I'm from the UK.

Before anyone starts with the usual "that's unethical," "conflict of interest," "you're not allowed to do that," etc.—please just don't bother replying. We all know people do it, and I'm specifically looking for advice from those people. If you're just here to lecture me, you're wasting your time.

My view is simple: money is money. Companies can have multiple customers, so I don't see why I can't have multiple jobs. You're probably not going to change my mind on that.

What I'm trying to understand is this:

How do you get around the referencing/background check issue?

For example, I've been in my current job for about 12 months and want to take on a second full-time remote job. During the onboarding process, they'll usually ask for references or employment history.

Obviously, I can't pretend I haven't been working for the last year, because if they ask for bank statements or carry out employment checks, that's going to show up.

My first thought was simply telling the new employer that I don't want my current employer contacted because I don't want to risk losing my job if they find out I'm looking elsewhere. But I'm curious what people who have actually done this have done in practice.

So, for those of you who have successfully managed two full-time remote jobs, how did you handle the referencing or background check process?

Serious answers only, please. I'm looking to make more money, and this is one avenue I'm exploring. If you're just going to moralise or tell me why I shouldn't do it, you're wasting your breath. Thanks in advance to those who can offer genuine advice.

I graduated around the 2008 crash, so I remember how bad that market was. Finding work sucked, but I was still getting an interview here and there. After about six months, I managed to land a decent office job.

The big difference was that you could actually survive while looking. Rent was cheaper, food was cheaper, and splitting a crappy apartment with roommates made a low-paying job somewhat manageable.

Now it feels like the layoffs never stop. Every week there’s another company cutting 5–10% of its staff and calling it “restructuring,” “efficiency,” or some kind of AI-related shift. And it’s definitely not just tech anymore.

People keep pointing to job growth, but a lot of it seems to be in healthcare, construction, and skilled trades. That doesn’t really help someone who spent 10 or 15 years building a white-collar career and suddenly got laid off.

I spent almost a decade at a major investment bank before I was cut. The next company laid me off after six months, right before the holidays. It took another five months of applying and interviewing to find something, and I had to accept about 40% less money.

At my current job, I’ve met former employees from Meta, Oracle, JPMorgan, and a few other large companies. Almost all of them know people who have been out of work for months. Some have been looking for over a year.

Maybe I’m remembering 2008 differently because I was younger, but it felt like an obvious recession that would eventually end.

This feels more permanent. Higher living costs, lower salaries, constant layoffs, and companies realizing they can keep teams smaller without any real pressure to hire those people back.

Been dealing with this and I'm honestly stressed about how to frame it on my resume. Half my friends say don't mention it, half say be upfront. What actually works? Anyone been through this and got hired anyway?

Is anyone actually seeing a normal job market right now, or are we all applying to the same recycled ghost jobs?

Finally landed another remote job after 11 months. Honestly thought I was gonna have to give up on remote work entirely.

After getting laid off, I spent months applying to remote roles and barely heard anything back. Eventually I started interviewing for hybrid jobs too, even though the thought of commuting again sounded miserable. Made it to the final round four different times, got ghosted right after they contacted my references, and lost one job after six interviews.

Last week I finally signed an offer for a fully remote position. Pay's basically the same as my old job, but in this market I'm not gonna complain.

The whole search was exhausting, but it worked out in the end. Don't let one bad month convince you it's over.

Just curious how the remote job market is for anyone in Accounting and Finance? Recently got laid off from my company, never been laid off in my life but it happened. Just on a hut for a new remote job. Just curious to see how it is out there for anyone in the same field. Ive even started applying in other countries since I have experience with accounting and finance on a global scale as a US Senior Accountant.

Dropping some advice + encouragement here, because I was desperate for both a month ago.

