What I particularly don't like from the original piece is "It shows resourcefulness, too, because the candidate often has to hunt down an email address the interviewer never gave them."
I write thank you e-mails to people who give me their business card during the interview. I'm sure as hell not hunting down your e-mail just to send you one. If you expect me to, you're not respecting my time as a candidate.
Hey, I wrote something! … I’ve been hiring people for 10 years, and I still swear by a simple rule: If someone doesn’t send a thank you email, don’t hire them.
Even if they'd have to hunt down that email address themselves, according to the article she links to.
A thank you email to someone you're already in an email conversation with is not at all unreasonable, but expecting people to hunt down your email address just to send you a thank you, is downright weird.
Only hiring people who send a thank you email is totally weird. "It shows resourcefulness, too, because the candidate often has to hunt down an email address the interviewer never gave them." To be honest my time is pretty much to valuable for this kind of teenager games. I am busy solving real problems for real customers. I don't have the time to search for your Email address, I also don't need to do that, people usually hire me for point 1), I get shit done.
"To be clear, a thank-you note does not ensure someone will be a successful hire. But using the thank-you email as a barrier to entry has proved beneficial, at least at my company." the author says. Blatantly ignorant towards all the genius they've lost in their broken process.
"The handful of times we've moved forward with a candidate despite not receiving a thank you, we've been ghosted, or the offer we make is ultimately rejected." The author says, because changing the strategy for a handful of cases out of thousands is definitely really scientific and stuff.
"As a hiring manager, you should always expect a thank-you email, and you should never make an offer to someone who neglected to send one." as the last quote just showing the pure entitlement the author suffers...
That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me happy to be in Software, people who bring trouble usually don't get promoted into responsibility...
"The handful of times we've moved forward with a candidate despite not receiving a thank you, we've been ghosted, or the offer we make is ultimately rejected."
Perhaps this is selecting for desperate job hunters who send thank you notes.
>Perhaps this is selecting for desperate job hunters who send thank you notes.
That's entirely plausible. I mean, you're probably <insert arbitrary percentage here> more likely to not turn an offer down, even if it's below the cost-of-living for the area in question, if you're willing to go to those lengths, yeah?
Their solution to the problem of having offers turned down seems to be not to investigate why but to just hire the people most willing to take them... I mean, they found a loop-hole but to quote the Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
New theory... the original twitter's annual performance metric is based on number of successful new hires (turned down offers and candidate who realize they are a bad fit are negatives)
Your kind makes me laugh.
"I am busy solving real problems for real customers."
Yep, I'm sure you hardly have time to brush your teeth with all those real problems popping out from everywhere just asking to be solved!
This might well be the one detail that makes the difference here. In software, and many other industries, this would be stupid and counterproductive, but in journalism, polite but invasive persistence might actually be a relevant character trait.
If it was a strategy like "we are looking for really driven people when we hire journalists, this is why we usually track events that show a strong drive for example A:... B: The applicant sends a thank you note even when they don't have our email address, C:..."
It would really be a different situation. But this is not about looking for a specific trait which is tied to a job.
Unfortunately all that they achieve with this strategy is locking out people who are "not like us". It all boils down to different cultures different rules, in Germany sending a thank you note to a business contact over a non disclosed communication channel would be perceived as very unprofessional or creepy.
It's the step right before adding your business contacts on facebook uninvited... So if your goal is to avoid hiring German people, the strategy is probably great.
(Taking the German example here because we Germans are very sensitive with data and privacy. The rule could also be exchanged for any other different no hire rule, overall what you achieve with such rules, is simply locking out a group of people, but those are people who could help your business succeed.)
I’m a frequent Twitter user, although I only use a third-party client but I’m not sure what’s difficult to follow here. The linked tweet is commenting on (parodying) the original tweet, the text of which is in the small box immediately below the text of the linked tweet. There’s no thread or “conversation” happening.
Thanking someone for their time is free and takes only a minute. If I don't really want the job I won't be bothered, and if I do I will try everything I can to make myself stand out throughout the interview process, including sending a short email. Recruiters are not stupid, they know this. TIL this behavior is: classist, archaic, possibly sexist, possibly racist, and definitely "problematic". Who knew?
It seems like you're flipping it around. I don't see anything wrong with doing this as a candidate. What strikes me as biased is making it a secret handshake, from a hiring perspective, that rules out people who don't think to do it.
