Email follow-up for job seekers: Following up with an application.
When you’re on the hunt for a job, it can be overwhelming to keep track of applications and correspondence. Whether you’ve just sent a hiring manager your resume, or had a great interview and are waiting to hear back, it’s a good idea to send a follow-up email to reinforce your interest in the position and establish open communication.
Writing effective follow-up emails is challenging, and remembering to follow-up on all your applications can be just as hard. Fortunately, Boomerang can help you with both. Read on for a guide on writing effective, "respondable" follow up emails, as well as how to track responses and get automated reminders to follow-up on applications that don't get a response. Never let a job opportunity fall through the cracks again!
"Terrific tools for the job hunt! I just installed Boomerang, an email scheduler/reminder for Gmail"
Jessa Carpenter
Some tips & reminders:
- Schedule your follow up email to be sent 5–7 days after no response
- Always do a grammar and spell check
- Use Respondable to increase your odds of a reply
- Keep your follow-up email brief but professional
- Include any recent professional developments (awards, training, etc) that may have happened since submitting your original application
Follow up with a job application
When a hiring manager receives dozens, even hundreds of applications for a position, it becomes difficult to tell candidates apart. A follow up letter can give you an edge by showing that you are proactive and interested in the position; it may also help keep your application from getting lost in the pile.
When drafting your follow-up, make sure you're striking the right tone and hitting the ideal length. If you need guidance on what's ideal, Respondable is an AI assistant that gives you real-time feedback on your message as you write it, showing you how to optimize your message for getting a response. To the right is a sample follow-up email that is "very likely" to get a response:
Click here to copy the example message's text to your clipboard.
As you’re sending out dozens of cover letters and resumes, it’s easy to lose track of different applications once you’ve hit ‘send.’ When composing an email, you can set Boomerang to give you a reminder if you don’t get a reply after a certain amount of days. If the message comes back to your inbox without a response, you can then react by sending another email to follow up.
You can now schedule your follow-up message as you're writing the original email. If the hiring manager responds to your original message, Boomerang will detect the response, and will not send the second email. If they don’t reply, Boomerang will send the follow-up message automatically — you’ll never have to let another opportunity fall through the cracks.
“Boomerang! Where have you been all my life?”
Sam Grobart, The New York Times
“Boomerang for Gmail. First off, if you don’t have it, stop reading this and go get it. Right now. There’s absolutely no other extension that will add this level of function to your Gmail.
Brad McCarty, TheNextWeb