Hey Cultivator! Welcome back to my channel! In this video today,
we're going to talk all about post-interview thank you notes.
But before we dive in,
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I greatly appreciate it. And without further ado, let's dive into this video.
Hopefully you're watching this because you just left an interview.
You crushed the interview,
and now you just want to stand out as a favorable applicant. Thus,
you are looking to send a thank you note.
I have to say that is a really great smart choice,
because I can tell you after recruiting and being an HR professional for a
number of years,
not every candidate puts out a thank you note or letter after the
interview. You might think that it's expected and it is the norm,
but you would actually be quite surprised.
I'll share that whenever we received a thank you note,
I genuinely appreciated it.
I thought that it left a very favorable impression.
It showed how professional and engaged they were.
And if you're using the template that I show you in here,
then hopefully you're even able to connect with them and build rapport.
But it's really important to send a thank you note,
because sometimes when you're leaving an interview,
you are competing against quite a bit of similar applicants and
your professionalism,
and the way that you follow up can really tip you over to the other side of,
yes,
let's extend an offer if they weren't entirely sure from the interview process.
And similarly, if they loved you,
your thank you note really just sends a confirmation or affirmation of, "Wow.
Yes, this person is the right hire." By the way, sound off.
Let me know in the comment box down below how often or what circumstances you
leave a thank you note after each interview. And without further ado,
let's dive into this video and break down what you need to know about
post-interview follow-ups. Before you dive into actually writing the note,
I would make sure that you've given yourself some time to just process the
interview itself while things are fresh in your mind.
So things that you might want to consider are,
what did I love about the interview? What was memorable about the interview?
Was there something that I really appreciated or enjoyed learning about?
How did I feel overall about the culture, the people that I met with,
the role, the position, what could I improve upon?
And that's just more for you to know in the future. Now, when you're ready,
it is time to craft your message.
I want to emphasize that you want to be as short, sweet and concise as possible.
Before the pandemic.
I would highly have recommended and encouraged sending a snail mail, physical,
thank you card. You know,
one of those that kind of fold over and you really just have this like tiny
index card space to write your message.
That is exactly what your message should be like when you're sending it through
email now.
So your emails should really be maybe three to five sentences,
just getting straight and direct to the point and let's break down what each of
those sentences should iterate.
So the first sentence of course is going to be addressing them by their name and
just reiterating your interest in this specific role at the specific
company and thanking them for their time and consideration.
The second sentence is really going to dive into one specific reason
why this role or company, and,
or both are very compelling to you.
The third sentence could be a statement of why you're very interested and
know that you can immediately contribute to this role based on your discussion.
You'll want to just kind of sign your name.
And then at the end you can add a PS and stay something that was very personable
or memorable from the conversation that you want to allude to.
So here's an example of what this looks like when it's all put together.
Dear Andrea,
thank you very much for meeting with me to explore the project manager role at
HBO. I'm impressed at how closely each department works together.
And I'm excited at the prospect of working on projects that reach millions of
fans. After speaking to the team,
I know this would be an excellent cultural match,
and I hope to hear about next steps. Thank you, Emily.
P.S. I can't wait to try Blue Bird Coffee,
thanks for the local recommendation. So as you can see, this is a very short,
sweet, concise approach to just reiterating your enthusiasm.
And again, positioning yourself as a candidate.
Who's leaving a positive impression. Now,
if there was something that went awry in the interview,
maybe you had technical glitches. You knew that you were off your game,
or you forgot to answer a question that you're completely stumped on and
you now know the answer to it.
You can absolutely include a second paragraph into that and just address that
head on if you want,
but really the point of these thank you notes is to just reiterate your interest
and position yourself as a professional candidate. All right.
So a question I get a lot is who should I send this thank you note to?
Really in the end of the day,
you want to make sure that the entire interview panel has received a letter.
So it's really up to you on if you're sending out individual
emails, like people gave you their cards and said, you know,
let's stay in touch or you just know their email addresses because you have one
person's email, you know,
everybody's full names and you can guess what everybody's email is,
then you can absolutely send a message to each individual. However,
there are times where I hear from candidates that they didn't get to the
interviewer's contact information. And in this case,
what I would say is you can absolutely send it to your point of contact,
which might be the recruiter and might be the recruiting coordinator or the HR.
And you could just simply state, Hey, so,
and so I hope you don't mind forwarding this message on,
I would really greatly appreciated Jessica's time interviewing me and would love
to send her this thank you note.
And then basically you'll put a colon and put in the note down bottom.
So whoever is you're going to contact can go ahead and just hit forward
and say, see below. And again,
you ensure that that message gets to them as far as when to send out this
message, I always believe that time is of the essence and the sooner,
the better.
This is not something that you want to procrastinate on and just hold off on.
You really want to do it while it is top of mind for both parties.
So before the pandemic, I would have said,
make sure that you snail mail this card out the same day of your interview
because local mail takes usually one to two business days.
So you want to do it quite immediately.
But now that everybody is working from home, you know,
the workplace is dispersed. You don't necessarily need to send a snail mail.
You could go ahead and email this message,
and you just want to do that within the first 48 hours,
72 hours max.
You could utilize the template that I provided for you and literally just
customize it in a snip. So there you have it.
It's as simple as customizing a single paragraph and just hitting send
as a thank you note to everybody that you have interviewed with,
whether it's your phone interview, your in person interviews,
your panel interviews, and more. Best of luck to you in the interview process.
If you enjoy this video, you found it helpful. Please like, comment, share,
subscribe, because I'm releasing this video next week.
And don't forget to sign up for the free resource library.
I went ahead and included the template in there for your convenience so that you
can reference it back. And there's a ton of interview resources,
resume resources, just everything job search related,
there's over 40 different templates and documents for you to download all for
free. Until then, I hope that you continue to cultivate your life and career.
Thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you guys next week.