Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?
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@jinpa said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
If you're hiring a salesman, sure. If you're hiring for anything else, to base your hiring decision on your perception of their salesmanship is absurd.
Not necessarily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill. In a job interview you are trying to sell them on why they should hire you and pay you what you want and they are trying to sell you on why you should work there for what they are offering.
Sadly, both sides are usually pretty shitty at their sales pitch.
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@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@jinpa said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
If you're hiring a salesman, sure. If you're hiring for anything else, to base your hiring decision on your perception of their salesmanship is absurd.
Not necessarily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill. In a job interview you are trying to sell them on why they should hire you and pay you what you want and they are trying to sell you on why you should work there for what they are offering.
Sadly, both sides are usually pretty shitty at their sales pitch.
Being able to select the best product/service without relying on salesmen is a valuable skill too, and it seems underrated.
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@sockpuppet7 anyone who thinks they don't sell is a fool. Whether you are selling your friends on going for Mexican and margaritas instead of burgers and beer, or you are selling your supervisor on why you should be paid more, or you are selling a potential mate on why they should give you their number, or whatever...we all sell.
Once you find the best solution without engaging a salesperson in the process you then need to sell your team on why they should use it.
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@heterodox said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
As an interviewer, I've never given my e-mail address to an interviewee; all contact with the company is supposed to go through HR/the recruiter.
This. I'd be far more likely to send a thank you note to the interviewer if I had his/her contact info, but that's rare. What am I supposed to thank HR for, doing their #&@&$+# job and forwarding my resume to the manager? Or the recruiter? "Thank you for including my resume among the dozens you dumped on the manager in an attempt to make a commission for yourself."
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@jinpa said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
It is actually an old-school practice. It was considered good manners to send a hand-written letter after an interview.
Yes. I've been told this within the last decade, even. Handwritten note on good stationery. No, I've never done it.
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@jinpa said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@DoctorJones said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@boomzilla said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
I've always sent thank you emails (or letters ) after interviews, though it has admittedly been a while
Really? I've never heard of this practice before today, so I assumed it was some new-ish millennial
bullshit.Serious questions: is it actually an old-school practice? Is it quite well known? Is it more prevalent in the US than in Europe?
Just curious.
It is actually an old-school practice. It was considered good manners to send a hand-written letter after an interview. I remember being surprised when employers did not even bother to let me know that I was no longer under consideration. Then one time in the last ten years, I got a letter from an employer I had applied (but not yet interviewed with). The actual letter was not left in my mail box, because it was certified mail, signature-required. They must be very interested! I went to the post office, signed for the letter, and, you guessed it, it was a rejection letter.
I was pleasantly surprised when I applied for a job in Ireland by mail, and they replied with a personal rejection letter.
The practise of sending rejection letters ended shortly after large corporations got flooded with applicants from India and Middle-East. Or, in some countries, after unemployment benefits got dependent on the number of job applications sent in the past month. Either way, any publicly advertised technical position gets hundreds of applications now, most of which are garbage.
Answering all with a physical letter would be too expensive. Answering only those from the same country would be "racist". So it's either automated e-mail rejections or nothing.
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@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
ily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill.
It's like lockpicking.
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
ily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill.
It's like lockpicking.
Lockpicking is a neat skill to have. I've lost my old lockpick set though, and I am decades out of practice.
But it's useful once in a blue moon, so I put it right up there with the skill set to build a basic house.
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
especially when most HR people and managers in general always try hard not to leave a trail in writing but instead tell you things in the hallways or over the phone.
Just a quick email to confirm my understanding of the conversation we had at the watercooler 5 minutes ago...
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
ily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill.
It's like lockpicking.
Must. Not. Make.
. Joke....
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@thegoryone said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
God only knows how many fantastic applicants she may have passed up by being petty and treating them like ill-mannered children.
Obviously, a fantastic applicant for her is only one who knows where their place is: on their knees, thanking her for spending her paid work time in their unworthy company and not even letting them know whether or not they wasted the vacation they took to see her.
Lovely workplace.
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Seems Business Insider like playing "Where's Wally":
"Where's the PoC?"
On the 'cultural' issue that people have mentioned, a more serious take on it:
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@topspin said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
ily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill.
It's like lockpicking.
