Work From Home Resume [No Experience - No Problem]

Resumes

Jul 14

Maybe you’ve been working from home for years and want to change careers or this is your first time building a work from home resume and you have no experience. For many of us, our ability to work is dependent on working remotely. However, this poses a challenge because remote jobs require different key skills.

Chances are you probably have more experiences than you think, they’re just not experiences in the industry or job you want.

You’re in the right place then. In this article, I’m going to walk you through how to write a work from home resume when you have little to no direct experience in that field. I’ll also:

Show you resumes with no experience samples used by career changers and new grads,
Discuss what to put on a resume if you’ve had previous work from home experience,
Talk about work from home skills you should consider adding,
Show you a resume summary, and
Walk you through a data entry work from home resume and a work from home customer service resume sample (two of the most popular and in-demand remote jobs available to those with little or no experience)

Let’s dive in!

What is a Work From Home Resume with No Experience?

If you haven’t read my list of legitimate no experience work from home jobs, I suggest starting there. A work from home resume with no experience is essentially a resume written for jobs that:

don’t require you to have previous work experience in the job family,
can be learned and often provide training,
can be done from home,
often don’t require a degree or certification, and
many of them are flexible as long as you finish the work by the given deadline.

Today, we’re going to be discussing a resume for these types of jobs, but you can also apply this to work from home jobs that do require direct experirence.

Why is It Important to Have a Strong Work From Home Resume If You Have No Experience?

You may be thinking if I have no experience, why do I need a resume in the first place? Well, here are some obvious and not-so-obvious answers.

It’s Expected

Let’s face it, hiring hasn’t changed much in the past ten years in terms of how employers find candidates. Sure social media and other technology have enabled some change, but you can bet on one thing. Someone is going to ask for your resume at some point.

It Serves as an Example of Your Abilities

Resumes say more about you than just the words on the paper. How you write is equally important. Can you think concisely and put together a resume that has a well-organized and easy-to-understand message? Did you make it easy to read with white space? Did you make it concise and to the point?

All of those communication skills are important for many roles and your resume will be evidence of your abilities - or lack thereof.

It Shows Transferable Skills

Written well, this resume tells a story of how your other experiences position you to do this job despite having little to no direct experience.

It’s Efficient

Never before have you been able to reach so many people so easily. You can visit a career website and submit your resume, oftentimes with the click of a button.

It Levels the Playing Field

I’ve been recruiting for a long time and resumes democratize the hiring process. Sure if you look the right part and know the right people, you can get a job without a resume. However, the use of resumes has leveled the playing field and given access to jobs to many who wouldn’t have it before.

The Challenges of Writing a Work-From-Home Resume With No Experience?

This resume isn’t going to be like all your other resumes, not if you want it to work.

Transferable Skills

Because you lack direct experience, you’ll need to rely heavily on transferable skills and experiences. They will need to be focused and translated into relevant statements that help recruiters and hiring managers understand how you can solve their remote challenges.

Identifying transferable skills can be challenging for many people. Some of that involves the career industry’s peddling of “soft skills” over the past few years. It’s a generic term that many slap onto anything but often refers to traits and not transferable skills.

I’ve dedicated an entire section and additional article below to this problem.

Translating

Most hiring teams won’t have the same experiences you’ve had. They didn’t work on the same projects you worked on in college. They didn’t work in the same industries that you did. And they have very different and diverse backgrounds.

This poses a signifcant challenge for you when writing your work from home resume that has no directly relatable experience because you have to translate your background in a way that recruiters and hiring teams will understand.

So what if you served 2,000 customers per day? But if you tell someone that you were able to serve an additional 400 customers per day without sacrificing customer satisfaction because of a process you developed and used, that may resonate more with someone hiring for a remote customer service role.

Simplifying your experiences and writing why each matters to them will be key to your success.

Work From Home Resume Skills

I’ve managed remote teams since 2018 and there are two types of skill categories that are important for these types of jobs. Transferable and work from home skills.

Transferable Skills

Transferable skills are important to any career changer or new graduate trying to get their first job in a new career space because they illustrate potential based on past experiences. Even though those experiences may be in a different industry, related to a project or freelancing gig, they transcend any job.

For example, if you worked a retail job where you rang up 2,000 people per shift with a 100% secret shopper customer satisfaction score, that’s a statement that can illustrate a transferable skill. Here you are communicating transferable skills of:

accurately counting large sums of money
resolving customer needs quickly and efficiently without sacrificing customer satisfaction

These skills would be important in a work from home or on-site job and are still relevant to your work from home resume.

Work From Home Skills

These skills are specific to remote work. Work From Home Skills and Traits Include:

The ability to communicate effectively and concisely over chat apps and email
The ability to self-regulate your work and independently complete tasks with good time management
The ability to self-teach yourself and learn new skills quickly
Familiarity with work from home communication tools such as Slack, Zoom, and other applications
The ability to make judgment calls and decisions when no one else is available to make the call

These skills are not exclusive to remote work. They’re important in work from home positions, but you could have used these skills anywhere.

