3 critical remote job hunting mistakes (and how to avoid them)

Hey ,

~5 years ago I landed my first remote job. Since then I've landed many more offers for remote companies in the US, Canada and Europe.

I made so many mistakes that led to hundreds of rejections. In this letter, I'll tell you those 3 mistakes, so you never have to job hunt ignorantly again.

If you're applying to more than 2 - 4 jobs per day, then you might be making some of these mistakes:

1/3 Applying for non global remote roles

Look at these two job postings:

Most remote jobs have something called called regional restrictions. This means that they can't hire someone from a different timezone or region even if they wanted to. They are limited by the laws of the country, or the structure of the company.

So even if you're the best candidate, they won't be able to hire you. 90% of the time, you'll just get a generic rejection, and you'll keep thinking you're the problem.

You're not.

Your location is just restricting you.

The only kinds of jobs or companies you should apply to are companies that are:

✅ Remote: Global
✅ Remote: Work from Anywhere
✅ Remote: EMEA (Double check the job description to confirm Africa)

2/3 Applying to jobs you don't match

There's a popular piece of advice you'll see online: Apply to jobs even if you meet only 50% of the requirements.

That's old advice.

As you know the tech industry has tanked, and has been tanking for the past 2 years. Jobs aren't as available anymore, and there's a lot of junior talent, but only senior positions, and very few of them.

This means that competition is extremely high. Recruiters have to go through 3,000+ applicants per job posting, and they get hundreds of highly qualified candidates that match 100%+ of the requirements, and dozens that are overqualified.

What you should do instead is:

✅ Find jobs where you're at least an 80% match
✅ Take time to craft your perfect application for this role
✅ Try to get a referral for the position but reaching out to employees or connections that work there
✅ Hope for the best. Then rinse, repeat

3/3 Generic Resumes and Cover Letters

With the spike in AI, everyone wants to use AI to generate their cover letter and resume for a job posting. While it can save you time, it could really reduce the quality of your application.

And frankly, writing down a cover letter that outlines your strengths and why you are a great fit for this particular job won't take you up to 5 minutes.

Here's a sample cover letter I wrote some time ago:

✅ I write down my top 5 achievements that are most relevant to the role
✅ I write down my personal values most related to this company
✅ And I show gratitude and send

Everything I wrote is very relevant to this specific role, but it took me just a few minutes to write down.

It takes just a few minutes to tweat your resume to match a particular job and company, but this could make a huge difference in the success of your application.

Thank you for reading. Book coming out really soon, and it's going to be 10x better than I ever anticipated.

Best regards, Frantz