Should you send a follow up after interview?

What's up, YouTube family? I'm Alison Peck, for those of you don't know me. I also go by Ally from Corporate on my other social media channels and for a couple years I've been making career development content online. Today we're talking about whether you should follow up after you've applied for a job, maybe even had a couple interviews and you haven't heard back in a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month, what do you do? Do you follow up? Do you not? What are the consequences or the benefits of doing either one? So let's get into this. I'm going to paint a picture for you. You've applied to a job, they called you, you had a first interview, you thought it went well. They called you, you got a second interview, you thought that also went well. They called you again for a third and final interview, you thought it went great, you were sure. It's in the bag, baby. They're going to send me an offer any day now. But then a week goes by, and then two weeks goes by, three weeks goes by. What do you, do you want to follow up to see, hey, maybe, maybe they just forgot about me. I would advise against that. Now, before I get into why, I want to give a disclaimer that before you follow any of my advice, ever ask yourself, does this apply to my situation? Would this benefit me? Is this a smart thing to do for my career? And can I try her advice out risk free to see if it works or not? And if not, you don't have to take my advice. No big deal. So what I would do in this situation, plain and simple, I would just keep job searching. Unless this is your number one dream company and you are so specialized with your skills or your licenses or whatever that you must work for this one company and this is it. Just keep job searching. It's kind of a numbers game sometimes. Unfortunately, job searching, I don't love the term spray and pray. That's sometimes used to describe job searching where you rage. Apply to a hundred different companies and just see what hits. I don't like that method. I think that job searching should always be intentional. You should also always apply with intention of working there because you want to work for that company for a specific reason. And that way you'll always have an authentic answer. When you're asked in an interview, why do you want to work here? You never want to say, oh, you were just one of the ones I saw online. So I clicked easy apply. No, we want to have a good reason for that. So let's talk about what would happen if we did reach out to maybe the hiring manager or the recruiter whoever interviewed us. Number one, I believe that it diminishes your negotiating power if they ever do reach out to you because it makes you look desperate. It makes you look like you have nothing better to do with your time than sit around, twiddle your thumbs and wait for a hiring manager to call you. I always like to job search using the mentality, I'm way too busy to send a thank you note. I'm way too busy to follow up after an interview. I'm just going to keep job searching until I land a job. So that's my advice to you. It's going to be different for different situations, for different companies. Obviously, for your situation, ask yourself, should I follow up? Should I not? But just know that if you follow up, you may be losing negotiating power because it makes you look desperate. If you don't follow up, what would happen? I highly doubt that they've just forgot about you or that they're going to respond to your reaching out and say, oh, shoot, thank you so much. You know, I almost forgot to email you back. Yeah, you got the job. I highly doubt it. I'm sorry to burst your bubble and, you know, rain on your parade, but they're probably not reaching out to you because you didn't get the job. And if I'm the first person to tell you that, I'm sorry, but life goes on. And the silver lining of all this and what I've learned in my career is that when one door shuts and it's the door that you wanted most in life, a better door opens and you thought, thank goodness that original door was closed, because this is even better. So I urge you to consider that if a company isn't reaching back out to you and you've had multiple interviews, maybe it's for the best. Maybe you wouldn't have wanted to work for them anyways. Maybe they're disorganized with their hiring process and they don't reach out to candidates that were in final rounds of interviews, which is a crappy thing for a company to do. You want to work for somebody like that? Maybe, maybe not. But keep job searching, keep going. And it's kind of like dating. I'll leave you with this metaphor. If you go on a first date and you thought it went well, and you text the guy and you go, or the girl and you go, hey, thought that was great, let's do it again sometime. And you don't hear back. And then you text again. Hey. Just wanted to hope you're having a good day. Wanted to reach out and say hi. And you don't hear back. It's probably because they're not interested. So take the hint. It's the same with the job. No big deal. Keep job searching. You've got this. And remember, I offer job searching support in the form of resume reviews, interview prep, and general career coaching. So if you need any support, let me know. And I hope you learned something from this video. I'll catch you in the next one.