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You’ve decided you want to ditch the long drive to work for a telecommute to your home office. It’s a good move. More professionals are choosing to work from home than ever before, but this also means candidate pools for telecommuting jobs are heavily saturated.

7 Tips for Writing a Memorable Telecommuting Resumé

As a remote jobseeker, you’re competing against applicants from all over the country or from around the globe. If you want to give yourself a leg up, read on for some of the best resumé tips that will get you noticed.

1. Remember, Your Resumé Must Represent You

If you’re located far away from the company headquarters, you most likely won’t be called in for a job interview. You may have the opportunity to make a personal connection with a potential employer via video chat, if you’re lucky, but the recruiter will make most of their hiring decision on the basis of your resumé.

What this means is that your resumé must be able to accurately represent you to a hiring manager. A resumé should act as an extension of you—communicating essential skills and qualifications that will demonstrate you are the best candidate for the job.

Related: Virtual Interviews: 9 Questions Candidates May Ask and How to Respond

2. Be Upfront About What You Want

First, clearly communicate that you seek a telecommute job. You can simply write “I am looking for a telecommuting role in [industry], and am very interested in fulfilling this role with your company.” You don’t have to say why you want such a role and, in fact, you shouldn’t include your reasoning on a telecommuting resumé. Saying you want to work from home because of health issues, or because you have children, could deter potential employers.

Second, be mindful of the language you use when you talk about the role you desire. It’s much more professional to refer to a home-based job as telecommuting or remote role rather than a work from home job. This will show the recruiter you’re serious about telework.

3. Get Right to the Point

When writing your resumé, get to the point. Resumé writer Peter Dudley from Paper Fellows says,

“A recruiter has an average of about 5 seconds to look at your resumé. If it takes them longer to get to the meat of yours, they’re never going to see it.”

Organize your resumé so that the most important information is easily accessible for quick reference during the initial screening process. Streamline your main ideas into bulleted lists and remember that less is often more.

4. Make Sure You Send a Cover Letter

The cover letter is vital for any telecommute job for which you are applying. It gives the recruiter an outline of who you are, what your experience is, and why you want the job. If you don’t include it, your telecommuting resumé could well be thrown out without ever being read.

A quality telecommuting cover letter should direct the reader’s attention to the most important parts of the resumé. If you have past experience in telecommuting, then you should point it out in the cover letter. The same is true if you have any relevant job experience that you’d like the hiring manager to see: make sure it’s mentioned in your cover letter.

5. Consider Resumé Templates

When job hunting, it can be time consuming to create a new resumé for every job opening. It’s true you’ll need to create a customized resumé for each job, but that doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot of time on it. To make the process efficient, consider using resumé templates to establish a framework for your document. Virtual Vocations offers e-courses, guides, and resumé templates to jobseekers looking for professional resumé help.

Related: Upgrade Your CV with a Virtual Vocations Professional Resumé Review

6. Double-Check Your Grammar

Grammar doesn’t always feel relevant once you leave school, but when you’re applying for jobs it’s vital that you’re getting it right. Good grammar makes your writing clear and easy to follow. Slacking off on following basic grammar rules can make you look unmotivated and uncaring about the details. Of course, that’s not the impression you want to convey to potential clients or employers.

Before you submit your telecommuting resumé, use tools and services to help you get it right. Resources like State Of Writing and Via Writing will assist you with guides and tips about common grammar mistakes everyone makes. If you need some more in depth help, reach out to a tutor who can guide you in the right direction.

7. Always Proofread and Edit

This should go without saying for any job hunter, but you need to ensure you proofread and edit any resumé you forward to potential employers. As mentioned earlier, you don’t have a lot of time to wow a recruiter. If they see spelling and grammar errors, then your resumé could get tossed. These mistakes indicate you haven’t put as much time into the application process as you should have.

If you feel you could use some help with your editing, you’ll find lots of help online. In fact, it’s often very useful to have someone else read your writing, as they’ll pick up the errors you miss. For example, auto proofreading tools like Slick Write and Easy Word Count will check your writing and highlight any errors that the software finds.

These tips should help you write a telecommuting resumé that stands out from the crowd. Remember to put the work in now, as your resumé will be a key deciding factor in whether or not you receive a job offer.

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