- Career coaches previously told Insider candidates should always send post-interview thank-you notes.
- But employers shouldn’t ever require them or use them to make hiring decisions.
- Three HR consultants, managers, and career coaches said a thank-you note shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.
In mid-October, Jennifer Howe was scrolling through LinkedIn when she came across a post about thank-you notes.
The LinkedIn user, who was a recruiter, had a clear message: If a candidate doesn’t send them a thank-you note after an interview, then they will not pass the job seeker’s materials on to the hiring manager for further evaluation, Howe recalled.
“It made my blood boil a little bit,” Howe, the founder of J. Howe Human Resource Solutions, said. “For them to say that a person isn’t worthy to be passed on because they didn’t send an email is preposterous.”
While there’s a debate over the practice of sending thank-you notes after interviews, it’s in a candidate’s best interest to send that follow-up because it shows professionalism and interest, career coaches previously told Insider. But the expectation that a candidate should send a note of gratitude doesn’t take into consideration the amount of time job seekers invest in the hiring process or the propensity for the practice to reduce the diversity of the talent pool under consideration, three human-resource consultants, managers, and career coaches told Insider.
Here’s why post-interview thank-you notes aren’t an equitable way for managers to judge a candidate, according to three human-resource consultants, managers, and career coaches.
It worsens an already exhausting process
Candidates already spend hours applying to roles, tweaking their résumés, and tailoring their cover letters, only for hiring managers to spend mere seconds reviewing their applications, Julia Firestone, the founder and CEO of her eponymous career-coaching and consulting firm, said. The process is already "exhausting" without adding this unspoken rule of requiring a thank-you note, she added.
"If they're a great candidate, then I don't think sending or not sending a thank-you note should make or break that decision," Firestone said. "I think it's a real problem that anyone would take a candidate out of the running because they don't send a thank-you note."
For Howe, it begs the question: Why do recruiters expect job seekers to thank them for their time when recruiters aren't expected to, and often don't, thank candidates for theirs?
"These candidates end up being ghosted or don't even know if the position is filled," Howe said. "We can't expect certain things of candidates that we ourselves are not going to reciprocate."
It creates a biased hiring process
Disqualifying candidates who don't send thank-you notes can also create a biased hiring process, Nora Morikawa, the former director of linguistics for the recruiting platform Datapeople, said.
"You can't expect a person to know what they don't know, and so you can't assume everybody was taught this," Howe said. "If you're going to really determine a person's professionalism by a thank-you note, then you have missed an entire interview."
There are so many other parts of the talent search that give insight into a candidate's capabilities, Howe said. What's more, to look at thank-you notes as an "obvious" or "natural" next step in a hiring process is not inclusive, Morikawa added. Using this practice to determine a candidate's competence often means equating professionalism with "white or educated," she added.
"It's an arbitrary social convention and, just like any other arbitrary social convention, it's not intuitive," Morikawa said. A candidate may not assume they need to thank an interviewer in writing after already doing so at the end of their interview, she added.