I started my research, and because I am still in the generative phase of my research, I did qualitative interviews with remote job seekers. After sending out a screener form, I ended up interviewing 7 remote job seekers, and I spoke with 2 recruiters in the field to gain more insights from their perspective as well. The overall purpose of the research was to uncover the major pain points in remote job searching from the perspective of the job seeker.
A look into the current remote-job market
To start off, I did some secondary and competitor research into the existing job boards as well as what is known about remote job searching. This led me to the following conclusions:
- Although there are a lot of articles about the challenges of remote work, tips for remote work (for employers) and even on remote hiring. I did not find many articles that talked about the challenges of finding remote work. As such, I think it is a subject that requires further exploration.
- The job board that is most experienced in offering remote jobs is Flexjobs — however, due to their premium plan, jobs are not visible for job seekers that do not have a paid account.
- Not all job boards offer filters for remote work, and where these filters do exist they are often limited and applied inconsistently.
- On (free) job boards like Indeed, the jobs are not checked before posting, contrary to Flexjobs where you can only search for jobs when you have a paid plan, but all the job ads are screened and verified.
- When searching for remote jobs it may be wise to focus on companies that already ‘get’ the idea of remote work, not ones that you need to convince of the benefits. As such you should focus on job boards that cater to this.
- It is important to clarify what type of remote job you are looking for (100% and location independent, remote in your vicinity, hybrid remote, etc) and focus your search on that.
- Many jobs are filled before they’re ever listed. Word of mouth and networking can help you uncover remote jobs that aren’t available to the general public yet. It can even lead to a position being created just for you.
As one of the main pieces of advice appears to be to focus on job boards that cater to remote job searching, I also looked at the competition. I found over 30 job boards that offer remote jobs and/or are specialized in the remote job market. These 30 were selected from different lists of ‘ the xx best remote job boards’ articles. After analyzing and testing these job boards, I came to the following conclusions:
- Remote search filters are limited and not always effective
- A lot of jobs that are listed as 100% remote will have a location requirement listed in the job ad text.
- At some job boards, like LinkedIn, jobs appear to be filtered automatically based on your profile information, which makes it difficult to filter out jobs that are not related to your geographic location but 100% remote without a location requirement.
- On remote-specific job boards you’ll only find remote jobs, you can filter on things like geographic area and sometimes even by timezone. However, not all remote job boards offer these filter options
One of the challenges I faced was to let go of my own experiences and biases when it comes to remote job seeking, and to let my research be led by the data I encountered. Nonetheless, a lot of findings did overlap with some of the main pain points I assumed I would find, and my findings left me confident that there is room for further exploration and improvement in this field, and that it would be worth my while to try to get in touch with remote job seekers to learn more about their experiences. The next step is to validate whether actual users experience these pain points in the same way, or not.
Stay tuned for part two of this article, where I’ll get into my interview process and findings!
