Dust off the phone and make a call!

These days, it isn’t hard to keep in touch with people who can positively influence your career. Other than the obvious options like phone and email, there are other methods to keep in touch with people like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and I’m finding that increasingly, recruiters and hiring managers (even bosses!) are willing to link up so that you can see what they’re up to.

How often you should keep in touch with someone who might be able to help you with your career is another question…the method of communication is another question.

When it comes to job searching, people often wonder what they should do following an interview in terms of when and how frequently they should contact the interviewer just to see what is going on. As the days turn into a week and you haven’t heard from a person you interviewed with, you probably tend to start thinking that you didn’t get the job and in some cases that might actually be the case. In other cases though, perhaps the interviewer was just busy or traveling or otherwise indisposed and couldn’t get in touch with you to let you know about the status of your job candidacy with them.

I recently had a job searcher asking me that question – how often should I follow up after an interview – and she also wondered how she should do it i.e. phone or email.

One thing you can always ask before leaving the interview is to get an idea from the interviewer what happens next and when. Will there be another interview for candidates they’re interested in or will they go straight to an offer? What is the timing for this decision.

Knowing these answers can help you save the aggravation of wondering why you haven’t heard anything if you already know in advance that the hiring manager will be out of the country for two weeks or if they don’t plan to make a hiring decision for 4 weeks, etc.

I’ve read that in sales, one of the reasons why sales people often don’t make the sale is that they simply don’t follow up. They contact a potential customer, do their presentation, maybe leave them with some information and then either don’t follow up or perhaps only follow up once and then don’t follow up again.

People make decisions and process information differently so our decision-making process might not be one that responds well to a sales person who either doesn’t follow up or who doesn’t follow up enough.

Relating This To A Job Search

I’ve experienced all sorts of situations myself in sales related to how often I followed up with a customer/prospect and quite enough you can tie it into a job search and your dealings with hiring managers and interviewers.

Let’s look at the scenarios for how frequently you follow up with someone.

You don’t follow up enough: I can think of cases where I didn’t follow up with someone enough (or at the right time) and then later found out this person ended up buying from someone else. As a sales person, this situation really sucks. You could have had the sale but didn’t contact the customer enough or at the right time. The same goes for job searching. People hire when they need to hire. Timing is everything they say…and it’s true. Always find out the timing of when a hiring manager plans to hire.

You followed up too much: I generally don’t scare customers away but I did do this at least once. I was under a deadline to get a customer re-signed because there was a time frame and if the customer missed it, they missed it for the year. I got the impression the customer was planning on buying again (they were already a customer) and they were always asking me to call next week, call in two weeks, call next Tuesday, etc but I guess I followed up with them once too often because they finally told me to stop calling and told me they were no longer planning on renewing with my company. In hindsight I think the customer was simply looking for a way out and I guess I gave it to him but I was getting tired of feeling like I was chasing this customer and wasting my time. So while you don’t want to scare a customer (i.e. a hiring manager in a job search) away, you don’t want to get the run around either. At some point a decision needs to be made and you need to find out if you’re being considered for the job or not. No one wants to waste their time or get their hopes up for no reason.

You don’t follow up at all: As mentioned above, sales are often lost because sales people simply don’t follow up at all. So are jobs. In a job search sense, you can choose not to follow up with a hiring manager – and in many cases that’s how they prefer it because they don’t want to be bombarded with job searchers checking in – but the truth is that most job searchers don’t follow up at all. If you’re working directly with a hiring manager, you want to know not only the timing of the hire but if you’re allowed to follow up with the hiring authority and what method you should use. You don’t want to scare away the decision-maker – see my example above – but you also want to know where you stand. If you’re working with a recruiter, they should be handling this part of the process for you and should know about the timing of the hire and where you stand with regards to getting an offer.

How often do you follow up with people who can positively affect your job searches?

Networking and getting yourself known can be key to job searching

Since we already spoke a few days ago about what sorts of businesses might be hiring around this time, another timely subject is getting noticed before the end of year and getting your face in front of people who can positively influence your job search i.e. hiring managers.

These days job searching has long since gone to one where people believe that quantity rules over quantity, one where many believe the key to getting a new job is a matter of firing off hundreds of resumes by email and hoping something materializes. As I’ve said before it’s counter intuitive to think this way because if it’s easy for you to fire off hundreds of resumes – and it is – then it’s equally easy for everyone else to do the same thing so what’s the point?

In recruitment we see first hand the need to cull through the long list of resumes that get emailed to us, many for jobs that the person who is applying isn’t even qualified for.

So the question becomes how to stand out from others in a positive way and how to get in front of hiring managers when email just isn’t cutting it?