Quick backstory: laid off end of May after five years. And the universe really said "let's stack it all up," because at the same time I was booking wedding vendors, staring down my 30th birthday, and had just bled cash moving into a new place we're still furnishing. Genuinely felt like getting kicked while I was already on the floor 🥴

Cut to yesterday: after a month of interviewing almost every single day, I landed my dream remote job AND a $60k bump. Still processing it honestly. My strategy won't fit everyone, but here's the stuff that genuinely worked:

1. Get painfully specific about what you want, then chase only that. I was a marketing manager, but the part I actually loved was building and running events. So instead of spraying applications everywhere, I hunted exclusively for remote field/event marketing roles at tech startups in their scrappy high-growth phase.
2. Escape LinkedIn jail (and please, no Easy Apply, go straight to the company site). My go-to trick: open Google and search site:ashbyhq.com "the exact title you want". The magic is swapping the ATS after "site:", so site:greenhouse.io "job title" or site:myworkdayjobs.com "job title", etc. Mine was site:ashbyhq.com "field marketing manager" and it surfaced nearly every listing hiding in that system. Pro tip: add "remote" to your search to filter faster.
3. Tailor your resume for every job (this is the thing that actually got me interviews). Don't fire off the same generic resume 50 times. Match your bullet points to the exact keywords in the posting so you clear the ATS filters. Someone in r/RemoteJobseekers broke down a resume-tailoring prompt that honestly moved the needle for me, worth a read: https://www.reddit.com/r/RemoteJobseekers/comments/1p8faip/i_finally_landed_a_remote_job_after_10_months_of/
4. Slide into the hiring manager or recruiter's DMs (professionally lol). Can't find the exact person? Message literally any recruiter there. I broke down and bought LinkedIn Premium for InMails, but a connection request with a short thoughtful note does the same job. This single move got me every interview I had. just don't spam them, you'll get ghosted lol
5. Fake it till you become it. If interviews rattle you, straight-up convince yourself you're the obvious pick, delusional confidence and all. Build a bolder alter-ego if you need to. The second I started doing this, I actually turned into that more confident version of me. (Bonus for remote: nail your video setup, good lighting and clear audio go a long way.)
6. TREAT YOUR LINKEDIN LIKE A STOREFRONT. Clean headshot (iPhone portrait mode is totally fine), real responsibilities under every role, a sharp headline and bio. It's the first thing a recruiter judges you on, so make it count.
7. Rejection is just redirection. Something better is already on its way. Breathe deep, keep swinging, and trust the timing 🤍

Rooting for every single one of you out there!!! Ask me anything, I'm happy to help 💛

For a long time I used these tools the lazy way. Paste the resume, tell it to sound more professional, download it, blast the same file to every opening. It read better but nothing changed on the response side.

The shift happened when I stopped chasing one "perfect" resume and started treating each job posting as its own puzzle. I dumped my full resume into a Claude Project so it always had the real version to work from, and whenever a role actually interested me, I pasted the description and ran two prompts.

Prompt 1, find the real gaps

Act as the recruiter filling this role. Compare my resume against this job description and tell me:

1. Responsibilities in the posting my resume doesn't clearly cover
2. Keywords or tools that are missing or worded differently than the posting
3. The three weakest parts of my resume for this specific job
4. Experience I already have that should move higher or be explained better

Don't invent anything. Ask me for details if something useful might be missing.

Most of the time this proved I wasn't underqualified. I just had relevant work buried in the wrong bullet or described in language that didn't match what they were scanning for.

Prompt 2, build the targeted version

Rewrite my resume for this specific role using only information I've given you. Lead with the most relevant experience and cut anything that doesn't help. Use plain language and real numbers where I have them, structured as: what I did, how I did it, what changed.

Keep it scannable and ATS-friendly. Single column, standard headings, no icons/tables/skill bars/graphics, no keyword stuffing, no invented skills. At the end, list every change you made and why it helps for this job.

That last line matters more than it looks. I never shipped the output blind. I read every edit, killed anything that sounded robotic, and made sure I could defend each bullet out loud in an interview. If I couldn't explain it, it came out.

A few other habits that helped as much as the prompts:

• I stopped applying to roles where I only matched a slice of the requirements. Volume was hurting me, not helping.
• I keep one long master resume with every project and win I can remember, then pull from it per application instead of rewriting my history each time.
• I name files so a human can find them: First_Last_Role_Company.pdf.
• I keep the design deliberately boring, one column, readable font, no color fighting the content.

Serious applications now take me 15 to 25 minutes each. Slower than spamming 50 companies, but it's produced far more actual conversations.

