Finally realized thank-you notes actually work after 3 months of testing

I started sending handwritten thank-you notes to people who helped me land interviews or gave me referrals. After 3 months, two of those people reached out with new job leads without me asking. Has anyone else seen results from old school stuff like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

shanes6616d ago

That part about two people reaching out with job leads without you asking really hit me. It reminds me of when I was helping my uncle clean out his garage a few years back. He found a box of old Christmas cards from people he used to work with in the 90s. One guy named Don had a return address on the envelope that was still in town, so my uncle wrote him a real letter just to say hi and catch up. Turns out Don was retiring and needed someone to take over his small landscaping business, which my uncle ended up buying for peanuts. We always laugh that a dusty Christmas card from 1998 changed his life. Did the notes you sent take a lot of time to write out?

kim_mason5515d ago

Did you handwrite your notes or just type them out? For me, keeping a stack of simple blank cards and doing a couple at a time made it not feel like a big chore. I'd just write a line or two while watching TV, and before long I had a pile ready to mail.

taylor_wells15d ago

Used to roll my eyes at thank-you notes... thought they were just fluff people sent out of obligation. But I had a buddy who swore by them for years and kept saying it was like planting seeds you'd forget about until they sprouted. After reading your post I finally get what he meant. It's not about the note itself it's about the fact that you took ten minutes to sit down and handwrite something in a world where nobody does that anymore. Makes people remember you in a specific way when your name comes up later on.