With all of that said, I'll tell you what I "know" about work at home opportunities. The majority of the positions that you will find are going to be contract positions, which of course means that the company will not offer benefits nor will they take out taxes. It also means that they can technically "drop" your contract and therefore you lose your job and they don't have to pay unemployment when they drop a contract employee. I don't think that the majority of companies want to "drop" their contract employees because they have to invest in training them etc, so they have some vested interest in the employee. The 100% telecommute jobs I have had are contract positions. At first it made me nervous but now, I just take it for what it is...
The second thing about many of these jobs it that the pay is not great, unless you get a job that is specialized (like I see positions for people that know how to use the Ruby on Rails program that have a high hourly pay, same for web designers, etc.) Most "hourly" jobs that I see that are customer service or marketing or bookkeeping offer between $8 and $12 per hour. Many of the positions that are marketing or sales are strictly commission. That's not my cup of tea because I'm not a salesman, but for people that have that aggressive ability, it's not unreasonable to make some money in those types of positions.
The third thing is that you have to have your own home office "equipment" at least a computer with internet access and for jobs that require that you make phone calls, you have to have unlimited minutes of long distance. Some jobs specify that you have to have a land line, others are ok with cell phones. The perk of this is that if you have a home office, a room dedicated to your work, when you pay taxes you can write off a tax exemption on the square footage of that room.
So basically when I'm looking, I look for jobs with a real job description. Real jobs, have real tasks that need to be completed and all of these "Great income opportunity for work at home mom. Make $5000 a week" ads are just scams. Legitimate jobs have legitimate job descriptions, reasonable pay and real people. Beware of any job that refers to "great income opportunity", never ever ever pay or give money to somebody to get information about a job or training. (I have heard that some legitimate jobs do require that you pay for your own drug screen or background check.) I know that some legitimate companies use craigslist to post their jobs and use the anonymous email address to keep the company name confidential. That's not worrisome, but if you apply and then you get generic information back about the company, avoid it!
If a company wants to pursue you as an employee they will identify themselves, then you check them on BBB.org to see what kind of rating they have, then google the company name along with the word "scam" just to see if there are any posts and of course, you want to talk to a real person on the phone about it.
Lastly, I would setup a secondary email account just for your job search/application process, that way if you end up on a scam list or some hacker gets your info, it's not your real email account. Also, for safety reasons, do not put your personal, physical address on your resume, only your email and phone.
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at loraa1234@gmail.com