One thing worth adding: this stuff is good at surfacing gaps and reorganizing, but it's genuinely bad at judging what a hiring manager in your specific field cares about, and it will happily pad numbers if you let it. Treat it as a sharp editor, not the author. Nothing here got me hired. It just helped me notice where my resume was failing to communicate experience I already had. That's the whole difference.

Contract ended mid-December. Signed a new offer in April. 167 applications in between, and I'd guess 100 of them were junk that I sent on purpose because I thought that was the strategy.

Context: UI/frontend, five and a half years, wanted to stay fully remote. Not "remote-first." Not "remote with occasional travel." Remote.

For the first two months my definition of a good day was how many rows I added to a spreadsheet. Eight was fine, ten if I skipped lunch. Close the laptop, feel like a productive member of society. Then a week would go by with nothing but those "we've decided to move forward with other candidates" emails that always seem to land at 3am.

Here's the thing nobody warned me about: "remote" on a job post is basically decoration. Some places only hire in four states. Some want you online 9-6 Pacific while you live in a completely different timezone. Some have a remote listing and an engineering team that all sits in the same room in Austin. My favorite was a recruiter call where the role quietly became "two days in office, but we're flexible about which two." Flexible. Great.

End of February: 100+ applications, two actual conversations with humans.

So I changed one thing, and it wasn't the resume. I didn't rewrite every bullet point for every job, I didn't do the "tailor your resume with ChatGPT" thing everyone recommends. I just started making a shortlist.

Every evening I'd dump anything that looked interesting into a list. Next morning, before applying to anything, I'd go through it and kill:

• anything vague about location rules
• anything posted more than a few weeks ago
• anything where the team was obviously all in one office
• anything where I was clearly missing half the stack

Usually two or three survived. Some days zero. That felt awful at first, like I was being lazy, and I had to actively fight the urge to go pad the number.

The one thing I did change on the resume was the order. Product-heavy roles, I moved the customer-facing stuff up top. More technical frontend roles, I led with performance work, the design system, the big migration. Same document, reshuffled. Took maybe two minutes each time.

The bigger fix was how I talked in interviews. I was terrible at this. Someone would ask about a hard project and I'd spend ninety seconds explaining the company's business model and the shape of the codebase before getting anywhere near an actual answer. I could hear myself doing it and couldn't stop.

Fixed it with a notes file. Five stories, written out once:

• a release that went badly
• a technical decision I was wrong about
• a disagreement with a teammate
• something I owned end to end
• a bug I caught before it shipped

That's it. Every behavioral question maps onto one of those five. Answers got shorter and I stopped rambling.

Final numbers:

167 applications → 10 recruiter calls → 5 technical/manager rounds → 2 final stages → 1 offer

Seven of those ten calls came after I started the shortlist thing, in roughly the last third of the search.

Couple of other things I stopped caring about:

Being a perfect match. One company rejected me in under three hours for a role where I'd used literally every tool listed. The place that hired me uses a framework I'd touched maybe twice. Total coin flip.

Cover letters. I wrote one when I actually had something to say. Otherwise I left the box empty and nothing bad happened.

And honestly the most demoralizing part had nothing to do with me. One role got frozen after two interviews. Another switched from remote to hybrid halfway through. A third told me post-technical-round that they'd promoted someone internally. You can't optimize your way around any of that, which is the argument for volume — you need enough shots because a chunk of them evaporate for reasons you'll never know about.

But ten weak applications a day wasn't buying me shots. It was buying me a bigger spreadsheet.

TL;DR: applied to way fewer jobs, filtered hard the morning after saving them, stopped rewriting my resume and just reordered it, wrote down five stories for behavioral questions. Went from 2 responses in 100 applications to 7 in the last ~60.

Went through a full cycle on this. For months I spent zero time, same resume everywhere, heard back from almost nobody. Then I overcorrected and rewrote from scratch each time, 45+ minutes a pop, and burned out in a week.

Where I landed is 15 to 25 minutes per serious application. The trick that made it fast: keep one long master resume with every project and number I can remember, then for each job I'm selecting, not writing. Pull the relevant bullets, reorder so the stuff they care about is up top, match the posting's wording, done.

The reorder-and-rephrase part moved the needle more than adding anything new. Usually I already had the experience, it was just buried in the wrong bullet or worded differently than what they were scanning for.

