Do You Send a Thank You Note After Your Interview?
In a recent article for Insider, Executive Managing Editor Jessica Liebman made one thing clear about her hiring practices: you’d better send a thank you letter if you want the job. “When I first started hiring, I came up with a simple rule: we shouldn’t move a candidate to the next stage of the interview process unless they send an email of thanks,” she wrote. However, this rule was not well received on social media.
“This is an arbitrary element of control that depends both on the culture and on the generation”, – he wrote in the Twitter one user in response to a story Libman. “… Gratitude is great, but it doesn’t disqualify.” (In a subsequent story, Liebman later clarified that this is not a decisive factor in the hiring process, but simply a “rule of thumb” for reasons of etiquette.)
A thank you note usually doesn’t hurt, unless you misspell the interviewer’s name or feel too needy. According to Ali Stelzer, senior talent acquisition partner at G / O Media Group, this is also an indicator that you are truly interested in the job. “It tells the interviewer and the team that you cared about the follow-up and are motivated after a face-to-face meeting and a better understanding of the position / team.”
Personally, I don’t think thank you notes are absolutely necessary if this is not the job I want, although I could write a short “Thank you for your time” and nothing more, for a job that I fear from. (If I have mixed feelings about the opportunity, and not sending a thank you letter deprives me of the opportunity to be considered, then I would not mind missing out on the opportunity to work there.) On at least two occasions, I did not send a follow-up email letter and received an offer or still moved on to the next step.
It also depends on the company itself. If you’re applying to a corporation that interviews hundreds of candidates a week, rather than a small company without a human resources department, a thank you letter to your interviewer may carry more weight in the latter case. A friend of mine even mails handwritten thank-you notes; in one case, a few months after she received a job offer and had already started working for the company, her interviewer-turned-supervisor finally found her card while rummaging through her mail, so it’s safe to say that the card is not enough influenced her recruitment. (Again, this just depends on the company.)
As we wrote earlier , a good note should be short and to the point; Thank them for their time and flesh out what you discussed, or perhaps referring to other small talk you may have had.
Do you send thank you notes after your interview? What do you include in yours? And for hiring managers, does this have any impact on who you decide to hire?