My wife has a bit of a situation. She applied as a data analyst for a software company and she has gone through four rounds of interviews (staffing company, phone with actual company, in person with actual company, in person again with different people at the actual company). She sent thank you notes in the mail to the people who have interviewed her in person.
She just found out that she sent the first one to the wrong person - a “John Smith” instead of a “John Jones”, if you will. It’s definitely there by now; it would have been there before the second in-person interview happened. She’s worried that this may be a deal breaker, though.
The only time she ever got the person’s last name was in a garbled voicemail left by him before her interview with him; he didn’t give her a card or introduce himself by his full name at the interview. She got the (wrong) name by Googling “John manager (company name) (company location)” when she was addressing the envelope. That was almost two weeks ago. She discovered the error today, when she checked her voicemail and the one he left back then was still on her phone; she thought it had been deleted, so she never checked that when she was looking for his name.
What can/should she do? Call him and apologize? Ignore it and hope for the best? Something else?
I’d say ignore it as for the apology. If no one noticed then why bring attention to it. If someone did notice and was offended then no apology will make it better.
However, is there anything to stop her from sending a properly addressed one? If the interviewer were offended, then maybe receiving a belated thank you will blame everything on the mail room.
Was the letter addressed to the wrong person entirely? He’ll probably think it is weird and toss it. No harm done. If she has the email of the right person then send a thanks by email - this is a software company, not a buggy whip company, right? When I get email thanks I never think the person should have sent a snail mail letter instead.
Anyhow, if this little mistake, even if discovered, was a make or break thing it is not a company where she wants to work.
If it got there before the second interview happened, why are you worried. If sending a thank-you letter to the wrong person (or the right person not getting one) was a deal breaker, would the second interview have happened? It’s also possible it found it’s way back to the right person, depending on the size of the company. It’s been two weeks, I’d pretend like the mistake never happened, at least unless the opportunity to apologize falls right in her lap. Like one of the three people involved mentions it.
It looks like you’re saying this mail was to the person at the staffing company who got her the interview at the actual company. If that’s the case, this is a non-issue, so long as she does follow up with the staffing company somehow. It’s not like they’re going to say, “Well, the Actual Company really wants to hire her as a consultant of ours, but she never wrote us back, so we’re not going to place her there and pick up our huge cut.”
As someone who has a weird name that has interviewed many people and gotten every variety of messed up thank you cards, I can say it never mattered to me. In fact, I never let a thank you card influence me one way or another, nor a cover letter with a resume. In some jobs where I’ve worked, I never even saw the cover letter, because an HR person stripped those out.
Honestly, if I am hiring for a job, I only care about the qualifications on the resume, and the interview that verifies that the qualifications are not fabrications. Beyond that, I don’t care about the type of paper you use, the font you use, or anything else, and I likely won’t even know who the thank you card is from if I have to interview a lot of people.
I will say this for anyone looking for a job right now:
I don’t know who the person is that thought doing a ‘functional resume’ was a good idea. That is, one where you list your skills up front (no matter how old) followed by generic job titles and businesses at the end that just tell me how long you worked there, but doesn’t match jobs to skills. If you tell me you have X skill, and I have no idea whether you have done it five minutes ago or five years ago and how long you did it, and I have to call you to find out, congratulations, because you’re not getting called and your resume just got tossed out. That trick may fool some HR people, but it never works if you are looking for technical folks.
For the resumes I get the skills are at least important as the jobs. There is a very particular set of knowledge I’m looking for, along with experience with certain software tools, and while we are willing to train people in some cases someone who has these skills gets a deeper look. Knowing Excel isn’t worth much to me, but knowledge of the stuff I’m looking for is a lot rarer. Someone with none of these skills may not even get a second look.
I agree. It’s just a resume. You can determine if the level of skill is anywhere near in line with the job requirements with just a phone call. If it is you can determine the rest with an interview where you can go into depth.
Me? I’d probably try and
a) e-mail the person who wrongly got the card (I assume this is someone not involved in the process at all?), to briefly say “Sorry about bothering you; this was meant for someone else. My mistake”. Just so they’re not worrying what it’s about (sure, they’re probably not, but I think it’s polite to let them know).
b) Re-send the thank-you not, with an additional brief apology for being so late because of mis-addressing the first note.
My thinking is that I think an employee who can gracefully admit to and recover from a minor mistake is the kind of employee I want. And a boss who thinks that way is the kind of boss I want.
On the other hand, since she seems to have moved along the process anyway, I wouldn’t fret too much about it.
Taomist - what I do want to see is a traditional resume that allows an apples-to-apples comparison against other candidates. That is, something that says for each job:
Your title, years there, and skills you used at the job, along with hopefully some technical accomplishments.
With regard to that last point, we’ve all worked at companies where several people did a large task. Inevitably, one guy led the task and filled in on all aspects of it where it was needed, staying late and coming in early to get it done. Another guy phoned it in and had to be reminded three times a day to do his job. Everyone else was somewhere in between. I want to know which of these guys you were. Presumably the laziest guy who phoned it in is still going to claim he led the project, and that’s where the interview comes in. Sometimes modesty may even make the guy who led it NOT list it, but I’ll be able to tell in the interview.
Stupid tricks that ‘life coaches’ tell people to do on their resumes that hide a lack of experience don’t really help people other than the life coaches themselves in helping you part with your money. If you are committed to entering a new field, acquire the skills first, or at least make an effort to learn what you can that demonstrates some initiative. Sure, every janitor has the potential to be a engineer if only someone will pay for them to get the on the job training, but put yourself in the employer’s shoes. Why pay you to learn it if someone else already has 90% of the qualifications. Playing games like hiding a lack of skills in a functional resume only hurts you in my opinion because it makes the company scratch their head and say “well, this resume does have the key words I’m looking for but I have no idea how many years and how recent the experience is”. As such, it puts you firmly in the “I will only consider this person if I have no one else better” category, even if you really do have the experience.