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The Horrendous Job Seeker Advice You MUST Ignore

The Horrendous Job Seeker Advice You MUST Ignore

When people hear you’re searching for a job, you’re bound to get advice from various sources about how to approach the process most effectively. From your resume to where to find job postings, friends, family members, blogs, and books all have tons of tips on what to do. But with as much great information as there is out there, there’s also plenty of ridiculous job seeker advice that you can simply disregard. Some of these tips include:

Just pack your resume with today’s hottest career buzzwords

Every year, certain buzzwords trend and it seems like you can’t read an article or go to a conference without hearing them. This may lead you to believe that you should incorporate these buzzwords into your resume in order to get a hiring manager’s attention. In reality, many times these terms become so overused that they lose their potency.

Instead, go back to the job description that was used to describe the open position. From there, make sure to incorporate some of the terminology from the posting into your resume. Regardless of whether the business uses a computer or an actual hiring manager to scan resumes, seeing the terms they used echoed in your resume will help to make you stand out.

If it says to send your application to a generic company e-mail address, just do that

Yes, being able to follow the application’s directions is important, but sometimes you have to break the rules in order to make an impression. If you’re shipping your materials off to [email protected], don’t be shocked when your resume gets lost among hundreds of others. Instead, try to find the direct e-mail address of the hiring manager, and submit your stuff that way. It increases the likelihood that the person will see your resume and cover letter instead of having it sit buried underneath hundreds of other e-mails.

Put your salary requirements right on your resume

Some people pass around the notion that doing this is helpful to hiring managers, but it also can cause you to sell yourself short. By listing salary requirements up front, you could be locking yourself into a number when you had the potential to get more than what you listed. Wait to have this conversation until you’re face to face.

Have you gotten any seriously bad job seeker advice? Share it with us in the comments!

Image: leandrocrespi/BigStock.com

Lauren Levine

Lauren Levine is a copywriter/blogger who contributes to a number of magazines and websites including The Frisky, USA Today, and others. She also authors her own blog called Life with Lauren. She loves cooking, anything on the E! network, and is trying to convince herself that running isn't so bad.

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