I disagree. If qualified candidates do something, hiring managers will naturally look for those things in all their candidate, so it's a two way street.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect your problem is actually with the automatic dismissal part - and I agree, there are probably many cases where it would be inappropriate (or at the very least, stupid) to not consider someone for not sending a follow up. We can argue specifics all day, but in general I don't think it's unreasonable for hiring managers to expect that kind of communication.
Yes, the automatic dismissal part is both problematic and foolish.
But beyond that, I am a hiring manager, and I really can't tell you which people I've hired have sent me thank you notes. I'm pretty sure it's a small minority. I have yet to hire someone who's a "bad egg" or just doesn't care about their coworkers.
Beyond that, expecting people to adhere to a protocol they simply may not know is unfair. As I've said elsewhere, the original author should take the things she thinks a thank you note shows and just screen for them directly, rather than extrapolating from a norm that some people may have and others may not for reasons that have nothing to do with anything.
If I thought an applicant knew they should send a thank you note but that they just dropped the ball, that would be a negative sign. But I see no reason to assume that.
I'm very much against hidden criteria used to filter people. It's a lazy, bias-driven way to convince yourself you're selecting the best people. The author of the original tweet (who this person is replying to) is trying to select for some sort of work characteristic she thinks correlates with success. It would be much better to identify that characteristic and focus part of the interview on trying to evaluate the candidate against it.
I haven't been hiring people for more than 10 years, but I swear by the simple process of being transparent about what I'm looking for in a new hire. The hard part is the reflection on exactly what that is.
What evidence is there that the author of original hiring tweet thinks that sending thank you emails correlates with success? The person doesn’t claim that, and it would be such a preposterous belief that I would be shocked to hear them claim to hold it. My interpretation was merely that the author of the tweet likes people to behave according to some supposed social norm, and punishes people who don’t by refusing to hire them.
> How someone presents in interviews might not translate to effectiveness in the role. While sending a thank-you note doesn't necessarily guarantee the person will be a good hire, it gives you the tiniest bit more data: The candidate is eager, organized, and well mannered enough to send the note. It shows resourcefulness, too, because the candidate often has to hunt down an email address the interviewer never gave them. At Insider Inc., we look to hire "good eggs." The thank-you email is a mark for the good-egg column.
Maybe I'm extrapolating and she doesn't view "good egg" as part of being successful employee, but I think that's what she's getting at. I believe she's trying to identify soft skills at collaboration.
That's my most charitable interpretation. Either that, or she's trying to identify people who share her cultural norms, which is problematic in itself.
> That's my most charitable interpretation. Either that, or she's trying to identify people who share her cultural norms, which is problematic in itself.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I find the above attitude problematic in itself. There's nothing wrong with filtering for cultural norms, you've all right to select the people you'll be spending most of your non-sleeping life with. For example, I don't really want to work with someone who's anti-gay (i.e. I want them to share my "live and let live" cultural norm), even though that's clearly a cultural norm for many people all over the world.
There should be a distinction between the values of a company and the cultural norms. The idea I've adopted is value-fit / culture-add.
The values are non-negotiables. To take your example, for any company I work for or manage for, it must be a place where gay people--for example--are welcome and comfortable being themselves.
Cultural norms are a different story. I want my hires to add to our company's pool of cultural perspectives. This means they may have behaviors that diverge from present norms. This can be disruptive, but I think it's a net win in over time. If accepting cultural diversity is a value, it doesn't eliminate disruption, but it certainly makes it less painful.
To me, whether someone does or doesn't send a thank you note does not speak to the explicit or implicit values of any place I've been to. It's in pure norm space. And even then, it doesn't say much to me. I appreciate receiving thank-you notes on a human level, but it does nothing for me in making a hiring decision.
It is certainly pretty weird to think that it's important to spend your time at work all day with people who send thank you emails after job interviews, especially given that they won't be doing any more job interviews with you while they work there.
> I'm very much against hidden criteria used to filter people.
I'm not, or at least, not everything should be spelled out; what you want to avoid is people 'cheating' at their job interview by trying to bullshit their way through the application process.
We have a technical assessment, but look at (and ask a lot of) things outside of what was asked exactly; basic expected software development skills such as unit testing, documentation, a grasp of technology used, a drive to keep up to date and learn new things, that kinda thing.
I guess you could fake those? But I think that if you've got the drive to "fake" learn a new technology you've got the drive we're looking for.
But if you don't tell the candidate what to do, how do you know if the candidate can do that or not?