Must. Not. Make.
. Joke....Every American who complains about their used cars salesmen, should visit Poland for comparison.
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@PJH said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
especially when most HR people and managers in general always try hard not to leave a trail in writing but instead tell you things in the hallways or over the phone.
Just a quick email to confirm my understanding of the conversation we had at the watercooler 5 minutes ago...
Followed by:
<crickets>
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@topspin you retain that knowledge between programming languages as well.
Isn't that exactly what I said?!
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@PJH said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
especially when most HR people and managers in general always try hard not to leave a trail in writing but instead tell you things in the hallways or over the phone.
Just a quick email to confirm my understanding of the conversation we had at the watercooler 5 minutes ago...
Followed by:
<crickets>
That's on them - the paper trail is now there, in your outbox, showing your side. Lack of rely would normally be taken as positive acceptance, since the opposite would elicit a denial.
Should the recipient "deny" receiving it, that shows either bad form by them as an individual, or demonstrates a serious, selective, failing about the email system...
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@PJH said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Steve_The_Cynic said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@PJH said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
especially when most HR people and managers in general always try hard not to leave a trail in writing but instead tell you things in the hallways or over the phone.
Just a quick email to confirm my understanding of the conversation we had at the watercooler 5 minutes ago...
Followed by:
<crickets>
That's on them - the paper trail is now there, in your outbox, showing your side. Lack of rely would normally be taken as positive acceptance, since the opposite would elicit a denial.
Should the recipient "deny" receiving it, that shows either bad form by them as an individual, or demonstrates a serious, selective, failing about the email system...
Unless it's outlook where you can retroactively make email vanish if you know the right guy in tech support.
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@Carnage said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Unless it's outlook where you can retroactively make email vanish if you know the right guy in tech support.
If you're that leary/suspicious of the company then CYA should probably involve copious use of the BCC field to another non-work email address for such situations.
But then again, if it's that far gone, then we start getting into the realms of "why are you still working in such a toxic workplace?"
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@PJH said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
POC
What's POC in this context? I fail at guessing (C = Culture?).
<image />
This sums up the problem quite nicely. The procedures for applying to a job vary a lot. Do you list every little thing you've done since attaining conciousness in your CV/Resume, or do you keep it as bare-bones as possible? Do you proudly proclaim that you've volutered in the government sponsored propaganda corps, or should you rather keep that a bit quiet? Some places want you to attach a picture of yourself to your application (to the point that job fairs have professional photographers attend with whom you can book an appointment beforehand -- and, yes, people play dress-up for those photos), other places absolutely forbid this. Even regarding how much you're expected to dress-up for an interview doesn't exactly come with a single correct answer.
Some of the stuff you can find out, some of it you can't easily.
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@cvi said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
What's POC in this context? I fail at guessing (C = Culture?).
People Of Colour. Melanin sufficent.
Or Person, in this specific context.
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@cvi said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Do you list every little thing you've done since attaining conciousness in your CV/Resume, or do you keep it as bare-bones as possible?
List what is relevant to the position being applied for and the employer.
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@dkf there are two very common, very annoying corner cases with that approach:
- Suppose you have three pages of stuff to write about that's relevant for the job. What do you do?
- Suppose you have almost nothing to list that's directly relevant to the job, but you have a lot of irrelevant experience. What do you do?
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Suppose you have three pages of stuff to write about that's relevant for the job. What do you do?
Under FooBar Inc - 2007-present: I just put 'Notable Projects' and list my 'greatest hits' out of the most relevant ones. Making sure to mention revenue for the multiple MM ones.
@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Suppose you have almost nothing to list that's directly relevant to the job, but you have a lot of irrelevant experience. What do you do?
Same deal, but list the most prestigious/highest revenue projects instead.
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@Cursorkeys said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Suppose you have almost nothing to list that's directly relevant to the job, but you have a lot of irrelevant experience. What do you do?
Same deal, but list the most prestigious/highest revenue projects instead.
What if none of your work was particularly prestigious? Because, you know, most people's jobs aren't particularly prestigious.
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Cursorkeys said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Suppose you have almost nothing to list that's directly relevant to the job, but you have a lot of irrelevant experience. What do you do?
Same deal, but list the most prestigious/highest revenue projects instead.
