Thank You Notes, Changing My Mind

["Steven J. Owens" <puff -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Folks,

     When this thread started, my gut reaction was that sending
formal, written thank you letters is a bit "over the top".  I've
changed my mind about that.

     Not that I had a problem with somebody deciding to do it, I just
thought it was a bit excessive.  I *was* a bit annoyed with the
various people who said, from both hiree and hirer perspectives, that
not sending a thank you note can lose you the job position.  The "pro"
posts seemed a bit obsessed with the idea.  As Sella Rush writes:

> It *is* possible to choose a way of doing things while still respecting
> other people's decisions to do things differently.

     Why I changed my mind: In the past couple of days, I've had a
couple of younger colleagues ask for my advice about resumes and job
hunting.  I thought about my advice to them on this topic, juxtaposed
with this discussion.

     My standard high-level advice (other than details about format,
language, structure, phrasing, buzzwords, and distribution) is to
prepare an "uber resume" and "uber cover letter", essentially your
story at length and in depth.  The idea is to thin about "your story"
in full, before going on to derive customized resumes and cover
letters according to the kind of job you're going after.

     I thought about it and I realized that a lot of these things may
seem excessive to somebody with less experience or perhaps a different
attitude about job hunting.  After all, I'm the same guy who posted
that I walk into every interview with the attitude that *I'm*
interviewing *them*, yet my advice seems to be about sycophantically
lavishing hours of care on preparing resumes and cover letters for
each job application.

     But my advice really boils down to, go the extra mile and do a
professional job at job hunting, the same way you'd do a professional
job on the job.

     From that perspective, sending a more formal thank you letter
after each interview as a form of mild "after sell" (or perhaps it
might be better phrased as "market positioning") is really quite
trivial; just a matter of paying attention to details.

Steven J. Owens
puff -at- netcom -dot- com


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=