Just hurry up and give me the job already.
Honestly, it can be so frustrating when you’re waiting on an outcome. You really like a role, and you just wanna know if you’ve got hired.
Essentially, you wanna make sure that you come across keen, but you don’t want to be pushy. You wanna have closure so you can move on with your job search or close this chapter of your journey.
This is the thing that the Career Transition Club members ask me most often.
I thought I’d break it down to tell you the best ways to follow up with the jobs you’re applying for.
Following Up on Initial Applications
If you’ve gone for 20 opportunities, you might be keen to follow up with every single one of them.
The reality is you’ve already done so much time and effort on your applications. And there’s so much more to do about being strategic on LinkedIn, trying to network to find the right people, and prepping for interviews.
You don’t have time to be following up with 20 individual jobs.
My recommendation is if you’ve applied for it, don’t follow up. If it’s been four weeks, consider it closed for your own mental health space.
If they do come back to you, great, but there’s probably not gonna be any outcome.
Now, if you were very keen on that particular role or one of those roles, there’s no harm in following up. I would recommend one to two weeks after the deadline of when it was gonna close.
The reason why one to two weeks is because it gives a bit of time for people to process the applications and work through what’s happening.
There could be delays that can’t be controlled, so you don’t wanna be day one straight away chasing.
After the HR Interview
Someone has spoken to you, they’ve determined whether you’re the right fit for the role to be passed to the hiring manager, and they’ve had a discussion around salaries.
Again, one to two weeks is the appropriate time to follow up with that one.
If you haven’t heard anything, it could be sat on a hiring manager’s desk and they haven’t got round to it yet. There’s so many reasons in the background that might prevent that outcome from happening.
But rather than not following up, I’d say it is important to follow up with those ones.
After the Final Job Interview
You’ve gone to the HR interview, you’ve been accepted for an interview, and you have a job interview. Congratulations!
Normally in interviews, they can set a timeline with you to say it’s gonna be a week where we’ll know what the next steps are.
The reality is hiring managers are quite optimistic in the moment whenever they’re giving that outcome.
It might take them a week to decide that they do or don’t want you, but they might have to go through governance to get that approved.
There might be a decision maker who’s off on holidays. Or there’s a recruiter at the end of that process who’s got 10 to 20 to 50 other opportunities they’re working on.
Accept that if they tell you a week, it’s probably gonna be two or three.
Again, the appropriate time to follow up is one to two weeks after the deadline that the hiring manager has set you.
And by the way, at the end of all your interviews, make sure you always ask what would be the next steps if I was successful.
Then you know what that timeline could look like.
Who to Contact
Now, when it comes to following up appropriately, the first place you should always try to follow up with is the talent acquisition team.
HR, recruitment, talent acquisition, whatever you wanna call them. They’re the people who are managing candidates on behalf of hiring managers and should be that first port of call.
Now in the instance where you don’t know who that is, you can try and find them on LinkedIn. Particularly if the vacancy is posted on LinkedIn, because often it shows you who is the recruiter for that post.
Be mindful though that with LinkedIn, recruiters are getting messaged a lot. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee that they’ll respond.
If you have an email address or a follow-up phone number, work with them on that. Contact them that way rather than the noise on LinkedIn, if you can avoid it.
Book a free, no-obligation 30-minute consultation with me and tell me your story.