What if none of your work was particularly prestigious? Because, you know, most people's jobs aren't particularly prestigious.
There's always something I'd have thought, even it was just an internal thing and only you doing it: "Led team to develop a new
xusing technologyy, resulting in high user-satisfaction and savings to the business of overzman-hours p/a.
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@Gąska For sales purposes, there is always some project in ones history that can be jazzed up a bit to sound fancier. It's still a rather bad idea to outright lie, but the CV is more of a sales pitch than a list of all the boring shit one has done while working.
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@Carnage said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
It's still a rather bad idea to outright lie
Doesn't look like it (see @Cursorkeys's "led team"). Outright lying seems okay as long as you have the appropriate skills to do the thing you lied about doing, but for real this time.
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
What if none of your work was particularly prestigious?
Well, it's not really making much of a case for you to get the job in that case, is it?
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@Carnage said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
It's still a rather bad idea to outright lie
Doesn't look like it (see @Cursorkeys's "led team"). Outright lying seems okay as long as you have the appropriate skills to do the thing you lied about doing, but for real this time.
I'd count that under 'jazzed up' if it was the only thing you had to mention. And when talking about it you'd need to be honest, 'it was primarily coded by myself with input from blah' and so on. If you literally did the work in a sealed box and wrote that then you wouldn't be able to talk about it in the interview without admitting no-one else was involved at all. Fine line and all that.
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@dkf only prestigious people deserve a job as a regular back-of-basement programmer developing run-of-the-mill CRUD system?
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@Gąska No, but if all you've done is sit there like a sack of mouldy potatoes, why the fuck would anyone give you a job?
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@dkf because 90% of developer jobs don't require anything more than a sack of mouldy potatoes? Look at it from the opposite way - why would anyone give a mundane job to someone grossly overqualified for it?
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@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@jinpa said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
If you're hiring a salesman, sure. If you're hiring for anything else, to base your hiring decision on your perception of their salesmanship is absurd.
Not necessarily. Everyone shits on salespeople, but it is a valuable skill. In a job interview you are trying to sell them on why they should hire you and pay you what you want and they are trying to sell you on why you should work there for what they are offering.
Sadly, both sides are usually pretty shitty at their sales pitch.
It's a valuable skill only in the context of bad hiring procedures (and cultural expectations). You shouldn't want employees (people in general) being good at selling themselves, that means that what wins is what's most convincing, not what's actually best. The extreme case is Elon Musk. Charismatic fella with questionable judgement. Of course that doesn't mean that you should pander to social cripples, because you want the workplace to be a bearable place.
(And even then, what's an insecure/shy/reserved/eccentric person gotta do? Work jobs below his skill level just because he's not a politician?).
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@dkf if all you did was "sitting like a sack of mouldy potatoes" (what does that even mean?), evidently there are jobs that require just that, otherwise you wouldn't have had that job in the first place. That everything must be exciting and memorable and life-changing and meaningful is a lie. A job is a job is a job. Assuming you weren't fired because you were sitting like a sack of mouldy potatoes, in which case a large share of the blame often lies onto the employer.
Like, in my current job, I work as a language teacher and occasional translator. Have been doing it for ten years. How can I spruce it up? I assume that if I apply for the position of, say, international relations <feel-good buzzword, eg. manager/specialist> in a company, the employers (or interviewers) know what my skillset is and how I can be useful to them. The only thing I could think of is to say that I translated marketing materials and technical documentation for companies operating in different fields, that I'm quick to acquire the lexicon and style (says who?), etc.
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I went on a round of job interviews back in 1989. I registered with an agency who set me up with one or two promising leads, all over the country.
So I got back from one of these after a drive of about 100 miles or so, to find my phone had been ringing off the proverbial hook. The agency had been trying to get hold of me to demand why I had not rung the company straight back to thank them kindly for their time. I replied (quite reasonably, I thought) that for one thing I had thanked them personally at the time, and for another, I had only just got through my front door.
Apparently the agency had contacted the company immediately after my interview had been scheduled to finish, to ask them what they thought of me. Apparently I hadn't come across as "enthusiatic" enough. I explained that I was an engineer, and I had a phlegmatic personality which just does not do fake enthusiasm. I had spent the time pondering what I was hearing, and involving in a dialogue to determine whether I was right for the job. So "enthusiasm" hadn't been my first port of call.
