After spending much of June in the pit of blackest unemployment despair, I wound up with a job interview early this week. I think it went well, but the company is interviewing a few other candidates, so I just have to wait and hope that they’re not as awesome as me. But that’s not what I want to write about. I want to write about the fact that if I hadn’t followed up on my application, I never would have had the interview at all.
When I applied for this particular job, I was answering an ad on Craigslist. I followed the instructions and sent my resume and cover letter to the Craigslist-generated anonymizing email address at the top of the listing. The listing said that not everyone would receive a response. A week went by — no response.
Nonetheless, I took the precaution of sending a follow up email to the anonymizing Craigslist-generated email address. I wrote that I had applied the previous week, and wanted to confirm that my resume had been received, and reiterated my interest in the position and the company.
I was expecting yet another rejection — but it turned out that my resume had gotten eaten somewhere along the line, and the company had never received it. They asked me to send it again, and within 24 hours I had an interview!
Following up is something a lot of job seekers slack off about, and I suspect those numbers are higher among job seekers with ADD. When you’re sending out a lot of resumes, it’s hard to keep track of where you sent them and when, and it’s easy to get bogged down in just sending out more resumes and cover letters instead of tracking down the ones you’ve already written. It can also be hard to follow up, knowing that you might get rejected — and that this time it’s final and official. In the long run, though, I’ve found that it’s best to know one way or another, so you can put your energy into finding new opportunities.
[...] Organizing The ADHD Job Search: Always, Always, ALWAYS Follow Up [...]