There are actually four of them. How do I thank the employer? When do I thank the employer? What do I say? What medium do I use? Should I hand-write a card, or should I send an email, or do both? In this post, I'm going to demystify all of that for you. As part of that process, I've coached many thousands of people for many, many thousands of interviews, and in that process, I've effectively perfected the thinking process, at least based on what I've seen my clients react to and the hiring companies and the success that the candidates that we prepare have had, and to give you an idea of how successful these candidates have been just based on industry averages, our candidates who have been prepared by us and have thanked employers in the manner that we recommend have outperformed the market by 233%, and if you're wondering where a statistic like that comes from, it's simply professional averages of how many job candidates an employer has to interview in order to hire somebody, so we've measured our performance and our candidates performance against that, and they're a lot better, and not all of that can be attributed to the thanking process, but the thanking process is one element that I think really can contribute that.
Let's dive in, those two important aspects I was talking about. Any thank you that you give to anybody, especially an employer, has to have two things, speed and thoughtfulness.
Speed is how quickly you respond after your interview. I recommend 24 hours, and I realize that some of you might not be able to do that for various reasons and scheduling issues, but trust me when I tell you, speed is extremely important.
The second thing that needs to accompany speed is thoughtfulness. That's the care in the words that you put, the energy that you put into that thank you. Was it thoughtful? Was it meaningful to you to be able to express that gratitude for their time and their education on their company and all the things that go along with that? The other thing that you need to understand about these two elements is one without the other typically renders your thank you message meaningless from a benefit perspective. Here's what I mean. If you exit an interview, you walk down the street, and five minutes later, you type a one line thank you email, that's fast, that's speedy, but there's not much thought into it.
An employer probably gets that and thinks, he or she did that out of obligation as opposed to really, genuinely taking the time and care to send me something meaningful. On the other extreme, sending something four, five days later, it's thoughtful, but it's ineffective because it's so slow. They've already put you out of their mind. A reminder four days later isn't really going to help your cause. There's those two things, and I think you need to be aware of those, because every thank you has to have an element of those two things. Now I mentioned three, three benefits of writing a thank you. The first one is you actually get to thank somebody, and there's benefit in that. You are developing a connection. You are developing a little bit of a bond with them thanking them for their time. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed meeting you, and thank you for helping me better understand you and your organization. That's what I'm talking about.
Coming to the second element, if you think about thanking them, everybody is going to thank them, so by thanking them, by sending them a thank you, you're effectively on par with everybody else, because everybody's going to thank them, but the second element is where I think you can really score your points. The second element is where you get to talk about you. You get to sell you. You get to reinforce why you're the best candidate for the job. You get to remind the employer. This is where you talk about why you're the best match, why you'll be a fantastic fit, so the second component of thanking somebody is, I would be a fantastic match because ... Then talk about something that you and the employer or the job interviewer or job interviewers talked about during your interview, and give them a reminder so that they could recollect why you're such a great fit.
People love to be re-assured that they're making good decisions. Help them do that. Give them a reminder. One other thing you can do that is a really nice technique is if you didn't get a chance to talk about something that is important that you think would add to your candidacy is bring it up in the thank you. It's a little bit of additive information, but the thing you want to make sure is you realize in this section of the thank you, remember, what's so awesome about writing a thank you, and especially this part of the thank you, is no one is asking you a question. You get to totally own this portion of the thank you process, so own it! You get to say whatever you want to say, so now you think through what you think would be the best thing to remind the employer, and be specific in that middle section of the thank you. Remind them about how you would be a fantastic match.
Then the third element is you also get to sell yourself here a little bit by helping the employer understand your level of enthusiasm, so give them some re-assurance that you are interested in the opportunity, so to close up your thank you, tell them, I want to let you know after speaking with you, I'm much more interested in the opportunity because....Then give them some valid reasons so that you're not just saying it, you're actually giving them a rationale behind why this is great for you. There are the three things that you essentially want to get into a thank you, thanking them for their time, expressing why you'll be a fantastic match, that's your little sales pitch, and then re-assuring the employer that you're interested in the job.
Now we've talked about the dos. Let's talk a little bit about the don'ts. I've hit a couple of these already, so don't send a one liner. It's fast but not thoughtful. Don't send a one pager. That's actually too long. Don't solely send a card that'll get there too slowly, and whatever you do, don't forget to proofread it a couple times. Maybe even have somebody else proofread it if you're going to hand-write it especially, but spellcheckers will only go so far. You can have correctly spelled words that aren't the correct words that you want to use, so you want to be really, really careful. I hope you really enjoyed this.
Share and subscribe to our newsletter to get notified on new posts
What other job hunters are reading
Free Resume Templates
Comments
Post a Comment