flexjobs.com – thomas farley's blog

Flexjobs.com Update

I’m not renewing my membership with Flexjobs.com. (internal link). I did get some continuing work from them but for the last several months they have flooded me with e-mails about jobs I’m not qualified for.

No, I don’t speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or Tagalog. And, no, I don’t have a four year college degree. My membership profile does not list foreign language ability or any completion of college. Yet Flexjobs.com continued to send me notices about jobs requiring either one or both.

Despite this unhappiness, and this may sound contradictory, I still think they are the best freelance site out there. They curate their listings really well and the jobs listed there are legitimate.

If you have the time to manually search their listings every few days then you should consider their service. If you don’t have that time, if you need to rely on their e-mail referrals, save your money.

Finally, a Legitimate Freelancer Job Site

I’ve just started using it, but flexjobs.com (external link) appears to be a legitimate freelancer job site. Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today all say nice things about it. My initial impression is very favorable.

Flexjobs.com is not a traditional, stand by itself job board. Instead, it curates postings from various job sites and company web sites, screening them for legitimacy before posting them to its site.

There are a tremendous amount of job categories at the site, ranging from account management to youth and children jobs. Many customer support positions. The emphasis is on jobs that offer flexible work arrangements, like working from home.

Flexjobs.com will save me a great deal of time looking for and vetting possible employers. The cost is reasonable, too. I paid $36 for a year’s membership, which is only $3.00 a month. Another good thing is that flexjobs.com does not take any money from you for any job you land. You deal directly with the employer. I’ll continue to look at Craigslist, but now there is no reason to deal with places like elance or Freelancer.com.(internal link)

Any downside? Their search engine seems to favor companies they are paid to promote but I can work past that. And there’s another thing worth mentioning.

These are the better jobs. This means they will pay better but the competition will be stiffer. Qualifications will be tougher and you might be in a larger application pool than a lead from a smaller, regional job board. Still, Flexjobs remains the most legitimate source of work that I’ve seen so far.