Ask HN: Interview Thank You Emails. Necessary?

I'll disagree. Here's why you should send a thank-you note: Though it may not matter to some hiring managers, it can make a difference for others. I put myself in that latter category.

Whenever I'm in a hiring position, I take a close look at the candidate's courtesy and interpersonal skills. Candidates who are polite, even to the receptionist, and who follow up with a thank-you email always get a little bump in "points" in my book.

The person who is thoughtful enough to thank me for my time not only understands social protocol, but is more likely to be respectful of others around the office.

It's not enough to get you hired if you don't have the skills for the job. But if there's a tie, the person who sent me a thank-you note will always get the job over the person who didn't.

And ties like this have happened in my experience.

So the moral is that you just never know if it's going to matter or not -- so you might as well do it.

I've only ever hired one person, so my experience in this is limited.

I was on the fence between the two top people. Both were great, right out of college and seemed eager to learn. One sent a thank you card, the other did not.

I hired the one that didn't send a thank you card because I was more concerned about keeping out a (potential) kiss-ass in the thank you note writer.

Also, I don't think a thank you note is courteous. If I believed that I'd also need to think that not sending a thank you note is a sign of an absence of courtesy.

Making courtesy a function of thank you notes would cause them be thrown out ad nauseum and would lose some meaning.

it really varies from place to place and company/industry. Which probably means its fading out. I recently went through a few rounds of interviews with several people at a large software company and i did not send thank you emails. I was given the job but it was brought up over beers later on with boss and peers how i did not send thank you emails. they mentioned how during their interview process that most people were not doing that and it seemed to them that was becoming outdated.

Now i was briefly a hiring manager before and i hated getting follow up emails from people i interviewed. It is so obvious that people know it's something they have to do and just kicked out these canned scripted thank you messages. Most people's inboxes are already full and they are busy why would they want this?

And my personal opinion is that, honestly they should be thanking you. I mean, they need help. They put out a "Help Wanted". You have skills that can help them. They asked if you wouldn't mind taking 3 hours out of your work day so you could go down to meet several of their team members so they could evaluate you and help them make certain they are hiring the right person. Maybe they should be thanking you?? It's a two-way street.

The main reason to chose snail mail is not that it is slow, but that it shows some amount courtesy and appreciation.The cost (in terms of time) of writing an email v/s letter should not be measured in terms of the number of minutes. I think of it this way, somebody who had take the time to get some postal envelops, stamps, sat down and wrote the letter leaving his work in some way and then dropping it off to a post box is much more classy than someone who composed an email in his/her already open client and wrote a bare bone email with a template in their drafts folder.

As a hiring manager, most of the time my mind is made up 30 minutes into the interview (though it's not considered polite to cut it short or notify them at that time). However, in the very rare case of a tie, a follow up email (or handwritten letter) will definitely swing it in your favor.

Actually, despite it being the common advice, they are quite rare to receive. So I tend to take notice and remember that person much later even if they are not selected. I would be likely to give the person another shot if they re-applied for another position, or pass their resume along to another position where I think they'd fit better. I'd never do that for someone who didn't follow up.