Job interviews are very strange events. Before you get to the interview you have no idea what the experience is going to be like. You have to adjust to every interview situation in real time, in the moment.
That's why when you nail a job interview, you feel victorious! When you have a great job interview, you leave the interview facility feeling ten feet tall.
You came, you saw and you conquered! That's a great feeling.
That's why it's doubly deflating to wait a week or two (or three or four) after a great job interview and hear nothing back at all.
You send your thank-you notes and you wait and all you hear is crickets chirping. No one acknowledges your thank-you note or your email messages. You know it was a great interview -- everyone you met was enthusiastic about you.
They asked you tough questions and you gave them fantastic, thoughtful answers. So why the radio silence now?
In my experience there are three reasons for a great job interview followed by a total shutdown in communications:
- They already had a candidate in mind -- the chairman's nephew, for example -- but they loved what you had to say at your interview and were enthusiastic when they met you because you're a smart person and you have good ideas.
- There's no job opening at all, but the company likes to interview brilliant people like you from time to time to gather free ideas.
- There is a job opening and you are a finalist for the job, but they're terrible at follow-up and may take many more weeks to respond to you.
Since you don't know and probably can't figure out on your own which of the three scenarios above applies to your situation, your best bet is to keep sending out Pain Letters and not to pin your job-search hopes on the people who loved you so much in the interview room and then forgot you exist the minute you left their offices.
That being said, here is our three-step plan for upping the odds in your favor after a job interview.
People are busy, and some people are not only busy but spaced-out as well. At Human Workplace we joke that hiring managers live in Brigadoon, the imaginary Scottish village popularized in the movie with my idol Gene Kelly.
Brigadoon only appears out of the mist once every 200 years. When a hiring manager meets you and loves you, he or she can easily slip back into the mist for weeks or months.
They'll tell you "We'll get back to you next week" but then they forget they ever said that.
Three months later you're still sitting by the phone waiting for a message!
Don't sit by the phone. Do this, instead:
Three-Step Interview Followup Plan
1) When you get home from the job interview, prepare and send your handwritten thank-you notecard and a more in-depth email follow-up message as explained here.
2) One week later if you haven't heard anything, drop an email message or a voicemail message on your hiring manager. Don't say "I interviewed with you last week" or talk about the job opening at the company (we'll use Acme Explosives as our example) at all. Instead, mention the Business Pain you and your hiring manager discussed in the interview, like this:
(Voicemail example)
Hi Sam! It's Waldo Jones here -- I came over to your office last week and we talked about the issues getting your e-commerce site launched. If you're still dealing with that and want to dig into it, here's my number: 212-867-5309.
That's all. Don't beg for the job, and don't call more than once.
3) Three weeks after Step 2 above -- that is, a month after your interview, if you haven't heard anything, leave another voicemail or send an email message that says "Hi Sam, I'm guessing that you found a way to solve your e-commerce site launch problem. I'm going to close up the file on Acme Explosives -- all the best to you and your team."
Don't take your eye off the ball for anybody until you've signed a job offer. When you have a great job interview, send another Pain Letter!
When you have a lousy job interview, send two more Pain Letters out! Your focus is your job search, and nobody has the right to deter you from that goal, no matter how heartily they laugh at your jokes or how lavishly they praise your experience.
Until you've accepted a job, you will pursue your job search with single-minded focus. Your mojo is the fuel that powers your career and everything else you undertake in life. Don't waste mojo on people who don't have three seconds to send an email message and update you on their recruiting process!
Remember that not everybody deserves your talents. Only the people who get you, deserve you!
