Here's the last blog post in a series I'm doing to refute the ideas in what I believe is a misguided article: "Five Out-Of-Date Job Search Tactics" from Bloomberg Business. (You can feel free to weigh in using the Comments section below.)
They say: (Avoid) "Gratuitous Research."
This one cracks me up. Apparently, the author feels you can be "too prepared" for a job interview -- and that, rather than coming across as an informed, intelligent, interested job seeker, she thinks that looks like "brown-nosing."
Really? And yet, in that same section, she advocates looking at LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and Glassdoor to prepare for the interview.
So which is it? I think it's a fine line. A job seeker can't point out that they prepped for the interview by "spending the weekend researching the company"? That's "groveling"? I think that's showing that the job seeker takes the interview seriously.
I think you can "advance a business conversation" by referencing where you heard about the "Acme Explosives-Toontown Motors merger" -- you might find the hiring manager has some insight into the author of the article you read -- particularly a bias from the article's author that may not have been apparent to the casual reader but that impacts the inference in the article.
All in all, this article underscores the problem with a lot of the mainstream media articles aimed at jobseekers today. There is a need for careers-related content (as I point out in my "Feed the Media" teleseminar -- available in the "Free Level" of BeAResumeWriter.com), and unfortunately, that leads to a lot of mis-information being spread as "gospel."
But it's up to us as careers industry professionals to speak up and refute mis-information when we see it.
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