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There was a good post by Alex at Emurse last week on the value to candidates in writing personalized thank-you notes to the interview team after an interview. It was particularly timely, as I received the best thank-you note I’ve ever received in my recruiting career that same week.

Based on my personal experience, less than 10% of all candidates bother to write thank-you notes after an interview. Even in this high velocity, high volume, transactional job market, this is surprising in that every candidate has invested a lot of time and energy to make it to the interview stage in the evaluation process and to ignore this opportunity to create an impression is most definitely a miss. It certainly should play at least a small role in an overall strategy to land a job.

The note I received was from a Stanford MBA that will be joining my team at Google to help with recruiting initiatives as an intern for the summer. As an HR guy, landing a Stanford MBA to focus on recruiting initiatives makes for a Pretty Good Day. She was a standout in the interview process, and very remarkable in the way she presented herself overall. It is not at all surprising her follow up was also exemplary. I’ll call her Shelly (not her real name) since she might not appreciate me blogging about her career plans.

Alex’s post caused me to reflect on why Shelly’s thank you note made an impact but also my broader perspective as a corporate recruiting leader on the value of these little gestures. I’ve referred to them as “Love Bombs” since as long as I can remember… I think it’s something I picked up in the early days of my recruiting career. As in, “that candidate sent me a really good little love bomb after that final round of interviews…”

Thank-you notes matter for a lot of reasons. They matter for all the standard reasons (showing commitment, business etiquette, etc) but I think they matter for two other reasons as well.

Reason 1: As part of an overall strategy, thank-you notes are a way for a candidate to extend the engagement level of the interview process. This is almost always a good thing if the candidate is in contention for the job. A properly executed thank-you note via email will include some additional job-related questions that continues to perpetuate the candidate/interviewer relationship and dialogue. I would actually recommend doing two thank-you notes, one via email with some additional questions, and one hand-written thank you as simply another marketing impression on the interview team.

Reason 2: Thank you notes can convey a unique marketing impression that sets a candidate apart in the selection process, but also begins to advance a personalized relationship with the recipient, regardless of whether the candidate gets this job. If they don’t win the job at stake, this personalized connection is valuable, and can lead to other opportunities in the future. If they do get the job, it strengthens the relationships that ultimately are the bridge in the onboarding process into the new organization, which also pays dividends. I can say the best thank-you notes I’ve received in my career created a nearly indelible memory of candidates I have interviewed… many of them still stand out in my mind today, and this after years and hundreds of candidates and interviews. That is certainly worth the investment on the part of the candidate.

Shelly’s note was special because it wasn’t just a thank-you note. It was hand-written in such a fashion that showed it was weighty to her: carefully scripted and flowing in a way that suggested it was written with great care; not scribbled in the way of most hand-written business writing of today. It was more than a message to say thanks, it was a recap of our conversation that showed a continued investment in the relationship, for purely the sake of investing in the relationship regardless of the job. Yes, she expressed her interest and excitement over the role, but there was much more there than just a sales pitch. It was the type of note that, coupled with her interview, would have solidified the relationship in a way that had she not got the offer, would have led me to call her for other jobs in the future should they become available and be well-suited for her.

Shelly landed the job long before I ever received her thank-you note, but I think it is a great reminder that the little things, even in this day and age, really do matter.

Now that I am officially a Californian, I stopped by an In N Out Burger over the weekend and had a cheeseburger and a chocolate shake. The restaurant I visited is right down the road from my corporate apartment of Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, and I was amazed at the quality of the staff that was working. These people were friendly, attentive, and in genuine good spirits. It was a unique fast food experience to say the least. In N Out is doing something right when it comes to talent acquisition.

If you haven’t been there, In N Out Burger sells 6 items. That’s it. I counted. Only six: Burgers, Milkshakes (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry), Sodas, Milk, Coffee, and French Fries, as I recall. $350 million per year of these 6 items by most estimates (they are privately held so we don’t know for sure).

I couldn’t help compare this with Jobster, whose latest change of direction is buoyed with the assertion that they believe the value is in the match (as in the match between person and job), so we corporate recruiting types can now post our jobs for free. Um, by definition, the value has always been in the match. No value is created for either employer or employee if jobs aren’t filled and job seekers don’t land jobs. Given that we are moving from the Search Era (everything available with the right query or question; a la Google search) to the Discovery Era (the right information served up to you before you ask based on complex algorithms, collaborative filtering, and historical data; a la the Netflix Prize or Amazon’s suggestive selling engine) this would be the holy grail of recruiting.

The talent marketplace is not that efficient. An efficient market would let us all know all the available, well-suited jobs that meet our criteria (location, compensation, job scope, company profile, leadership team, culture fit, the list goes on and is highly complex). I envision this as my internet home page (currently Google with lots of widgets) serving up only the jobs that I might be interested in and also well-suited for. Relevancy is very important, as there are already too many candidates pursuing jobs they won’t ever get hired for because they cannot discern whether they are well-suited for the role. Similarly, the best talent doesn’t want to be solicited for jobs that don’t suit them any more than I want Amazon.com to recommend something that I’m not really interested in (which they annoyingly do by the way).

This is a huge challenge for Jobster, and I’m not optimistic that they will be able to pull it off for several reasons:

1.) Complexity: Creating relevant matches between jobs and people is one of the most complex algorithms I can think of. Amazon can’t even get relevant matchng right and they know a lot about my preferences for books and music. It’s not clear to me how Jobster will be able to create relevant matches (and they must be relevant) by matching the multifaceted, multidimensional requirements of jobs with the multifaceted, multidimensional requirements of human beings.

2.) Range restriction: People don’t want to change jobs that often. Yes, the velocity of careers has accelerated to where the average person changes jobs every couple of years, but in reality, there’s not a lot of time window when non-job hoppers really want to hear about other opportunities. This makes the data set smaller. For example, if you only order one book every 2.5 years, Amazon’s not going to serve you up much of a relevant menu. Funny anecdote: the week after I started with Google, I got a call, in my office at Google, from a headhunter about a head of staffing job at Home Depot after the Nardelli Implosion. Talk about poor relevancy matching…

3.) Unclear job specifications: Those of us in recruiting know that the key to an efficient and ultimately successful search is really qualifying the requisition with the people responsible for making the hiring decision. Very few hiring managers have thought through what really drives success in a job, and generally don’t develop a robust specification for the job. This complicates things even further.

I’ve alluded to this topic a few times, but simplicity forces value creation, whether it is running a recruiting department, a burger chain, or a software company. Admittedly, I’ve only done one of these.

What I have done is made a career out of observing and assessing behaviors, competencies, and the subsequent results of executive leaders with whom I’ve worked with at both large companies like Starbucks, Microsoft, and Google, and at the small 50-person start-up Oracle technology consulting company that my team and I helped rapidly scale in the late 1990s. I have become a student of competencies, behaviors, and their resulting impact on business results.

One of the key behaviors I see effective leaders consistently dispay is to separate the productivity from the activity in their pursuits, and winnow that down to clarify business results around a single, well-defined objective. Generally, things aren’t as complicated as we make them. I haven’t seen Jobster create this level of laser focus around a business problem that can clearly be monetized.

I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t know what business problem that Jobster was trying to solve. Unfortunately, now that I know and as much as I want them to succeed, I am no more optimistic about their probability of success. It will be interesting to follow their latest tack.