She informed me that unless I shaped up and changed my attitude, they'd be finding me no more interviews to attend. I concurred with their final assessment of the situation and contacted another agency.
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@Carnage said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
all the boring shit one has done while working.
- fell asleep on the crapper
- discussed my dislake of language x and tooling y on TDWTF
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
On the other hand, most of the Europe has much more relaxed and overall better conditions for employees including the laws protecting them and their basic human rights -- we have 40 hour work weeks, we have social security, we have health insurance, we are insured by employer against injury and death 24/365, we have paid sick leave and maternity leave, we have minimum 20 working days paid vacations with added benefits as we get older (more days, etc), we are protected against wrongful termination and can't be fired without prior written warning, but you lot would probably call all of that dirty socialism while we call it mutual respect and fair treatment.
TIL I somehow live and work in Europe without ever realizing it.
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Yes, there are shitty and abusive employers in Europe too (mostly retail crap like supermarket chains), but even that is better than the most I read about the USA.
The good stuff almost never hits the media. It is only the most egregious stuff that hits the media, and hits the media hard enough that people in Europe will hear about it.
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
with added benefits as we get older (more days, etc)
Nope.
This is definitely not something that everyone in Europe gets.The rest seems to be true, though.
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@levicki From my experience, the "smaller companies with nepotism" are far better about work hours, insurance, paid time off, etc than the huge companies like Amazon, Google, etc.
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Fair enough, but when big companies like Amazon, Verizon, etc have those egregious examples what do you think happens in smaller companies where nepotism is surely still entrenched?
Business runs on nepotism. There is fuckall you can do about that.
I will say this much: My entire working life when I was working for others, I worked for companies that would never end up on the Fortune 500, and I never saw anyone treated like that. In smaller companies people are not numbers. They are people.
The shittiest owner I ever worked for, a guy that could be a complete and total asshole at times, had his great moments. As an example, we employed some people who would be on the fringe of society. Ex-cons, etc. We had an employee who lived paycheck to paycheck because of his own choices, and that led him to a situation. He and his baby's momma had a child who was stillborn, and he showed up to work the next day. He was an absolute emotional wreck, as you might imagine. The owner asked him what he was doing there, and told him to take as much time off as he needed. The fellow tells him, while starting to cry, that he couldn't take time off because he had bills to pay and he did not even have the money needed to bury his child. The owner then tells him that he would give him two weeks vacation to give him time to grieve and then directed him to the funeral home he had just used to bury his own mother a few months earlier. He told him to go there and arrange for them to bury his child and he would pay for it.
You will never see something like that happen in a larger company, and such actions never hit the news because people who do such things do it out of the kindness of their own heart and not for media exposure.
That guy took the two weeks, the owner paid for the burial of his child, and he never came back to work. He never returned our phone calls. Just ghosted. No good deed goes unpunished. Not even a thank you.
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
I am all for professional courtesy and mutual respect, but hiring me or someone else is literally her job. She should not expect gratitude for doing her fucking job
You'd be surprised how common this attitude is..
I manage someone who's upset that his employees don't give him praise and validation
A reader writes: I’m an executive. One of my direct reports (a manager) is frustrated that his team doesn't acknowledge his input/skills/expertise. It’s
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
Is anyone still surprised that HR people are so full of
themselvesbullshit and so self-righteous?They are literally the untouchable employees in every company -- who is going to fire them for bad behavior? Themselves? Yeah, I don't think so.
Courtesy is a 2-way street, it's not a fucking birth right.
For this reason lots of people refuse to go to HTC a few years ago, they used to have HR that behaves cocky and drives people away.
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@mott555 Agreed. The enterpreneur often realizes that keeping the employees happy keeps them productive much better than micromanagement does. In large places, squeezing employees gives a larger immediate apparent savings due to sheer number of people under the press, so it happens more.
But back to the supremacy or lack thereof, of one of these continents. The problem with the current Soviet Socialist Europe is that the socialism started to bloat and bog things down. The average salaryman's real tax rate in Finland after all the myriad taxes and tax-like fees has been estimated at 69%-74%. Which results in the fact that an unemployed person may have a larger net income than the working man, but that was already discussed in another thread. And I hear in France they can't sack an employee that wasted his entire shift smoking weed and destroying customers' property, despite security video evidence that covers the entire shift.
