During the course of your life, you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of applications you’ll have to fill out. Most are mundane, some are spectacular, some are memorable, some you forget about as you’re filling them in; there are applications for jobs, for school, for apartments, for loans, for insurance, for disability, for marriage, and for countless other reasons. You may be tempted to go on autopilot when going through the application process of any sort, but beware, there are consequences if you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing! Consider the following information carefully before attempting your next rendezvous with an application form.
Pay Attention to the Details
It’s really, really easy not to pay attention to instruction on an application. Sometimes it’s the small print that gets you. Sometimes it’s the fact that you don’t know the answer to a question so you figure you’ll ‘get back to it later’. Sometimes instructions can be violently confusing. No matter which of these situations you find yourself in though, always, always pay attention to the details. Particularly if you are applying for a job or are doing your taxes for the year, you can really lose a chunk of cash simply because you forgot to cross a ‘t’ or dot an ‘i’, or maybe you forgot to sign your name (we’ve all been there).
If At First You Don’t Succeed
One common issue that people have with applications is that they get frustrated if they get denied for some reason. Yes, it can feel bad when you’re denied Social Security benefits, but that’s when you simply need to hire a lawyer that specializes in SSI benefits. It’s really no big deal. If you don’t make it into a college one year, apply the next. Many, many times the failure of an application isn’t because you aren’t good enough, it’s rather because you didn’t fill something out right. And that leads right back to the ‘pay attention to details’ maxim.
Research the Successful
One way to help yourself out when it comes to filling out applications right is by researching people who have done those applications successfully in the past. How did they do it? What are their qualifications? Were they ever denied? Are they the same demographic as you? The more questions you have answered, the better your application skills are going to be. There are great online resources that can help with filling out resumes, which falls in the same category of applications in this regard. Word choice, information selection, and formatting will all help you get to your goal, but you have to make sure that you’re focused from the very beginning on the process.