Last week we spoke about voice mail and your career and specifically how ways that you can effectively use it.
One question people often have with voice mail is whether or not to leave a voice message when contacting a hiring manager or someone else who can influence your career, or if you should simply hang up without leaving a message and try calling again later.
Obviously, the best thing you can do is catch someone live on the phone rather than leaving them a message and hoping or expecting that they will call you back. These days though, people often use their voice messaging system as well as caller ID to manage their incoming calls and to decide what calls they should answer and which ones they should let go into voice mail.
Clearly, you don’t want to call the same person 10 times in a day and have them wonder why your name keeps popping up on their caller ID and have them think you’re stalking them. In that regard, leaving a message is probably a good idea since you can spend a lot of time calling them back and still not getting the person live on the phone especially if they happen to be a person who doesn’t take calls during the day.
Plus, if you happen to have their email address, it’s not a bad idea to follow up with a very brief email mentioning that you’d just left them a voice message and wanted to follow up by email in case they’d prefer to respond by email.
I’d had instances where I’d left a message for a hiring manager who I was contacting for the first time and then immediately followed up with an email. Within minutes of sending the email, they responded and typically they make a comment about how they prefer using email over the phone. Remember that some people are like this: it’s much quicker and more impersonal to send an email and some people prefer this, until they get to know you anyways.
When leaving a voice message, you want to be clear and brief. I’ve been guilty in the past of trying to cram in as much as I can on a voice message to the point where I get cut off and exceed the time limit on the message. You want to avoid doing this…
Instead, you want to state your name, your reason for calling, your phone number and the best time to reach you if applicable. That’s it.
When sending an email, I usually just mention that I’d just left them a voice message and have followed up with an email to provide my contact details in writing and just in case they’d prefer to respond by email which as I mentioned above, some people do.
Plus with people carrying their cellphones and Blackberries everywhere these days and the ability to send quick text messages, chances are that you might even get a quicker response this way.
