Timeliness is key when you're sending a follow up email after an interview, and it shows your enthusiasm for the role you were interviewing for. Here are a few tips for how to follow up after an interview, to land you your dream internship.
1. Respond via email within 24 hours.
If there’s one thing that people notice upon first impression, it’s your punctuality. Similarly to arriving at your interview on time, you want to make sure that you do the same with your thank you correspondence as well. Within 24 hours of your interview, email the people who interviewed you. This is a key step in your follow-up.
2. Write individual emails to everyone who interviewed you.
Rather than writing a group thank you email, take the time to personalize your message by sending a thank you note to each person who interviewed you. This may take time and research. Start your research by looking at the company’s “team” page to see if each person’s email address is listed there. As a last resort, it's usually fair to guess that other people’s email addresses follow the same pattern as the person who originally emailed you. Usually, companies follow email trends like first.lastname@companyname.com.
3. Reference talking points from your interview.
Not only should you thank each person for taking the time out of their busy schedule to interview you, but you should also showcase your listening skills by referencing things that came up in your interview. Did so and so mention that they started in this internship role, just like you? Mention how inspiring it is to have heard about their upward mobility. Did someone else explain their favorite part about working at this company? Reply and tell them their answers excited you even further to join this organization. This will help make you stand out among the other emails they’re receiving that just say “thank you and hope to hear from you soon.”
4. Reiterate your interest in the position.
End your email by restating how much you would love to intern at this company. Remember, they have your resume already, so there isn’t a need to go into an elaborate description of your work experience. That’s what your initial application email was for. Use this email as a chance to let your personality shine through.
5. Keep it short and simple.
A general rule of thumb for follow-up emails is to keep them at no more than five sentences, or a paragraph long. You can open the email with a sentence thanking them. The chunk of your paragraph should be focused on referencing talking points from your interview, as well as reaffirming your interest in the role. You can close your paragraph by saying that you’re excited to hear back from them soon and leave your preferred method of contact.
6. Be patient.
Patience is a virtue, especially in the interview process. Remember, they are likely interviewing many other candidates and taking the time out of their normal work schedules to do so. Once they reply to your thank you email, they’ll likely give you a turnaround time for hearing back about secondary interviews, or role confirmation. Hang tight and be patient until they reach out to you again.
Did you know that you can also use these tips to follow-up on job interview if you think it went badly? In fact, it's a good idea!
If you had a bad job interview, keep these tips in mind before you follow-up:
1. Let yourself be upset.
It’s disappointing to feel that you’ve failed at something. At the same time, don’t internalize the failure. The interview didn’t go well, but that doesn’t reflect your capabilities or intellect. It was just something that happened.
2. Take deep breaths.
Once you’ve had your moment of crisis, relax. Take a deep breath. Or many of them. Try to calm yourself mentally and emotionally so that you can think more rationally about what actually happened at this apparent epic failure of an interview.
3. Take stock of what went well
It’s easy to be self-critical and repeat in your head the ways things didn’t go as smoothly as you would have liked. Try to spend the same amount of energy thinking about the things that went well. Think about the questions that went better than others and compliment yourself for performing well in those areas. Job interviews can be very stressful and cause us to freeze up or overthink things, so it’s important to forgive yourself and cheer yourself on so that you can do better next time and maintain a positive attitude.
4. Send that follow-up email.
Take a moment to follow up with the interviewer using the advice above. Consider a question that you would like the chance to answer again and take a moment to say something along the lines of, “In addition to my response in the interview, after further thought I would like to add that…” or something along those lines. Thank them for the chance to interview in a concise way and you’re set.
If you get an email to say you were unsuccessful, respond and ask them for some feedback on your interview performance. This way, you've used the bad interview as a valuable learning opportunity and you can improve for next time!
