Cole 🇬🇧

Sales

"The Extra Step Often Did Get Me The Interview"

Cole's Story

Cole is from Manchester and had spent his whole career there, mostly in telco companies, mostly in the office. The only stretch of remote work he'd had was during COVID, like most people. He'd been considering Remote Rebellion for a while, having noticed Michelle was the only voice on LinkedIn actually talking about the kind of work he wanted, but sat on it for six months before making the jump. What pushed him over was redundancy starting to hit where he worked.

Before joining, he'd applied to more than 20 remote roles out of a high-pressure sales job, with nothing positive coming back from any of them. LinkedIn made it worse: postings would say "remote" and then list a country restriction buried in the details, hard to tell apart from the real thing until you were already partway through a process. He describes his search at the time as scattergun, applying anywhere and everywhere, sometimes getting deep into a hiring process before realizing the "remote" role wasn't actually remote at all.

The pull toward remote work wasn't abstract for him. He'd been driving three hours round trip daily, and with a health condition already in the mix, that commute was actively costing him. Once he had the flexibility to stop losing that time to traffic, his health improved along with it.

He was initially skeptical about paying for the course, especially given he was facing redundancy at the time and felt like poor timing to be spending money. In hindsight, that cost is part of what made it work. Paying for it meant he committed to actually finishing it rather than treating it casually. The CV work early in the course helped him get clear on what he wanted and what kinds of remote work existed. The regular calls did double duty: practical advice, plus enough of a boost to keep him from losing motivation in a market he describes as thoroughly stacked in the hiring manager's favor.

A lot of his interviews came through recommendations out of the community, not cold applications. He also picked up habits he wouldn't have thought to try alone, like following up on LinkedIn or building a Loom video into an application, extra steps that he credits with getting him interviews he might not have landed otherwise.

He's now in a fully remote role with no location restriction, free to work from anywhere as long as the hours get done. For him, that means an end to the same nine-to-five office routine and room to travel and meet people along the way.