We career writers constantly spew the advice we’re able to gather, but it’s always nice to hear that some people are actually listening.

But sometimes we wish you hadn’t.

Yesterday my best buddy, an attorney for a major corporation, called to tell me a strange story. She was interviewing candidates for a new position and as you can imagine they got many interested job seekers.

One particular woman had great credentials but they just didn’t fit this particular job. The candidate was told this but she pushed for an informational interview.

Smart move #1. If you’re not right for the job, it’s always a good idea to get your foot in the door by asking for an informational interview.

She got the interview and was sitting in my friend’s office discussing her credentials. She had researched my friend on Google beforehand and had a bevy of background information on her.

Smart move #2. Before you go in for an interview, do your homework and find out who you’ll be interviewing with. Then search Google, or any social networking sites like LinkedIn or Twitter to find out about their education, background, etc. This will help you find connections with the interviewer that could help you.

But this was when the job seeker fell into a big, black Google hole.

Instead of using the background to find common ground, she just started spouting personal things to my friend about my friend.

“I understand your son is on the swim team at University X,” she said. But then she didn’t offer anything else, such as, “my son is a swimmer.” or “I went to that school.”

Then she said something like, “I see your friend is the author of ‘From the Sandbox to the Corner Office’ and she wrote in the acknowledgements that you slapped her around when she needed it.”

Yes I did write that book and she has slapped me around, but what was her point in bringing this up?

These little nuggets of my friend’s background from this job candidate did nothing to connect the two. In fact, my friend was “creeped out” and quickly tried to wrap up the interview and show her to the door. “I felt like she was stalking me or something,” she says.

I’m calling this faux pas Google-osis. Basically it’s when people are so obsessed with Google that they lose touch with reality. They think everything they find Googling is worth spewing out randomly and will somehow show people around them how smart and tech savvy they are, or maybe even get people to like them.

Well, it won’t unless you have context people!

Context: the parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or passage and clarify its meaning.

Meaning. There has to be meaning to what you say to an interviewer, especially if you’re bringing up personal things. Or else, you just look naive or worse off, a bit loopy. And stay away from talking about a person’s children, please. You can comment on how cute an interviewer’s kids are if there’s a photo on their desk, but digging up info on a child is going to put a parent on the defensive.

I love that people are using the tools we now have available to us to help them advance their careers, but all these tools and advice will never work unless you add one key ingredient — common sense.