Do you send thank you emails after an interview? I used to do so and coached others to do the same. I agreed with Business Insider Managing Editor Jessica Liebman’s position on this for some time. Then, later in my career as a hiring manager for a large company with many, many applicants, I began to feel a bit more neutral about it. The thank-you emails were usually uninspired and had little or no influence on who I hired.
But now I come to the etiquette part: as uninspired as those emails may have been, I responded to every one of them.
What the article misses is that the hiring managers also owe a response to those thank-you emails so the interviewee at least knows their message reached them. This is part of a bigger issue: if you are a hiring manager who interviews a candidate, he or she deserves to know where they stand. Are they in or out of the running?
We have a saying here in Silicon Valley: “It’s a small valley.” I’ve sent many thank-you emails that just vanished into the void and I never heard back from the company, HR or the hiring manager. It’s a small valley, and burning bridges, being rude and forgetting common courtesy does not help you.
What if you don’t want to respond to a plethora of emails? No problem. You don’t have to give out your email address. Use a tool like Jobvite that masks email addresses. Or ask your recruiter to follow up – whatever works for you. But etiquette and common sense suggest you should respond and treat everyone fairly and nicely.
Niceness is important! Please also read “Small Acts of Kindness.”
Click here to find more articles by Tina Shakour on MeaningfulWomen.com.
Tina Shakour lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband Nasir and one very spoiled Shiba Inu named Zuko. She works for the start-up Veetle, and has been an engineer, an Internet TV “personality” and now spends her time loving video, social media and marketing. You can follow her on Twitter (@tinashakour).
A great reminder, Tina! Thank you so much!