756: How to Find High-Paying Remote Work Without Job Boards

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: The best remote roles, the ones with real compensation, real flexibility, real ownership, those were never actually posted. They're being filled right now through relationships and conversations that started long before any job description existed. Everyone searching for remote work is making the same assumption, that the remote job market works like any other job market.

[00:00:20] Post your resume, find the postings, apply, wait. That assumption is costing you months, and by the end of this conversation, you'll understand why.

[00:00:30] Introduction: I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career, the podcast where we share real conversations with real people and walk you through how to build the life you want and design your career so that you can thrive at work.

[00:00:42] Scott Anthony Barlow: Rachel had been trying to escape for almost a year, not out of her industry and not out of her career, just out of the office, and she had some real reasons. Caregiving responsibilities that at home made a rigid 9:00 to 5:00 genuinely unsustainable. She had a commute that was eating two hours of her day every day, and that she would never get back ever, and her body was sending her signals that she kept ignoring because she didn't feel like she had a real choice.

[00:01:07] Remote work wasn't a preference for Rachel. It was the only path forward that really made any kind of sense. So she did what everybody does. She went to job boards. She filtered by remote. She rewrote her resume to highlight the skills that she thought remote employers wanted, and then she optimized her LinkedIn, and she applied, not casually, but seriously, consistently, and then she did this for four months straight.

[00:01:29] Guess what? She didn't receive one single offer at all. At that point, you start to wonder if the market had shifted on you. And in her case, if remote work at her level maybe just didn't exist anymore, or if the problem was her experience or her industry or age or something she couldn't really recognize or couldn't really fix.

[00:01:47] But here's what was actually happening. When Rachel was applying, she wasn't competing against a few dozen people. She was competing against hundreds, like sometimes thousands, for the same handful of postings. In that environment, you're not competing based on who you are. You're competing against keywords and formatting, so she built what we call a target companies list.

[00:02:07] These were organizations that she identified through research and conversations and interactions, not job boards. Companies where the culture and the leadership and the structure suggested that her conditions that she wanted could actually be met, and that is where she started having real conversations with people behind the scenes at those organizations.

[00:02:28] And to be clear, this wasn't her pitching herself. She's not even asking about openings. She's just trying to learn and understand, is this an organization that I wanna be at, before anything was ever posted. When she used these methods, guess what? She started getting traction in just three weeks. Not because the market had changed, but instead because she stopped competing and started building relationships with organizations that actually had remote work and the other pieces she was looking for.

[00:02:54] But here's the part of Rachel's story that I really want you to hear. This is where most people leave a lot on the table. When Rachel finally got into those conversations, she didn't lead with, "Guess what? I'm looking for remote work." Instead, she led with curiosity, and that furthered the conversation, which then eventually allowed her to be able to start to really get to know them and them to get to know her.

[00:03:19] And then she was able to share what made her uniquely valuable, her specific strengths, the specific results she'd been able to achieve in the past, some of the specific things she was looking for, the specific ways that she approaches problems that nobody else does. And so in this particular case, remote was a condition of the arrangement.

[00:03:40] It was how she was filtering organizations. It wasn't the pitch. The pitch, in her case, was her when she showed up. This distinction matters more than almost anything else in this process. As you might imagine, this put her in a different situation than all the people who are clicking apply to remote jobs.

[00:03:58] And since she's no longer competing with them, she's getting to know the people who are actually making those decisions, who can either help her or hire her. Then that allowed her to be able to be there, having that conversation, and them understanding what value she brings to the table, in literal and figurative senses.

[00:04:18] Here's exactly what we want you to take away from this episode. Stop asking where, start asking what. What does your life actually require? What work were you built to do? The best remote roles don't get filled through job boards. They get filled through relationships, through conversations that happen before anything is ever posted.

[00:04:36] The people who land really high-paying remote careers or those remote careers that are very much a fit in the other ways, well, they're not luckier than the people who don't. They just happen to their career instead of letting their career happen to them. That's a choice, and it's available to you right now.

[00:04:51] Hey, by the way, if you wanna go deeper building your ideal career profile or digging into identifying what we would call signature strengths, or even finding organizations where your remote working conditions can actually be met, then send me an email right now, scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and then I'll connect you with the right person on our team, and we'll figure out the very best way that we can support you.

[00:05:15] The remote career that fits your life probably exists, and it's probably out there right now. You just have to know what you're looking for beyond just the remote work itself, and we'd love to help you do that. Love to help you figure it out. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career.