Why does nobody talk about how bad the 'just apply to everything' advice is?

I got laid off from my marketing job in April and spent a month blasting out over 200 applications for any role with 'marketing' in the title. I finally got an offer, but it was for a sales job that wanted me to cold call all day. The recruiter literally said, 'Your resume showed you're good at talking to people.' I learned that mass applying with a generic resume just gets you mismatched offers. Now I'm only targeting 5-10 jobs a week and rewriting my resume for each one. Has anyone else gotten a totally wrong job offer from applying too broadly?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendy2052mo ago

My 300 generic apps got me an offer to sell timeshares in Florida.

norag382mo ago

Has anyone thought about how this advice actually trains the job sites to ignore you? If you just click apply on everything, the algorithm starts to see you as a low quality candidate and shows your profile to fewer real recruiters. It's like spam filtering for resumes. You end up only getting seen by the desperate companies with bad jobs, like that sales role. That's why focusing on fewer, better applications works better.

taylor_mitchell8018d ago

Stuck to maybe 10 jobs a week that actually fit my skills and got way better responses than blasting out apps. @norag38 is right about the algorithm thing, seen it happen to friends.