Ignore This Common and Awful Career Advice

Ignore This Common and Awful Career AdviceIgnore This Common and Awful Career AdviceNot all career advice is created equal. In fact, some can actually hurt a job search or career. Here are seven pieces of terrible career advice that you should ignore1. Going to grad school will make you more marketable. Grad school will make you more marketable if youre in a field that requires or rewards graduate degrees, but if youre in one of the many fields that doesnt, employers may find the degree irrelevant.Whats worse is that grad school can even make it harder for you to get hired in many cases, since if youre applying to jobs that dont require the degree, employers may think that their work isnt what you really want to do.2. Treat your job search like a full-time job if you want to be successful. The amount of time a job search takes varies dramatically from field to field and from person to person. If youre junior in your career and applying to a wide range of positions, its possible t hat writing cover letters, tailoring your rsum and networking could take up a significant portion of your time (although it still might leid reach 40 hours a week, and thats fine).However, if youre more senior or simply in a field without a lot of openings, youre probably not going to need to spend (or be able to spend) 40 hours a week on your search. And besides, for fruchtwein people, when it comes to applying to jobs, quality matters far more than quantity.3. It no longer matters how long yourrsumis. Its true that the old one-pagersumrule has relaxed for everyone but very recent graduates, butrsumlength still matters.Rsums that are three pagesorlongerend up diluting the impact of their contents and will make you come across as someone who cant edit and doesnt understand what information matters most.Plus, the strongest candidates limit theirrsums to two pages, so when an experienced hiring manager sees a longrsum, theyre instantly primed to expect a weaker candidate.4. Offer to w ork for a week for free to prove yourself to an employer. In most cases, this is illegal, because it violates minimum wage laws. With a few limited exceptions (like some nonprofits and government agencies), employers are required to pay people who work for them. But even if it werent illegal, most employers wouldnt sign on for this anyway, because it takes an enormous amount of time to train new hires. The first week is nearly always a loss for the employer.5. If an interviewer asks about your weaknesses, answer with something positive. If youve picked up any guide to job searching in the past decade, youve probably seen the advice to claim that your biggest weakness is that you work too hard or youre a perfectionist. But so have most interviewers, and at this point, those answers sound clich and disingenuous. Whats more, they make you sound like you either dont have much self-awareness or youre unwilling to have an honest discussion about your fit for the role youre applying for.Go od interviewers dont want to talk about weaknesses so they can play gotcha, but because they want to make sure they wont put in a job where youll struggle.6. Following up with an employer after you apply for a job shows persistence and enthusiasm. This advice is still a staple of many career centers, but these days, persistent follow-up mostly shows you dont respect hiring managers time and that youre not clear on how the hiring process works. After all, the employer knows that youre interested your application demonstrated that. Now the ball is in their court to decide whether theyre interested in speaking further with you or not. Most employers arent interested in fielding follow-up calls at this stage.7. Track down the hiring managers name so that you can address your cover letter to the right person. This is unnecessary, and most hiring managers dont even notice whether you did or not and far fewer care. If the hiring managers name is easily available, of course its fine to go ahead and use it. But you dont need to call to track it down or do other detective work to find it. Hiring managers care about the content of your application, not whether you spent 20 minutes trying to find out their names.Alison Greenwrites the popularAsk a Manager blog, where she dispenses advice on career, job search and management issues. Shes the author of How to Get a Job Secrets of a Hiring Manager, co-author of Managing to Change the World The Nonprofit Managers Guide to Getting Results and the former chief of staff of a successful nonprofit organization, where she oversaw day-to-day staff management.