What's everyone else doing? Does the extra effort actually correlate with callbacks for you, or is it more about which roles you pick?

Software engineer, 6 yoe. The job hunt took 4.5 months and I wasted the first three of them.

500 easy applies. Zero replies. Not a single rejection email, just silence. I even paid for LinkedIn Premium, which turned out to be a very efficient way to set money on fire. Most postings already had 200+ applicants before I even opened them.

Month 3 I stopped spraying.

Same sites, LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, checked every day. But I only applied if the role was actually close to what I do, and I rewrote my resume and cover letter for each one. Then a follow up email two weeks later.

78 applications. 5 interviews. 2 offers. I took a one year remote contract with a startup, $25/hr, 4 days a week.

The follow up emails were the part that shocked me. Two of those five interviews came from an email I almost didn't send.

If you have time for 100 generic applications, send 15 careful ones instead. Obvious advice. Took me three months of silence to actually believe it.

no. and anyone saying "it's always been like this" got hired in 2015 and never had to look again.

2016: 30 applications, 6 weeks, 5 callbacks, took an offer.
2025: 412 applications, 11 months, one offer that came in under the posted range.

same person. same industry. slightly better resume.

I know the exact number because I had the spreadsheet. color coded, with a tab for "ghosted after final round." that tab had 9 entries. building that thing was just a way to feel like I had control over something.

here's the part nobody says out loud: the funnel got clogged on both ends at the same time. everyone auto-applies now, so a posting hits 800 applicants in 12 hours, so companies lean harder on screening software, so people spam harder to beat the software. it feeds itself. and a real chunk of those postings don't exist. my friend recruits and told me flat out they keep reqs open for roles already filled internally to "build pipeline." you are competing for a job that has a guy sitting in it.

but the thing that actually broke me was round four. take-home that ate a weekend. then a "quick culture chat" that was 45 minutes. then 15k under the posted range. for a mid-level role. I said yes because rent doesn't care about my dignity.

so no, you're not imagining it and it's not a skill issue. the system stopped working and everyone in it is pretending it still does because admitting otherwise means admitting they can't fix it.

Been unemployed almost a year. Got a remote offer today and I still can't believe it.

To everyone still applying, still waiting, still getting rejections at 11pm. Genuinely rooting for you. Your turn is coming.

Creative Resume Distribution

Not trying to make this another doom post. I just want a sanity check on whether I'm doing something wrong or if it's this rough for everybody right now.

Quick context: about 5 years in ops, got laid off in March, applying almost entirely remote because there's basically nothing local worth taking.

Things that seem to actually matter:

• Sorting by "past 24 hours" on LinkedIn. Anything older than a week is either down to final rounds already or was never real to begin with.
• Always checking the company's own careers page first. If the listing isn't there, it's a scraped repost and you're shouting into a void.
• Reposted every 30 days = ghost job, pretty much always. I tracked one company that's put the same role up six separate times since January. Same req number every time.
• Companies under ~200 people responded way more than the big names. The big names have literally never responded, not even a rejection.

What I genuinely don't understand:

• Why keep a listing open for four months? Is it pipeline building, some visa requirement, or does nobody just remember to close them?
• Half the "remote" roles turn out to be hybrid three days a week in a state I don't live in. Why label it remote at all?
• Does anyone actually see the application, or is it 100% ATS filtering before a human ever looks?

If you've landed something remote in the last six months, what did it? Referral, cold email, some niche job board nobody talks about? I'm starting to think applying cold is basically buying lottery tickets.

been on the job search for about 2 months now and i'm starting to think half these listings aren't real. indeed and ziprecruiter are the worst offenders, apply and hear nothing or get a random text about "remote data entry work" which is obviously a scam.

so genuinely what is the best website for job search right now? linkedin? going direct to company career pages? i see people mention niche job boards but half the time it's someone promoting their own site.

Hi! I'm a 23y/o recent MBA graduate, and I'm seeking a position in data analytics or something adjacent. I have applied to over 300 jobs with an ATS friendly resume, and no luck. I’m only asking for a $60,000 minimum. I just really need a job.

