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?

It’s been said that patience is a virtue and that good things come to those who wait. During the job search process though, having patience is often something that is in short supply especially if you really want to leave and find a new job as soon as possible.

Inevitably though, you’re at the mercy of the person or people who are making the hiring decisions and you have to abide by their timelines. If you were searching for a new job during our recently departed summer, you probably experienced a long wait, as people took vacations as the pace of hiring in your desired target companies may have appeared to come to a complete halt.

Which it might very well have. I know of companies who basically shut the hiring process down for the summer and pick it up in the autumn when vacations are complete.

But if good things really do come to those who wait, perhaps the best jobs come to those who see the process through to the end even if it takes longer than usual.

A friend of mine found his ideal job – a company he really wanted to work for – but had to wait around 9 months from the time he first applied to the time he was hired. 9 months is certainly a long time to wait and he did have a job that he was working at while waiting for his ideal company to make their decision but it did take 9 months before he got the answer he was looking for.

This 9 month period included several interviews, several tests, references being completed, a further waiting period and finally the job offer.

I’m sure he wished the process been much shorter and he probably wondered many times if the company was really interested in him if it took them that long to make a decision…but in the end, it worked out well for him.

And all because he was willing to follow the process through from beginning to end.

Ethics in the field of hiring, staffing and recruitment is based on a combination of things and depends on who is actually involved in the hiring process.

Certainly the job searcher, hiring manager and recruiter are just three possible people involved in a hiring decision.

As a recruiter, I try my best to gauge the truthfulness of comments by both job searchers and hiring managers and they presumably are gauging my truthfulness as well.

Commonly, job searchers often lie about various aspects of their resume ie. their salary, why they left their last job, their job responsibilities, their educational achievements, etc.

Hiring managers might lie about why they are looking to hire a new person ie. they might lie about why the previous person left the job they are trying to fill (if the last person who held the job was fired for something embarrassing like having an office affair or something like that, do you think the hiring manager will tell you the truth about why the person was fired? Me neither). Similarly a hiring manager probably won’t tell you that the previous person quit the job because they were bored or because they thought their manager was a jerk either.

A recruiter needs to find the truth and often needs to read between the lines of comments that are made to them by either the job searcher or the hiring manger.

Similarly some recruiters aren’t always capable of telling the truth 100% of the time either. Recruiters often have a reputation not much better than a used car salesman – no offense to used car salesmen – and sometimes it’s not difficult to see why.

Whether you’re a job searcher looking for a job, a hiring manager looking to fill a job, or a recruiter looking for a job searcher to fill a job, the truth tends to come out one way or the other.

As a recruiter, I have a hard time working with people I can’t trust and I’m usually a pretty good judge of character. I tell the truth when working with job searchers and hiring managers alike and I expect them to do the same.

There are plenty of honest job searchers, hiring managers and recruiters out there and life is just too short to waste time with people who aren’t trustworthy.

One of the biggest myths in job searching is that “no one hires in December” or that hiring comes to a complete halt during certain time of the year ie. summer, Christmas, early new year.

Certainly things can slow down during these times as people are on holiday mode, offices shut down for days at a time, and people might work shorter hours. This doesn’t mean people aren’t hiring though.

Take this time of the year right now: Who tends to have their best sales results during November and December with the holiday season coming up?

Here are a few:

1. Catering companies and restaurants: Think of all the holiday parties and lunches that companies and individuals go to and all of this adds up to a lot of business for caterers and restaurateurs which also means more staff is often required. Some of them might be hiring.

2. Retailers: Could this be more obvious? How many retailers make it or break it during the Christmas season? How many retailers in your area are hiring because they need the staff for the Christmas rush?

3. Entertainment and other related employers: DJs, comedians, photographers, singers and other entertainers often find themselves busier during December, possibly they’re hiring. If you have the skills, you might even find a way to do this work yourself! Short of that, maybe your local mall needs to hire a Santa or an elf?!

Are you looking for a new job, a temporary job or are you just looking to earn some extra money? Think about the types of companies mentioned above and see if any of them might offer you an opportunity to make some more money when these companies tend to be hiring. Your best bet is to get started looking now in October and not wait until the last minute.

And remember that the Christmas season isn’t the only time of year that some companies in other industries hire because their busy season might occur at a different time.

Granted, the economy is still iffy and many companies might be holding off hiring people and you’re probably going to be competing with more people for fewer jobs.

In that case, you might consider a temporary job that doesn’t involve you getting paid:

Not for profit: Soup kitchens and other not for profit organizations often need help at this time of the year especially for those of us who live in the north and who get cold, snowy winters and when being homeless is especially tough. You might not get paid with money but it might help someone else’s life and it might also help you realize that your life is pretty good afterall.