Most programming exercises that companies use in interviews are much simpler (trivial really) than actual software projects, and personally I don't see the need to write 1 page of documentation and unittests for code that can fit on 3 pages... Does that mean I'm against documentation and can't write unittests? No, I'm simply being pragmatic.
I've interviewed ~5 times in the last year...did not receive any business cards or email addresses. The recruiter/HR person actually denied my request for their email address when I asked for it in order to send a note on more than one occasion.
I know organisations which would automatically disqualify candidates who send "thank you" or any other kind of emails. They would call it "canvassing", which is forbidden for job-seekers in these organisations.
I mean... I was taught in high school to always send a thank you email to an interviewer after an interview.
Not only for the courtesy, but also to stay in the interviewer’s head if they were undecided. Most people don’t send these, thus, you’ll be a bit unique and might tip things in your favor.
An interviewer that uses it as a hiring requirement probably wants someone thoughtful and willing to do a little extra compared to others. Seems minor compared to multi hour programming tests.
> someone thoughtful and willing to do a little extra compared to others
Seems to me that you'd be more likely be selected for people are willing to comply with arbitrary social conventions for the sake of getting ahead. Or even just those who happened grow up in an environment that passed on the folk knowledge that this is necessary. How many people who send these "thank you notes" are truly thankful for the experience?
> Seems minor compared to multi hour programming tests.
It is minor if you know you need to do it. The thing is, that some applicants will, and some won't (entirely independently of their capacity to do the job).
I’m sorry, but a thank you is now considered arbitrary? Come on, seriously? What environment are you not taught to respect someone that gave you time of day?
And does it matter if they are truly thankful? It’s not like people share things on the internet to truly SHARE, out of their own good will. They either want fake internet points, recognition, or traffic to end up selling something down the road.
> I’m sorry, but a thank you is now considered arbitrary?
> And does it matter if they are truly thankful?
A thank you that is 1) Expected and 2) Not truly meant seems pretty arbitrary to me. I would show respect to the person who took time out of their day to interview me by not taking any more time out of their day by making them read a thank you message.
To be clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with sending a thank you. I just don't think it should be considered necessary, and it definitely shouldn't be a primary signal on hiring decisions.
This is exactly the issue with these arbitrary gates in the hiring process. You were taught to do it. Someone with a different background (maybe they grew up in a different country or had parents that worked in a different industry) wouldn't necessarily even think to send a thank you and would be unfairly disqualified from the position.
Like Eastern European immigrant that could only afford to live among white trash blue collar folks? I should be too stupid to know how the great big American economy works then since my high school was surrounded by cattle farm. I’m pretty white trash still to this day. But even in our retarded educational system, we knew handshakes, pleases and thank yous were still important in a cooperative, functioning society.
You know what, that's funny. The poorer folks I know that escaped their poverty, we all know our pleases and thank yous. It's actually the people that grew up with money that are social idiots and ungrateful bastards that like to complain about every little thing under the sun.
You say "thank you" at the end of the interview. Sending it again later in an e-mail definitely wouldn't come to my mind at all, and if I got such mail it would feel very strange.
> I was taught in high school to always send a thank you email to an interviewer after an interview.
Ah yes, the folk-knowledge from high school. Always offered by the academic class with no background in having real jobs.
IMO, thank you letters seem desperate for anything other than an entry level job. Interviews should be testing you for fit (primarily technical) for the role. If you pass this criteria, they will be very excited for you to join with their team because there is high demand for skilled workers.
Many people don't view public sector (government) workers as legitimate professions, teachers included. They are part of the bureaucratic machine, and their experiences don't replicate what the rest of society encounters.
Is a chemistry teacher that's never been employed in the private sector (aka, had a 'real job') as a chemist a good source of knowledge about obtaining a job as a chemist? Not really.
"It shows resourcefulness, too, because the candidate often has to hunt down an email address the interviewer never gave them."
So basically the author expects the candidate to send a thank you email even though she didn't exchange her email address. Well, I think such email is natural when you make a personal contact with the interviewer, but in this scenario(when you receive emails from noreply@bigcorporate.com) it feels unnecessary and intrusive to me.
I wonder why HR people keep on doing this shit - they get deservedly heckled by everyone who is stuck with their crap.
I'm not sure if it is a vapid bubble or they are just callous morons who don't get why people would get pissed off over being denied a job for arbitrary reasons and don't learn from experience.
There is no golden rule. You are interacting with humans, and every situation is different. A recruiter with good people skills doesn't use one golden rule to filter everyone with it.
