by
2015-01-09
January 9, 2014 – This morning on Fox35, David Sprinkle, Managing Partner at Veritas Recruiting Group, discusses common career advice that you should ignore.
Will that graduate degree make you more marketable? Depends… Grad school will make you more marketable if you’re in a field that requires or rewards graduate degrees, but if you’re in one of the many fields that doesn’t, employers may find the degree irrelevant. What’s worse is that grad school can even make it harder for you to get hired in many cases, since if you’re applying to jobs that don’t require the degree, employers may think that their work isn’t what you really want to do.
Work for Free to Prove Yourself? Don’t offer to work for free…. Aside from the legal ramifications, offering to work for free screams desperation. Companies and hiring managers want to hire someone that is in demand. Good companies know that you get what you pay for…
“If an interviewer asks about your weaknesses, answer with something positive.”
If you’ve picked up any guide to job searching in the past decade, you’ve probably seen the advice to claim that your biggest weakness is that you work too hard or you’re a perfectionist. But so have most interviewers, and at this point, those answers sound cliché and disingenuous. What’s more, they make you sound like you either don’t have much self-awareness or you’re unwilling to have an honest discussion about your fit for the role you’re applying for. Take an honest look in the mirror and see if you can determine some true weaknesses that you need to work on and then put a plan in place. You can also talk to your previous managers and/or look through you’re former reviews/evaluations to find areas to work on. It is important that you be honest and show how you’re working to overcome your weaknesses rather than give disingenuous ‘pat’ answers.