YOU LEAVE YOUR interviewers with a strong, positive image and don’t want that memory to slip with the passage of time and a busy schedule. But out of sight means out of mind, and out of mind means out of the job offer race, so following up with your interviewers shows that you pay attention to detail and are enthusiastic about the job. The longer the decision-making period, the less distinct candidates become from each other in the hiring manager’s memory.
The first thing you do on leaving the interview is breathe a sigh of relief. The second is make sure that “out of sight, out of mind” will not apply to you. You do this by starting a follow-up procedure immediately after the interview: Sitting in your car, on the bus, train, or plane, write a recap of the interview while it’s still fresh in your mind.
This information will help with your follow-up with this company, and reviewing all your follow-up notes after two or three interviews may alert you to a weakness you hadn’t noticed. Make notes on these categories:
Identify aspects of your interview that went poorly. A person does not get offered a job based solely on strengths; those questions will be easy enough for you to answer. On the other hand, you may get that job offer based on your lack of negatives compared to the other candidates. It is important to identify any negatives from your performance so that you can overcome them in your follow-up and during subsequent interviews.
Using the information gathered from this exercise, you can begin a follow-up campaign. Knowing if there is another round of interviews or if the decision is going to be made tomorrow afternoon or next week has a significant impact on how and when you will follow up.
Knowing where you are in the selection cycle will help you execute a well-paced follow-up campaign. We’ll start with a follow-up after the first interview in a series.
If you can find something interesting related to the job, company, competition, industry, or profession, your first follow-up will be professional-casual, reinforcing the tone of an ongoing conversation between two professionals with a common interest. You’ll send an e-mail that opens with a salutation: “Hi John/Jane,” if you are close enough in years and experience to use first names. If you are younger and have been encouraged to use first names, that’s okay too, but reverting to the formalities of Mr./Ms. in written communication (until after the second meeting), will usually be received as respectful and flattering. If use of first names hasn’t been encouraged, don’t presume: It won’t win you points, while showing professional courtesies always does.
Note the short, punchy, conversational tone of this sample follow-up e-mail; it is considerably more casual and direct than traditional follow-up letters:
“It was great to meet you this afternoon. I really enjoyed talking about the _______________ position. Your comments/our conversation on _______________ [the topic of your attachment, or what you paste into the body copy] has been buzzing in the back of my mind all day. I just ran across this and knew you’d enjoy it. On a deadline, so I’ll follow up properly as soon as my schedule permits.”
Send the e-mail between 7 P.M. and 10 P.M. that evening or early the next morning when you first get up, whichever is closer to the limits of the twenty-four-hour mark. Do not send an e-mail during business hours.
Your first meeting will have tagged you as someone different. This initial follow-up aims to continue the differentiation. The tone is respectful, and shows a committed professional working late (you can’t write fully because you are working on a deadline) and being intelligently enthusiastic (you are actively engaged in thinking about this job and your profession outside of business hours).
Your formal first follow-up should arrive two to no later than three days after the first interview, or after your first informal follow-up; adjusting your timing to the needs of each separate selection cycle. This formal follow-up letter should make the following points:
Here are some ideas and phrases you’ll find useful:
Keep the note short (less than one page) and address it to the hiring manager or main interviewer if you haven’t met your new boss yet. If you interviewed with other people and the meeting was more than cursory, you can send separate e-mails to each. Remember:
Cover the following points in this phone conversation:
If you are making a call, it is best not to write everything out in full sentences: You’ll sound like one of those telemarketers. Instead, write down the bullet point you want to make: You’ll sound more natural.
If the selection cycle is normal, three interviews for each of a handful of short-list candidates can take three or four weeks, so with the second and subsequent interviews (excepting the final interview), your follow-up pattern should replicate that of the initial interview.
1. An informal follow-up within twenty-four hours, essentially saying:
“Good to see you again Jack and to meet the guys. Thanks for your time. Preparing for a client meeting. I’ll get back to you properly in the next couple of days.”
You might replace this with an equally brief phone call, when there is something to warrant a brief conversation. If the manager doesn’t pick up, leave a complete but brief message. You don’t need to call back.
2. A formal follow-up, following the same principles and timing as before. As the interview cycle progresses, you want to maintain awareness of your candidacy, but you don’t want to be seen as doing anything by rote.
Although the bulk of business correspondence these days is done via e-mail, remember that a traditional letter can make you stand out.
You don’t want to make a pest of yourself by calling or e-mailing every day, but neither do you want to drop out of sight. If the process stretches out into a month or months, make contact every couple of weeks, but keep it very low-volume. You don’t want to seem overly anxious, just interested. Google.com has a nice feature that allows you to track news on any topic you choose. Taking advantage of this allows you to keep up to speed on your profession and factors affecting it, and this knowledge-gathering can be put to additional good use.
As you did before, you might send profession-relevant information:
“Harry, being so busy you may not have seen the article I’ve attached. It’s about new legislation that’s bound to affect us.
Regards,
Martin
P.S. I’m still determined to be your next _______________.”
You can do this in an e-mail and/or by traditional mail.
Getting a funny e-mail always brightens the day, and giving the interviewer a smile is a great way to be remembered, but this requires judgment. Don’t send anything of a sexual, political, or religious nature, as it constitutes a breach of professional values.
The same considerations apply when sending a cartoon via traditional mail. This works because it’s a different delivery medium and the cartoon causes a smile; plus, if you’re lucky, it gets stuck on the wall or passed on.
Check out the follow-up letter templates at www.knockemdead.com. Here you’ll find four different categories of cover letters, plus advice on networking, follow-up (telephone and face-to-face), candidacy resurrection, negotiation, rejection, acceptance, resignation, and after-hire thank-you letters.
Sometimes jobs remain open for a long time, or they may be frozen because of budgetary constraints and reposted under a different job title. Here’s what you do:
Not sure this will work? As I was updating Knock ’em Dead, I heard from Michael, who wrote to me through the website; he said, in part, “I have been tracking jobs since last spring that are now reappearing and I’m wondering what to do.”
Not long after I sent him the above ideas I heard from him again. “Thanks Martin, I spoke with the recruiter a couple of times, then last Thursday, called the hiring manager directly. We spoke for almost ten minutes, so it was a well-received call. She admired my guts in calling her directly because she had recently been out of work herself, and hated making those calls” (my italics). It is this kind of extra effort that pays off in job offers.
The longer the hiring process drags on, the less likely it is that you will get the offer. It can happen, but the odds get longer as time goes by. Don’t let your job search stand still while you’re waiting for a response from one company. Remember: You don’t have the job until you have a written offer in hand.
Based on many years’ experience, I can tell you that a decision next Friday means that an offer will be extended on that date, while the actual decision will be made at least seventy-two hours to five days prior (allowing HR the time to shepherd the paperwork through the authorization process). Of course this isn’t the case if you are interviewing for a job today and they tell you the decision will be made at the end of the week, and as always you adapt the follow-up strategy to reflect the demands of the hiring cycle.
If you know in advance that a decision is coming, say, Friday of the following week, you can aim to get an e-mail on the hiring manager’s desk this Friday/Monday; a slight variation of that message might arrive via traditional mail on the same or following day; and you can make a telephone call no later than Wednesday morning. This leaves seventy-two hours before decision time.
The content of these communications should cover:
If a hiring decision is imminent, succinctly following up on your e-mails and letters within seventy-two hours of decision time might help seal the deal. Work out what you want to say, write it down in bullet points, and make practice calls to a friend, keeping it brief and to the point. Then, when you are ready, make the call; you have nothing to lose and a job offer to gain.