VirtualVocations.com is a website owned by two siblings who post telecommuting job listings. The site sticks mostly to telecommuting jobs and not freelance work. They also note that they only post listings that are paid hourly, per-project salary or salary. They filter job postings and do not allow companies to submit their own employee needs, to ensure no spam is posted on the site.
Compared to other sites of this sort, Virtual Vocations doesn’t seem as user-friendly but the quality of the job listings is quite high. There site doesn’t have detailed filters to narrow down a job search and an individual can only search by keywords and location. For many telecommuting positions location don’t matter, but there are some listings that are only partial telecommuting – and sometimes this is difficult to distinguish.
An individual can also create a ‘portfolio’ – for which they receive a unique URL – and upload their resume; however, the portfolio is more or less an extended form of a resume. The option to share this through a unique URL is an added bonus that someone can take advantage of without needing to ‘subscribe’.
You can register and join the Virtual Vocations community for free but it is unclear, until further into the website, that an individual cannot apply for jobs until they ‘subscribe’ to the site and pay a fee. The job listings are visible to anyone, which allows job seekers to view the types of employment that Virtual Vocations posts and decide if any are a good fit. This also gives individuals the ability to take keywords from job postings and search for the offer on other sites.
A few employers who have posted jobs on Craigslist reported that Virtual Vocations has taken these job listings without permission and posted them on their site – many times omitting relevant information from the listing. This has resulted in a flood if ineligible and unqualified applicants, which has frustrated the employers and, a few times, the job seekers.
The owners of Virtual Vocations note that many of the positions on their site can be found elsewhere on the web. They offer a less time consuming manner of finding real, legitimate telework without needing to search many different websites.
This may be the reasoning behind the website’s charges. You have a choice of three fees: $6.99/week, $15.99/month, or $49.99/6 months. Theoretically someone could register for the site (free), find multiple interesting job listings, pay for one week, and apply to all of the listings that were relevant.
However, one benefit of subscribing is the professional resume evaluation that the site offers. Of course, finding a friend who works in HR or utilizing your alumni association at your former University couldn’t hurt either. Also by subscribing to the site you will receive email updates (as often as you like) of recent job listings, which makes the search even less time consuming.