How We’re Vetting Jobs for Our Work-From-Home Portal

Finding a reliable work-from-home gig can be a real chore, especially with so many job boards, listings and companies that regularly seek remote employees.

Our work-from-home jobs portal is a great resource for finding new positions that become available every week. We hope you find it useful and check it often.  But you may have wondered how we decide which work-from-home jobs are share-worthy.

With a thorough vetting process. Here’s how it works.

How We Vet Work-From-Home Jobs

We have a few methods of finding work-from-home gigs, such as browsing job boards, using keyword searches in Google and checking the career pages of companies known for having remote positions.

Once we find a job we think might interest our community, we put on our reporting hats. Here are the steps we take to make sure it checks out:

• First, we do a quick Google search. We check out the company’s website and social media presence, looking for signs of legitimacy, like current contact info, recent activity and other boilerplate pages such as terms of service and press releases. We also look for the opposite: red flags. For example, maybe some of the site’s pages don’t exist, or it has links that lead to dead ends or unsecure sites. We might be concerned if a site looks outdated or uses odd or overly formal language. A lack of social media isn’t a deal breaker, but social media flooded with spammy links is.
• If we find the listing on a website that aggregates jobs, we make sure that it’s also listed on the company’s official career page. If it’s not listed on their site or the information between the two posts doesn’t match up, that tells us to dig a little further. In some cases, someone unaffiliated with a company could be behind a job board’s listing, using a big name to scam job seekers.
• If the job listing or company website is riddled with typos or uses weird, unnatural language, that’s a big red flag. We pass on those jobs.
• Next, we check Glassdoor reviews — reading what current and former employees have to say is a great way to get a better reading on a company. How are the benefits? Do the job listing’s claims live up to reality? Do employees recommend the company to other job seekers? If Glassdoor reviews are overwhelmingly negative, we’d likely choose not to share the job opening with you.
• At times, we also check business news sites for updates about the company. Maybe the company recently raised wages or improved its benefits package. Or maybe it’s making headlines for less-than-stellar reasons, like unsavory hiring practices. Good or bad, we want to know what’s going on.
• Finally, if we’ve dug into a company and have further concerns, we check the BBB Scam Tracker or look into whether complaints have been filed against the company with any government agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission.

Here at The Penny Hoarder, we’re discerning when it comes to finding legitimate jobs for our readers. If we have a fair amount of trouble vetting a job, we err on the side of caution and take a pass. We know you rely on us for quality opportunities, and we’re looking out for you.

Former staff writer Kaitlyn Blount contributed to this post.

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