Coming up with experiences to show these critical work from home skills will go a long way to bolster your resume and set you apart from others who don’t have direct experience either.

For more help writing about your skills and experiences in your resume check out the article: Skills vs Experience in a Resume.

Work From Home Resume Sections

Contact Information

This resume section belongs in every resume, but what you include may change for a work from home resume. You should include:

Your first and last name,
Your email address,
Your phone number,
Any portfolio URL if you have one, and
If the position requires you to live in a certain geographical location, include your city and state.

Work From Home Resume Summary

Your resume summary is one of the most important parts of your work-from-home resume. It sets the tone for everything to follow and, done well, will help the reader connect the dots and metabolize your message.

I always suggest reading the job description and writing down all the key points and problems that the job will require of you. Then got through and lump them into categories. The goal is to get them into three to four categories. This will help the reader metabolize what you are about to tell them.

Depending on whether you are writing a master resume or a targeted resume, you may wish to review several job descriptions.

Then you can go through and come up with examples of experiences that reflect the three to four categories that you mentioned and plug them into my resume summary formula.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you spent the past five years working at a retail job and you want to apply for a work from home customer service job. You might translate your resume summary to read like this:

Over 5 years of creating ridiculously happy customer experiences in high-volume environments through empathetic listening, quickly processing customer requests, and accurately calculating money exchanges.

I modified it a bit from the formula because I can’t say call centers or remote jobs. But I found a way to connect it to my audience in another way by using high-volume environments.

Now I will move on to work experiences and drive home the message about empathetic listening, efficient customer care, and accurate financial calculations.

If I had prior remote experience but it was in a different role or industry, I would be sure to say that I have over five years of experience in remote environments.

Work From Home Experience Section

If you’ve been working from home, I would consider titling this section “Work From Home Experience”. If not, you can check out my guide on resume subtitles to find the best heading for you.

This is where you want to focus on statements that show your transferable and work from home skills, even if they are from traditional work settings, internships, or projects. It doesn’t matter where they came from. It matters that you illustrate them and convey them in a way that the recruiter or hiring manager understands.

Pay attention to what the job requires from you and the themes you identified for your resume summary. The goal is to support those ideas with evidence in this section.

Sticking with our above example our themes were:

Empathetic listening
Efficient processing
Accurate mathematical calculations

Now we want to come up with examples of how we’ve done this at previous jobs and projects. We may come up with statements like:

Handling 10 customer complaints per day and resolving them all with 100% customer satisfaction
Maintaining an average transaction speed of 30 seconds per customer
Responsible for manually calculating order totals and change for up to $90,000 daily

We can even add in some examples that show some of the work from home skills we discussed earlier. Examples may include:

Quickly communicated IT fixes via an internal messaging application to troubleshoot system errors that affected customer service. (remote communication)
Ramped up faster than any other associate, learning a new POS system and processing over 2,000 transactions per day within first 30 days. (ability to self-teach and learn quickly)

You can put it all together using my resume templates and formatting found in my Definitive Guide to Resume Writing.

One final piece of advice, if you have previous work from home experience, make sure you say so when writing about your job experience.

Writing a Work From Home Resume?

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Education

If the work from home position you’re applying for requires a certain level of education or certifications, you want to have an education section. Even if it doesn’t require it, if you have an Associate Degree or higher, you should include it in this section.

It’s up to you whether you include dates of graduation or GPA, but I tend to not include either because neither should matter in the hiring process.

For most people, the education section typically comes after their work experience, but there are situations where it may make more sense to put your education right below your resume summary. Some of those situations include:

If you recently graduated and don’t have much experience.
If your degree gives you a competitive edge. For example, if you had a Bachelor's degree and were applying for a work from home loan processing role, you may choose to lead with education because less than half of your peers have a degree. You can always look this information up in the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Work From Home Technology Skills

The last section I usually write in any resume is a technology section. This lists out any software that my client is proficient with. This could include CRMs, MRPs, and ticketing systems, but for work from home jobs you may also want to include things like:

Slack
Discord
Zoom

Keep in mind that you don’t have to have traditional work experience using these applications. By listing them here, you are simply telling the employer that you are familiar with these tools.

That means you can go learn any you don’t know now and add them to your resume. Just be sure that you feel comfortable enough that if a hiring manager asked you questions about it, you could navigate the application.

How Do You Say Work From Home on a Resume?

If you have previous work from home experiences, you want to be sure that you say so when you write about each job. Here are a couple of ways you can do so.

The Obvious Way

List locations (city, state) for each of your jobs. For the jobs you worked from home, list remote. Be sure you keep the same formatting throughout the resume. It could look like this.

Optim Careers | Managing Editor | Remote 2018 - present

The Subtle Way

You could also include it in your job summary toward the beginning with a statement that mentions it. Here’s an example.

Optim Careers | Customer Service Rep 2018 - present

Promoted to remotely answer up to 200 calls per day for a global insurance….