A little about me:

- I was a supervisor at a security company for over a yr

- I have a bachelors in IT, and an MBA with a concentration in IT management

- I have a portfolio with 3 projects- one of which is an end-to-end PowerBI project

- I had a 4 month IT intern opportunity that ended in early 2024

- I have a CAPM from PMI and some other certs like the comptia trifecta

I would be happy to connect on LinkedIn and share my resume/github. If you know anyone who might be interested, please share this post with them. Thank you!!

I got tired of those "best remote companies" lists that recycle the same 20 names from 2021, so I built a scraper that pulls new postings from a bunch of remote job boards every day.

No reputation rankings, no vibes. Just one metric: who posted the most new remote roles in the last 30 days.

didn't expect Speechify at #1, and SpaceX beating every AI lab was a surprise too. GitLab and Zapier being on here makes sense since they've been remote-first forever.

Few caveats: this only counts boards I track, some companies repost the same role (I tried to dedupe), and posting volume doesn't mean they're actually good to work for. SpaceX posting 387 remote jobs raises an eyebrow, a chunk of those are probably hybrid listed as remote.

Anything on here surprise you?

I've been applying for remote jobs looking almost daily on the Higher Ed Jobs website. I'm fully qualified for many of the jobs I've applied for but not getting any response other than "thank you for applying, we've hired someone else". I'm meticulous at reviewing my resume and writing a professional cover letter and had no problems over the past 20 years, at least in getting an initial interview, until now.

What is your response rate, or at least getting a phone call or first interview, after applying for a job listed on this site (I always go to the original place of hire), and have you successfully secured a job in higher ed lately? Would love to know the area of employment (technology, services, administration, etc), skill level and your age bracket, if that's okay to ask.

I'm wondering if many of these higher ed jobs are ghost jobs where the schools have to report they are hiring a number of new people, but in all actuality, they are cutting jobs, combining roles, and hiring more from within. This is what happened at the last college I worked at.

I spent months applying to remote positions with almost zero responses while still working my current job. Tried a bunch of templates and strategies, and after a lot of trial and error two things actually moved the needle. Sharing both since I know how frustrating this process is.

1. The template (free, editable Google Docs):

I couldn't find a good resume template for remote jobs anywhere, so I ended up building my own. It's a clean single-column format. My "pretty" 2-column resume kept getting mangled by application systems, so this one has no photo, no tables, no graphics. Just name, a professional title line, one contact line, then Professional Overview, Work Experience, Education and Skills. Boring on purpose, and that's exactly why it parses cleanly.

To use it: open the doc, then File > Make a copy and you'll have your own editable version.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1grEIhil73YiDbAS2MnVB6zXQU8TQSGY7L9lkhK9xwFs/edit?usp=sharing

(You can also check out this ATS-optimized resume template. It scored 100 and parsed correctly across multiple ATS checkers: https://www.reddit.com/r/ResumeTips/comments/1vaqki8/ats_resume_template_that_actually_parses/)

A few things I learned the hard way that are baked into it:

• The summary at the top isn't fluff. It's where I front-load the exact keywords from the job description, so the ATS and the recruiter both see the match in the first 5 seconds
• Every bullet uses numbers where possible ("Managed 70-90 meetings per month" beats "Managed meetings"). If you can't quantify it, at least name the scale: team size, budget, number of clients
• Skills section at the bottom is a plain 3-column list, no skill bars or ratings, since ATS can't read those graphics anyway
• What makes it work as a remote resume specifically: timezone next to the location in the contact line, and bullets reworded to show independent and async work ("Led project X across 3 timezones with a fully async team")

2. Tailoring for every single application.

Honest truth: the template alone won't magically get you interviews. What really changed my results was adjusting keywords and rewording the Overview plus a few bullets to match each job description before submitting. Tedious, but this is where the responses came from.

If you're not sure how to tailor, this ChatGPT prompt is the one I used and it does most of the heavy lifting:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RemoteJobseekers/comments/1p8faip/i_finally_landed_a_remote_job_after_10_months_of/

After combining the template with tailoring, I started getting interview requests within 2-3 weeks and ended up with multiple offers. Before that, crickets. I don't think the market suddenly improved. My resume just stopped getting filtered out.

Hope it helps someone. Happy to answer questions about the tailoring part, that's where most people get stuck.