Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips
Job-hunting tips from the January 7, 2002 issue of
QuintZine.
In our article about how to conduct a long-distance
job search, we suggest checking out college career centers
in your targeted new city. To expand on that idea, career
columnist Carol Kleiman points out that community college
career centers can be a great resource and are often open
to the public because they are subsidized by public tax dollars.
A fee may be charged for services, but it won't be as expensive
as a private career counselor. And, of course, this community-college
suggestion applies to all job-seekers, not just those searching
from a distance.
A tip that syndicated columnists Kate Wendleton and
Dale Dauten found important enough to include in their
"Best Tips of 2001" column relates to our recent article
about maximizing Internet job-hunting. "Job-hunters aren't
trying to deceive a company into hiring them for a job for
which they have few qualifications," Wendleton and Dauten write.
"No, they read an ad and think, 'I could do that,'" and then,
'What have I got to lose by sending a resume?' Most of them
are right: They probably could do the work. But companies want
to hire those with proof, usually by having done the job
somewhere else. When managers take a chance on the
underqualified, they are usually current employees or
friends/relatives, not strangers with resumes." We said in
our article that job-seekers who submit resumes in response
to online ads for jobs for which they are not qualified clog up
the process, making it harder for those who ARE qualified.
Bottom line: Unless you truly believe you can make a case for
yourself, and the job is your absolute dream, don't apply for jobs
you don't qualify for.
The old rule about not lying on your resume was hammered
home recently by the fiasco surrounding would-be Notre Dame
football coach George O'Leery, who was punted out of his new
job coaching the Irish after one week when it was discovered
he had lied on his resume about having a master's degree and
fibbed about details of his own football-playing career. The
moral of O'Leery's story is that even 20 years later, these
untruths can come back to haunt you. O'Leery had many years
to right the wrongs on his resume, and he should have done so.
Read his tale of woe.
In our article about how to conduct a long-distance
job search, we suggest checking out college career centers
in your targeted new city. To expand on that idea, career
columnist Carol Kleiman points out that community college
career centers can be a great resource and are often open
to the public because they are subsidized by public tax dollars.
A fee may be charged for services, but it won't be as expensive
as a private career counselor. And, of course, this community-college
suggestion applies to all job-seekers, not just those searching
from a distance.