When I was first looking for a job when I was out of university and had moved to New Zealand to begin my career, I started my job search by doing something that I thought might help to make me stand out from others who were applying to the same jobs I was. I had a local printer print my resume on a calendar which I had laminated and then distributed to 30 or so companies that I wanted to work for.

I did get a few job interviews and a few hiring authorities complimented me for my originality but I didn’t actually get a job from my calendars at least not directly. When I was in the process of delivering my very last calendar, I happened upon a recruitment agency who as it turned out, did know of someone who needed a fresh grad like me and ended up hiring me several days later.

So while the calendar didn’t get me a job, it did get me a few interviews and the process of delivering them by hand did end up with me meeting a recruiter who I wouldn’t otherwise have met who did help me get my first real job.

Would doing something like this work these days?

Whether it’s your resume on a calendar, your name and phone number on a coffee mug or perhaps a personal website with your CV on it, methods like this might be conducive to jobs that actually require some creativity or to hiring managers who appreciate people who think with some originality.

It’s one way of standing apart from others who are applying for the same jobs you are and in a positive way.

Networking is typically one of the best methods of standing out from your fellow job searchers and it also helps you build a network of people who might assist you during your job searches – and vice versa – and at a minimum help to make you more comfortable “selling” yourself and meeting new people. With the holiday season coming up comes more opportunities to get out and meet new people, shake some hands and exchange some business cards that might come in handy down the line.

Following up with a hiring manager after an interview is an easy yet often overlooked method of separating yourself from your competitors. A simple follow up email post interview that is well-written and brief can help to keep you top of mind in the eyes of a hiring manager especially one who values a human touch and someone who exhibits professionalism. Many job searchers attend interviews and never bother following up again even to check on their candidacy so they’re typically quickly forgotten. The person who follows up will often be remembered.

These days – and in this economy – putting the human touch to your job searches can help in ways you might not imagine and help you rise above others applying for the same jobs who don’t bother to do the same.

Working in recruitment has enabled me to meet many, many different people and many, many, many different kinds of personalities along the way.

How people choose to keep in touch is quite an interesting aspect of a person’s personality. Here a few different kinds of people in terms of how they keep in touch after they’ve made contact with me.

Which one are you?

1. The Missing In Action Job Searcher: This is the person who speaks with me once, maybe even meets with me in person and then disappears, never to be heard from again. They never call, never email, never tell me whatever happened to them. If I have a job to discuss with them, I’d certainly give them a call but I generally don’t call people just to say hi and to see how they’re doing. That’s their job. Follow up is something they’re supposed to do with the recruiter if they’re serious about getting help with their job search otherwise they become quickly forgotten.

2. The Whiner: This is the person who calls me and complains that they haven’t heard from me in a week and wonder what’s going on. Uh, I don’t have a job to discuss with you, that’s what’s going on.

3. The Harrasser: This is the person who calls me every day (for a few days anyways, until I stop returning their calls and they get the message). They call every day – often they’ll call several times a day and when I don’t answer the phone, they hang up without leaving a message and then try again a few minutes later. Thank God for caller ID…

4. The Emailer: This is the job searcher who never calls me, but simply sends an email to touch base every so often. I actually like this type of person because sending a quick email to touch base isn’t a bad thing and the truth is I often do the same thing. Sending an email of course means that I don’t have to respond right away – although I normally do anyways – and isn’t as intrusive as a phone call.

5. The Harrassing Emailer: This person has tendencies of both #3 and #4. Typically, they will email me and the moment the email hits my In Box and I hear the sound that MS Outlook makes when a new email arrives, I hear a second sound and it’s typically my phone ringing because in addition to emailing me, this person has called as well to ensure I got the email that they only sent 5 seconds earlier. Typically, they’ll say “did you get my email?” This would be the email that they’d sent 5 seconds earlier.

6. The Updater: This is the person who updates their resume three times a week and sends me an updated copy of their resume three times per week.

7. The Spammer: This rare breed will send a generic “I’m still looking for a job” email and will CC the email to 10 or more different recruiters. We already talked about netiquette and email rules a few months ago.

8. The Drop In Artist: This is another rare breed who will pop into my office unannounced just to say hi – they usually say they “were in the neighborhood” – and to see if I have a job for them. Typically, I’m just about to pop into a scheduled interview with someone else and I actually feel guilty when I have to cut the chat short with The Drop In Artist to attend the other interview even though it’s not my fault.

9. The Social Butterfly: This person starts working with me and starts getting my help to find a new job. Then I find out that they have interviewed with one or more of my colleagues previously without telling me, meaning I get into a dispute with my colleague(s) and then we have to sort out who is going to continue working with The Social Butterfly which just gives everyone a lot of grief. Typically, The Social Butterfly isn’t that great a candidate either. No offense.