I grew up in the age of handwritten thank you notes for everything and I still wouldn’t expect them for an interview. I’d also be dismayed if the company’s didn’t feel “thankful” to see me.
Companies need good employees. VCs need companies to invest their customers’ money into. The implicit power relationship in these situations is unhealthy.
61 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI write thank you e-mails to people who give me their business card during the interview. I'm sure as hell not hunting down your e-mail just to send you one. If you expect me to, you're not respecting my time as a candidate.
Hey, I wrote something! … I’ve been hiring people for 10 years, and I still swear by a simple rule: If someone doesn’t send a thank you email, don’t hire them.
A thank you email to someone you're already in an email conversation with is not at all unreasonable, but expecting people to hunt down your email address just to send you a thank you, is downright weird.
"To be clear, a thank-you note does not ensure someone will be a successful hire. But using the thank-you email as a barrier to entry has proved beneficial, at least at my company." the author says. Blatantly ignorant towards all the genius they've lost in their broken process. "The handful of times we've moved forward with a candidate despite not receiving a thank you, we've been ghosted, or the offer we make is ultimately rejected." The author says, because changing the strategy for a handful of cases out of thousands is definitely really scientific and stuff. "As a hiring manager, you should always expect a thank-you email, and you should never make an offer to someone who neglected to send one." as the last quote just showing the pure entitlement the author suffers...
That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me happy to be in Software, people who bring trouble usually don't get promoted into responsibility...
Perhaps this is selecting for desperate job hunters who send thank you notes.
That's entirely plausible. I mean, you're probably <insert arbitrary percentage here> more likely to not turn an offer down, even if it's below the cost-of-living for the area in question, if you're willing to go to those lengths, yeah?
Their solution to the problem of having offers turned down seems to be not to investigate why but to just hire the people most willing to take them... I mean, they found a loop-hole but to quote the Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
> makes me happy to be in Software
This might well be the one detail that makes the difference here. In software, and many other industries, this would be stupid and counterproductive, but in journalism, polite but invasive persistence might actually be a relevant character trait.
It would really be a different situation. But this is not about looking for a specific trait which is tied to a job.
Unfortunately all that they achieve with this strategy is locking out people who are "not like us". It all boils down to different cultures different rules, in Germany sending a thank you note to a business contact over a non disclosed communication channel would be perceived as very unprofessional or creepy.
It's the step right before adding your business contacts on facebook uninvited... So if your goal is to avoid hiring German people, the strategy is probably great.
(Taking the German example here because we Germans are very sensitive with data and privacy. The rule could also be exchanged for any other different no hire rule, overall what you achieve with such rules, is simply locking out a group of people, but those are people who could help your business succeed.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect your problem is actually with the automatic dismissal part - and I agree, there are probably many cases where it would be inappropriate (or at the very least, stupid) to not consider someone for not sending a follow up. We can argue specifics all day, but in general I don't think it's unreasonable for hiring managers to expect that kind of communication.
But beyond that, I am a hiring manager, and I really can't tell you which people I've hired have sent me thank you notes. I'm pretty sure it's a small minority. I have yet to hire someone who's a "bad egg" or just doesn't care about their coworkers.
Beyond that, expecting people to adhere to a protocol they simply may not know is unfair. As I've said elsewhere, the original author should take the things she thinks a thank you note shows and just screen for them directly, rather than extrapolating from a norm that some people may have and others may not for reasons that have nothing to do with anything.
If I thought an applicant knew they should send a thank you note but that they just dropped the ball, that would be a negative sign. But I see no reason to assume that.
I haven't been hiring people for more than 10 years, but I swear by the simple process of being transparent about what I'm looking for in a new hire. The hard part is the reflection on exactly what that is.
I wrote about this several years ago: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/were-hiring-engineers-a.... It's basically a re-presentation of interview training I've gotten.
> How someone presents in interviews might not translate to effectiveness in the role. While sending a thank-you note doesn't necessarily guarantee the person will be a good hire, it gives you the tiniest bit more data: The candidate is eager, organized, and well mannered enough to send the note. It shows resourcefulness, too, because the candidate often has to hunt down an email address the interviewer never gave them. At Insider Inc., we look to hire "good eggs." The thank-you email is a mark for the good-egg column.
Maybe I'm extrapolating and she doesn't view "good egg" as part of being successful employee, but I think that's what she's getting at. I believe she's trying to identify soft skills at collaboration.