Either way is effective. Depending on your situation one may work better than the other. You can always A/B test the resume if you’re unsure.

Work From Home Resume Sample

Work From Home Resume No Experience Sample

Data Entry Work From Home Resume Sample

Below is an example resume for someone who has limited work experience and is trying to obtain data entry work from home job. Note that this resume tells clearly, and more than once, that they’ve worked remotely before. It also includes several repeated points to drive home a narrative of fast, accurate data entry with some bonus database management skills.

Cole Sperry

Riverside, CA | 555.555.5555 | hello@optimcareers.com | linkedin.com/in/colesperry

Data Entry Clerk

Recent graduate with 2 years of data entry experience, managing up to 3 databases and typing over 140 words per minute with a 99.9% accuracy.

Education & Certifications

Bachelor, Business Administration | University of California Riverside (expected May 2023)

Data Entry Experience

Optim.Edu | Administrative Assistant | 2022 - present

Hired through a remote work-study program at UCR to assist the Dean of Science Stuff perform a remote clean-up of 3 databases including reviewing Access mapping and formulas, and entering up to 48 spreadsheets of data manually into an Access database.

Key Contributions:

Cleaned up 3 databases with over 5,000 data points within the first 3 months of hire
Had a 100% accuracy on all new data entered upon QA reviews
Passed two typing speed assessments with over 140 words per minute average typing speed

Technology

Access, Power BI, SQL, Advanced Excel

Work From Home Customer Service Resume Sample

Below is an example resume for someone changing careers from retail to a work from home customer service role in the insurance industry.

Take note of the examples illustrating work from home skills and transferable skills.

Cole Sperry

Riverside, CA | 555.555.5555 | hello@optimcareers.com | linkedin.com/in/colesperry

Customer Service Specialist

Applying over 5 years of hospitality and retail customer service to create ridiculously happy customer experiences for insurance claims customers by empathetic listening, quickly processing customer requests, and accurately calculating financial figures.

✔ Serviced over 2,000 customers in one day with a 100% customer satisfaction score

✔ Designed a method to service two customers at once, increasing productivity by 100%

✔ Maintained a 99.8% accuracy on all manual cash calculations, responsible for over $40,000 daily in transactions

Customer Service Experience

Optim | Sales Associate & Cashier | 2015 - present

Hired to provide quick, empathetic customer service to over 1,000 customers per day. Responsible for meeting customer needs, quickly resolving customer escalations, and accurately handling up to $40,000 of cash daily.

Key Contributions:

Held an average transaction speed of 10 seconds per customer, twice the nationwide average
Collaborated with remote IT team to troubleshoot a system-wide outage, successfully restoring all customer-facing software within 1 hour
Improved customer satisfaction scores by 18% through empathetic listening and de-escalating customer concerns

Education & Certifications

Associate, Business Administration | University of California Riverside

Technology

Jira, Clover, Advanced Excel, Slack, Zoom

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Work From Home Resume Template

You can use this template to guide you in writing your own work-from-home resume. Or you can download my resume templates in Google Docs for free.

[First Name] [Last Name]

[Location (if local remote) | [Phone Number] | [Email Address] | [LinkedIn URL]

[Job Title]

[Three to four lines of text describing your unique qualifications]

Experience

[Company] | [Job Title] | [Remote] | [Dates of Employement]

[Two to three-line summary of the relevant pieces of your job duties with context]

[Three to five bullet points with supporting evidence that shows you are good at the job]

[Company] | [Job Title] | [Remote] | [Dates of Employement]

[Two to three-line summary of the relevant pieces of your job duties with context]

[Three to five bullet points with supporting evidence that shows you are good at the job]

[Company] | [Job Title] | [Remote] | [Dates of Employement]

[Two to three-line summary of the relevant pieces of your job duties with context]

[Three to five bullet points with supporting evidence that shows you are good at the job]

Education

[Type of Degree] | [University Name] | [Date of Graduation]

Technology

[List of relevant software you are proficient with]

Additional Tips for Writing a Work From Home Resume

Here are a few more tips for writing your work-from-home resume.

Use a professional resume template to save time and provide a clean, modern look.
Proofread your resume and spell-check it.
Ask someone to grunt test the resume. Give them your resume for 20 seconds. Take it away and ask them what you do and why someone would interview you. If they can’t answer in that amount of time, you’ve still got work to do.
Use action verbs and avoid first-person pronouns to shorten the resume.
Show your transferable skills with examples that paint clear pictures in the mind of the reader.
Don’t be afraid to use examples that show your work-from-home skills, even if you used them at traditional jobs.
Quantify everything. Clarity wins and if you confuse, you lose. Be clear, not vague.
Get your resume reviewed by a qualified resume writer with recruiting experience.

Cole Sperry has been a recruiter and resume writer since 2015, working with tens of thousands of job seekers, and hundreds of employers. Today Cole runs a boutique advisory firm consulting with dozens of recruiting firms, oversees Optim’s Resume Revision Service and On-Demand Coaching Program, and is the Managing Editor at OptimCareers.com.