Are Work At Home Jobs Legitimate?

Well the short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes & no. Sorry about that.

I don’t think there can be any doubting the legitimacy of working from home while answering phones for a large established company that just wants to tap in to the more flexible, and usually cheaper, WAHM or retired market. A professional job without the overheads for the company or the travel costs for the telecommuter. In fact, with a spare room, a desk, and a computer monitor, you can have your home office up and running relatively cheaply.The problems arise when the company isn’t in the FTSE or NASDAQ.

If ‘Bobs Gardening’ in Vegas wants an out-of-hours customer support agent he can put a post on a site like ours and reach the very people he needs. But is Bob evil? Will Bob take a months worth of your work and then decide to fire you without pay? Is Bob legitimate?

Here are a few litmus tests to use when asking are work at home jobs legitimate -

1. What kind of email is the job poster using? Is it a free gmail account or is it acompany.com? If it’s acompany.com check that the address has a website. If its a gmail or yahoo don’t fret, they may not want their company inbox jammed up, just send them an initial message or resume but after reaching the negotiation stage make sure you do so through their bona fide email address.

2. Once you’ve checked that their methods of communication are legit then check that the company itself is. You can go through government bodies to check credentials but this is usually overkill. Just google the company name and see if any red flags go up.

3. Get paid fast. The above suggestions are fine when working for people that have some sort of registered company, but what about those that need you most. The one-(wo)man-band that is juggling 10 different aspects of his/her business at once that desperately needs a flexible hand. They may only have a gmail account! The simplest test is to get paid early and often. If you’ve just started working for someone insist on getting paid weekly, or even daily, until you build that trust between each other. This way if Bob is evil you’ll only have lost a little time and cash.

So – are work at home jobs legitimate? Yes, but take a few initial steps to make sure your employer is the good sort, they’ll understand, and as the trust grows you’ll become their telecommuting right hand and there’s nothing like being indispensable.

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