Job Interviews: Follow Up or Fall Behind

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What takes place after the first interview — when candidates are ranked — decides who has the inside track on winning the job.

Your follow-up may be the tiebreaker that gives you the win over other promising candidates. And even if the employer already planned to offer you the job, your follow-up creates goodwill that kick-starts your success when you join the company.

Follow up vigorously. It's your caring that counts.

Your basic tools are

• Letters
• E-mails
• Telephone calls
• References

Letters

How much do post-interview thank-you letters really impact hiring decisions? When they're canned, flat, and "Dear-Aunt-Martha-thanks-for-the-graduation-gift" boring, interviewers may see them as a snore.

But when you're in a classy field of candidates, each trying to race through the stretch for the win, skipping a dynamic marketing-tool-of-a-thanks-letter is unwise.

In constructing a thank-you letter that actually does you some good, use the same powerful concepts that you would for a targeted resume that directly matches your qualifications with the job's requirements (Read my book, Resumes For Dummies, 5th Edition; Wiley, 2007.)

The resume and the thank-you letter are book-ends for your interview: The resume is the "before" communicator of your high-value qualifications and the thank-you letter is the "after" chance to market yourself for the win.

Your resume content and interview performance sold you as being a great fit for the job with tit for tat in qualifications and interest, punctuated with true and lively tales of accomplishments. Don't stop the winning streak that got you this far — build on it! Here are sales pointers for your thank-you letter aimed at converting your candidacy into a job offer:

• Express appreciation for the interviewer's time and for giving you a fresh update on the organization's immediate direction.
• Remind the interviewer of what specifically you can do for a company, not what a company can do for you. As you did in closing your interview, draw verbal links between a company's immediate needs and your qualifications: "You want X, I offer X; you want Y, I offer Y; you want Z, I offer Z."
• Repeat your experience in handling concerns that were discussed during the interview. Write very brief paragraphs about how you solved problems of interest to the company.
• After researching an issue that the company is wrestling with, include a concise statement of your findings, perhaps even enclosing a relevant news clip about the matter.
• Tie up loose ends by adding information to a question you didn't handle well during the interview.
• Overcome objections the interviewer expressed about offering you the job. For example, if the job has an international component and the interviewer was concerned that you have never worked in Europe or Asia, explain in your letter that you have worked in the Caribbean and in Mexico and that you are proven to be productive in other cultures.
• Reaffirm your interest in the position and respect for the company.

Content is not the only aspect you need to consider when preparing a follow-up letter. The following are tips for presenting and delivering a letter that gets you noticed: