You've aced the interview and sent a thoughtful thank-you note. Now what? How do you know if your follow-up strategy is working or if you need to make some adjustments? In this article, you'll learn some of the most effective ways to evaluate your follow-up strategy and improve your chances of landing the job.
Before you start following up, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Do you want to get feedback, express your interest, show your value, or ask for the next steps? Depending on your goals, you'll need to choose the right timing, frequency, tone, and content for your follow-up messages. For example, if you want to get feedback, you might want to follow up within a week of the interview, while if you want to show your value, you might want to share some relevant updates or insights after a few weeks.
Once you have your goals and your follow-up plan, you need to track your results in order to measure the effectiveness of your follow-up strategy. To do this, you can look at indicators such as the response rate (how many of your messages get a reply), the quality of the response (how positive, informative, or encouraging are the responses that you receive), the progress of the process (how far along are you in the hiring process?), and feedback from the employer (do they appreciate your follow-up, give you constructive criticism, or ask you to stop contacting them?).
I would say that the ultimate way of determining the effectiveness of your follow-up strategy is based on whether you got the job or not.
After you track your results, you need to analyze your data and see what works and what doesn't. To do so, you can compare different follow-up messages to identify how they perform in terms of response rate, quality, and progress. Additionally, it’s important to look for patterns and trends in your results that could help you optimize your strategy. You can also test different scenarios by tweaking some aspects of your follow-up strategy such as the timing, frequency, tone, or content. This will help you gain valuable insights into how these changes affect your results.
Based on your analysis, you can adjust your strategy and make it more effective. To do this, you can experiment with different approaches - for example, by using A/B testing to compare the outcomes of two different messages sent to two similar groups of employers. Additionally, you can ask the employer for feedback on your follow-up strategy and seek referrals or recommendations from other contacts in the same industry or company. Furthermore, it's important to learn from your mistakes and avoid repeating them - if you notice that some of your follow-up messages are ineffective, annoying, or inappropriate, stop using them and apologize if necessary.
Finally, you need to keep following up until you get a definitive answer from the employer. It is important to remain persistent and polite, yet creative and relevant. Additionally, it is essential to remain confident but humble. Do not give up too soon or too late, and do not lose your enthusiasm or professionalism. Avoid spamming, nagging, or harassing the employer, making unrealistic demands or threats, repeating yourself, sending generic messages, sharing unrelated information, assuming, begging, boasting, selling yourself short or overselling yourself. Following up in this way will help you get a response from the employer.