I had a (pretty good!) job interview today. I know it behooves me to pass on thanks.
The problem is, no one involved in my interview(s) gave me real contact information. The only two points I have are the e-mail of the HR person who initiated this whole thing (who was not a participant) and the phone number of one of the interviewers (given in a document I worked with).
Which of those, if either, should I use? Or should I just call the front desk? I’m afraid, in the excitement, names slipped my mind.
Mmm, that’s a tight spot. If it were me, I would email my HR contact, and ask for the mailing address and official titles of the people I interviewed with.
For the future, ask for a business card from anyone you interview with. As soon as you leave, scribble a few notes on the back of the card, like something notable about them or something you talked about (so you can say in your note, “I enjoyed speaking with you about…” – kinda jogs the memory, yes… interviewers are human they forget names too)
Email the HR person and ask them to forward the thank you note to the interviewers. Include a thank you note to the HR person and a separate thank you to the people who interviewed you.
Hmm. Should I really give away the fact that I couldn’t remember names? Wouldn’t that make me look bad? (It was suggested I send a more general mail - that it would be put in my file for others to see anyway if I sent it right to HR.)
I will certainly be more careful about this kind of thing in the future, though. Thanks for the thoughts!
Write to that person asking them to pass your thanks to the interviewers. And say “the interviewers” - there’s not need to point out that you don’t remember several names you’ve heard once, at a time when you were nervous.
Speaking as someone who actually interviews people, I generally could care less about the follow up “thank you” everyone says you are supposed to send. Typically, the decision has already been made in the interview itself and a follow up email is not going to sway me one way or the other.
Certainly forgetting the interviewer’s name doesn’t make you look good. Don’t they normally give you an itinerary of who you will be meeting with anyway?
As someone who regularly interviews external candidates, I agree. The follow up thank you card/e-mail comes across as “pleading”. Say your “thank you’s” at the end of the interview as you say goodbye and are leaving their office.
In this case I would probably follow up with the HR person and say thanks for arranging my day at ___, I was really impressed by ___. I think it’s a great match, please let me know if you have any more questions for me. It sounds like none of the interviewers offered you a business card, and I would take that as a sign that they let HR do the follow-ups. They didn’t have to wait for you to ask, some people come into the room with a card in hand.
Entirely JMHO, I’m not anyone special, just someone who interviewed for IT jobs a bunch of times.
Well! I’m glad SOMEBODY finally said it!
Too often, people go on about needing a follow up ‘thank you.’ I knew, intuitively, that it was just another way of bothering/pestering/pressuring the interviewers, but, now, it’s official. Good job.
Not only that, but a lot of people stress the idea that it has to be a handwritten note, to show them you really care and took the time to be so personal.
Only my (and lots of other peoples’) handwriting looks like crap. Even if I make it look the nicest possible, it still looks like a five-year-old wrote it. That couldn’t possibly leave a good impression on anyone.
Yup. In engineering, most of the interviewers probably got handed your resume that morning, and are spending half the interview thinking about the work they’re going to have to catch up on because of the 45 minutes they’re stuck with you. Bothering them later with a thank you note isn’t going to help anything.
Once when I was a hiring manager at a small company, I had a guy I had interviewed call up and lie to the receptionist to get to my direct line - he told her he couldn’t say who he was, but it was very important he talk to me. At the time, I had a newborn at home, so you can imagine the scenarios that went through my head when the receptionist told me this. When it turned out to be this guy calling to thank me for the interview and give me one more piece of info he hadn’t had at the time, his resume went straight from the short list pile to the trash.
Yup. In engineering, most of the interviewers probably got handed your resume that morning, and are spending half the interview thinking about the work they’re going to have to catch up on because of the 45 minutes they’re stuck with you. Bothering them later with a thank you note isn’t going to help anything.
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Well, I also think that if you snail mail it, it will get there after the job has already been given to somebody else. If you email it, it’ll be just more clutter; or, something for them to laugh at you about! (Hey, this idiot doesn’t know Fortran, and he thinks we’ll overlook that because he sent us this note!) Hoo-ha!