Post-Interview Thank You Note Seals the Deal or Nails the Coffin

If you want the job, follow these 9 tips to write the perfect thank you note

As I advise candidates throughout their interview process, there is one area where I consistently get pushback: “Do I really need to send a thank you note? Does it ever make a difference?”

I understand the reluctance. In the vast majority of cases, your post-interview thank you note is never acknowledged and most candidates only get an offer in a small percentage of the positions that they interview for. It can seem like the effort to write a note is wasted or that all of those notes are swept into some recruiting black hole where they slip away into eternal irrelevance.

Writing a note of any kind seems superfluous in our fast paced contemporary era. It evokes images of embossed stationery and wax seals or the nagging you got from your mom after Christmas to thank your Aunt Marge for the scarf she knitted you. Who needs any of that?

A well written post-interview thank you note, however, can be an impactful piece of business communication that can help seal the deal. I’ve seen many cases where the thank you note cemented a hiring authority’s positive impression of a candidate or actually turned a negative impression into a positive one that ultimately resulted in an offer. I’ve also seen poorly written thank you notes result in a marginal candidate being quickly nixed.

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