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@acrow said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@mott555 Agreed. The enterpreneur often realizes that keeping the employees happy keeps them productive much better than micromanagement does. In large places, squeezing employees gives a larger immediate apparent savings due to sheer number of people under the press, so it happens more.
IME, with the clients we support, the businesses that are most profitable are the ones that treat their employees best. The ones that are not doing as well are the ones where the owner does not treat employees as well and micromanages them.
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@levicki My guess is that it depends, at least in part, on where you live. The US is a really big country. For example, Germany, one of the larger nations of Europe, is only 3 times as large as Pennsylvania (on the smaller end of US states). So here on the east coast, I find alot of what I read on Slashdot, which is full of west coast IT people, utterly preposterous. Like contracts...I've done contracting and never seen a contract so what is this about negotiating terms? Being paid more on contracts to cover for gaps between them? Telewhat?
I've had my share of lousy jobs too, that I never would've put up with as long as I did if I could've just walked down the street and gotten another job like some people say they've done. It has been a fight to get every job I've ever gotten. Recruiting is terrible, I swear sometimes it seems like half the jobs here are recruiters chasing some subset of the other half. The interview process in this area is pretty bad too. There is alot of value I can bring, and have brought, to an organization that just doesn't come out because I've already been prescreened out by some filter, or interviewed by non-technical people, or pitched an entirely different job than I showed up for.
Job hunting is beyond frustrating and a major source of cynicism. You run in circles prostrating yourself to get on payroll somewhere so you don't have to move into a refrigerator box only to be put in front of a spinning wheel and barked at for not producing enough gold from straw with the threat of how many H1Bs are lining up around the block to replace you for less. Some people are so scared they'll transmute that fear into gratitude ("licking the employer's ass"). Although I say please and thank you, internally I alternate between resentment and considering carbon monoxide therapy so I get where you're coming from.
Unfortunately, the advice I've heard most often for people that think this way is that they need to be self-employed and that, too, is not always easy for people with the personality types that have traditionally been attracted to working with computers.
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@levicki said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
I hear you man, that's exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that rant above. Have you perhaps considered moving to Europe? By Europe I mean anywhere in the EU where you can land a decent job, maybe even non-EU, but soon to be EU countries?
Yes I have. The two biggest hurdles, to me, are interviewing and the language barrier.
In this area, places only want to interview you if you're within 25 miles ("locals only") or overseas. I'm about 2 hours out of Philadelphia and cannot get an interview in that area to save my life. Not that it can't be done, as my brothers had companies in Texas and California fly them out for interviews, but I don't see how (they didn't have better degrees from better schools or githubs or anything). Also damned near every posting I read has NO TELECOMMUTING (literally as presented here). I cannot really imagine landing an interview for a European job.
The language barrier...I can read and speak Spanish but can't keep up with other speakers. I've been meaning to get my act together and learn German but haven't yet. Brexit's made the English-speaking part of Europe a shakier proposition.
Self employment, uphill fight as it's been, still seems like a more feasible solution.
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@Polygeekery I wish I could contract a salesman to do that for me
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@Polygeekery said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@acrow said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@mott555 Agreed. The enterpreneur often realizes that keeping the employees happy keeps them productive much better than micromanagement does. In large places, squeezing employees gives a larger immediate apparent savings due to sheer number of people under the press, so it happens more.
IME, with the clients we support, the businesses that are most profitable are the ones that treat their employees best. The ones that are not doing as well are the ones where the owner does not treat employees as well and micromanages them.
That's because you work in a field where having the best employees is very valuable. For low-skill labor (where potential employees are in high supply), however, it seems that treating your employees like absolute shit is good for business.
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@Gąska said in Do you send thank-you notes after being interviewed?:
@dkf there are two very common, very annoying corner cases with that approach:
- Suppose you have three pages of stuff to write about that's relevant for the job. What do you do?
- Suppose you have almost nothing to list that's directly relevant to the job, but you have a lot of irrelevant experience. What do you do?
This depends on where you are, but in the U.S., outside of academia, resumes should generally not be more than 1 1/2 pages. So you list your greatest hits.