That's my most charitable interpretation. Either that, or she's trying to identify people who share her cultural norms, which is problematic in itself.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I find the above attitude problematic in itself. There's nothing wrong with filtering for cultural norms, you've all right to select the people you'll be spending most of your non-sleeping life with. For example, I don't really want to work with someone who's anti-gay (i.e. I want them to share my "live and let live" cultural norm), even though that's clearly a cultural norm for many people all over the world.
The values are non-negotiables. To take your example, for any company I work for or manage for, it must be a place where gay people--for example--are welcome and comfortable being themselves.
Cultural norms are a different story. I want my hires to add to our company's pool of cultural perspectives. This means they may have behaviors that diverge from present norms. This can be disruptive, but I think it's a net win in over time. If accepting cultural diversity is a value, it doesn't eliminate disruption, but it certainly makes it less painful.
To me, whether someone does or doesn't send a thank you note does not speak to the explicit or implicit values of any place I've been to. It's in pure norm space. And even then, it doesn't say much to me. I appreciate receiving thank-you notes on a human level, but it does nothing for me in making a hiring decision.
I'm not, or at least, not everything should be spelled out; what you want to avoid is people 'cheating' at their job interview by trying to bullshit their way through the application process.
We have a technical assessment, but look at (and ask a lot of) things outside of what was asked exactly; basic expected software development skills such as unit testing, documentation, a grasp of technology used, a drive to keep up to date and learn new things, that kinda thing.
I guess you could fake those? But I think that if you've got the drive to "fake" learn a new technology you've got the drive we're looking for.
Most programming exercises that companies use in interviews are much simpler (trivial really) than actual software projects, and personally I don't see the need to write 1 page of documentation and unittests for code that can fit on 3 pages... Does that mean I'm against documentation and can't write unittests? No, I'm simply being pragmatic.
Not only for the courtesy, but also to stay in the interviewer’s head if they were undecided. Most people don’t send these, thus, you’ll be a bit unique and might tip things in your favor.
An interviewer that uses it as a hiring requirement probably wants someone thoughtful and willing to do a little extra compared to others. Seems minor compared to multi hour programming tests.
Seems to me that you'd be more likely be selected for people are willing to comply with arbitrary social conventions for the sake of getting ahead. Or even just those who happened grow up in an environment that passed on the folk knowledge that this is necessary. How many people who send these "thank you notes" are truly thankful for the experience?
> Seems minor compared to multi hour programming tests.
It is minor if you know you need to do it. The thing is, that some applicants will, and some won't (entirely independently of their capacity to do the job).
And does it matter if they are truly thankful? It’s not like people share things on the internet to truly SHARE, out of their own good will. They either want fake internet points, recognition, or traffic to end up selling something down the road.
A thank you that is 1) Expected and 2) Not truly meant seems pretty arbitrary to me. I would show respect to the person who took time out of their day to interview me by not taking any more time out of their day by making them read a thank you message.
To be clear: I don't think there is anything wrong with sending a thank you. I just don't think it should be considered necessary, and it definitely shouldn't be a primary signal on hiring decisions.
Like Eastern European immigrant that could only afford to live among white trash blue collar folks? I should be too stupid to know how the great big American economy works then since my high school was surrounded by cattle farm. I’m pretty white trash still to this day. But even in our retarded educational system, we knew handshakes, pleases and thank yous were still important in a cooperative, functioning society.
You know what, that's funny. The poorer folks I know that escaped their poverty, we all know our pleases and thank yous. It's actually the people that grew up with money that are social idiots and ungrateful bastards that like to complain about every little thing under the sun.
Ah yes, the folk-knowledge from high school. Always offered by the academic class with no background in having real jobs.
IMO, thank you letters seem desperate for anything other than an entry level job. Interviews should be testing you for fit (primarily technical) for the role. If you pass this criteria, they will be very excited for you to join with their team because there is high demand for skilled workers.
Is a chemistry teacher that's never been employed in the private sector (aka, had a 'real job') as a chemist a good source of knowledge about obtaining a job as a chemist? Not really.
So basically the author expects the candidate to send a thank you email even though she didn't exchange her email address. Well, I think such email is natural when you make a personal contact with the interviewer, but in this scenario(when you receive emails from noreply@bigcorporate.com) it feels unnecessary and intrusive to me.
I'm not sure if it is a vapid bubble or they are just callous morons who don't get why people would get pissed off over being denied a job for arbitrary reasons and don't learn from experience.
Companies need good employees. VCs need companies to invest their customers’ money into. The implicit power relationship in these situations is unhealthy.