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[Chairing a search]

What are advisers telling their graduate students about thank-you letters? When I was on the market (the last five years), I rarely sent thank-you letters after interviews, though I knew that some people did as a matter of course. The few times I did it felt forced and artificial, and I never felt it had any effect on whether I got a campus interview or a job offer.

Now I am chairing a search and recently received a few thank-you letters after our phone interviews, and the letters seemed forced and artificial also. One of them was quite eloquent, and the writer certainly went out of his way to comment on the discussion we had during his phone interview. We had already decided to invite him to campus; I don't think the letter itself helped or hurt him. I found it mildly irritating, but I didn't feel irritated at the candidate, rather at the convention he had chosen to follow.

I do recall that one year my thank-you letter jogged the memory of the person who interviewed me at M.L.A., and I got a campus interview out of it, so I suppose it helped.

Overall, though, I think they're a false formality that smacks a little of desperation. What do others think?

[Francesca]

Personally, I'm not too fond of thank-you letters in an academic setting -- at least not as a requirement or as an overly formal expression of thanks.

In our last search only one candidate sent one -- and, of course, it was the candidate we absolutely weren't going to hire. The artificiality really came through in the letter, as we (the faculty) hadn't really clicked with the candidate.

I do think it is OK to do (perhaps informally, via e-mail if you've already had e-mail correspondence with the chair) if you had a particularly good rapport with the folks there and you have something else to say.

[Anon]

The thank-you letter is one of the many crappy things coming from corporate culture. There are far subtler and nicer ways to show one's gratitude. It makes visible how desperate candidates are.

[Anon 2]

I always send a thank-you letter. I believe that good ones don't seem artificial (although I don't usually read them, so perhaps I'm off base). Plus I think it's a good way of thanking people who took time out of their schedules to meet with you (particularly if they went out of their way to give you a campus tour).

[Sharon]

I agree with you 100 percent. Whenever I chair a search committee and I get a thank-you letter, I read it and then pitch it. Thank-you letters have never made any difference in the job-search process for any of the search committees that I have chaired, and I have chaired many of them over the years. They are a waste of time to write and a waste of time to read.

[Chairing a search]

Yes, now we've interviewed the candidate who is sending us thank-you letters, and he wasn't very good, and keeps sending e-mails about various things, so he seems even more desperate. It's a bit sad.

What are advisers telling their graduate students about this?

[Marcus Welby]

For those holding the cards, a thank-you letter from an applicant who did not make the grade may be a nuisance. In some minds, perhaps that is a person who has been dispensed of and should not be heard from again. Search-committee chairs are busy people, dealing with dozens of applications, many of which are quickly deemed disposable. The chair's time has value, and it is understandable that s/he doesn't want to waste it. You characterize the person who sends such a letter to a committee chair as "desperate," and maybe he or she is.

However, if you put yourself on the other side of the fence, out there in the job hunt with a large pool of qualified applicants, you might look for any edge you could find to distinguish yourself from the others.  
 
Someone who did not even get an interview has little to thank the committee for and is probably wasting their time and postage corresponding with them.

However, someone who was permitted an interview or asked to submit additional materials may feel that they are legitimately under consideration and may wish to re-state their interest in the position, even if they haven't heard anything.  

You say there are "more subtle" ways of showing your appreciation to an interview committee. What did you have in mind? Thanking the people on the way out the door for their time or complementing them on the state of their department or campus? I don't see a great deal of difference between these types of oral missives and a properly constructed thank-you note. In fact, the latter may demonstrate more mature reflection than the former.

I've read in this forum that unsuccessful interviewees are often left sitting in limbo for up to a month until the preferred candidate accepts the position. If the preferred person turns the post down (if, for example, the advertising institution is outbid for his/her services), the second- or third-place applicant may well be offered the job. Sometimes preferred applicants accept jobs and then turn them down weeks later after getting a better offer.  

In these cases, a letter from another interviewee thanking the committee for their consideration and reminding the committee about his/her qualifications and how those fit the department's needs may well be a rational, rather than a desperate, act.  

In any case (whether the writer was interviewed or not), it doesn't hurt to show more compunction for applicants who have invested a great deal in their education and are trying to make it pay off and to make a valuable contribution in their field of study. These people "want in" badly and many of them legitimately deserve it. They have invested a great deal and often have reaped very few dividends. As strange as it may sound, you were probably in that same position at one time yourselves.

[Thank-you-note writer]

I notice that no one on the market has responded to this thread, so I thought I'd throw in my two cents.  

I had four convention interviews, two telephone interviews, and one-on-campus interview this hiring season, all for tenure-track positions, and I wrote thank-you letters for all of those. I did not write thank-you letters to those schools that only asked for additional materials.  

I did not write the thank-you notes out of desperation, but because I thought it was the polite thing to do. These people took the time to discuss my work with me, the position, and to answer my questions about the department and institution. I believe that their time was valuable. I wanted to show my appreciation for the opportunity to speak with them.  

In short, I was thankful. Being nice isn't desperate, and social niceties are too often forgotten in academe. If a search committee or chairman thought that I was "desperate" for thanking them for their time, and if that harmed my chances, that is not the sort of department in which I would be happy working.

That said, I have been offered a tenure-track position at the school where I did the on-campus interview, and I am taking the position. By the way, I did not write a thank-you note to them for offering me the job -- now that would betray desperation!

[An invisible adjunct]

Yes, it is more than a little bit sad that there are so many desperate job-seekers.

What's striking about some of the comments here is the sense of irritation at someone who has had the bad taste to betray that sense of desperation. How unseemly of him! This is clearly someone who does not know his place. If he is not wanted, then he should slink away quietly and not make a nuisance of himself by continuing to assert his continued existence with letters that will require pitching and e-mails that will require deleting.  

The unemployed/underemployed Ph.D. is a blot on the copybook, an embarrassment to the profession to which he or she is supposed to belong. An uncomfortable reminder of an unpalatable set of conditions that some tenured faculty members would rather not face.

[Chairing a search]

Marcus Welby, I have been soundly scolded! I am just off the market this year, and I was a candidate for five years. I know that side of the fence much better than I know the hiring side. A sincere, meaningful letter may be a good reminder in the circumstances you describe, but to send letters as a matter of course seems irrelevant. I would certainly never let the thank-you letter determine whether or not I recommended someone for a job, but the person who is papering us with letters right now seems very desperate, perhaps because he knows he did not fare well at his interview. He's also much better on paper than in person, so is resorting to that, but it's not going to make us hire him.

No one has answered my initial query -- what are advisers telling their graduate students about this?

[Hey, Marcus]

Dr. Welby,

All these sound like great arguments, and probably would seem great in an article of advice for the job-seeker. If the people who got the letters saw it that way, you'd be giving good advice. However, the vast majority of hiring committees don't enjoy these letters, and certainly don't need to be reminded who does what or what their qualifications are, since a "ranking" form or sheet is made for all 10-12  longlist candidates, in most cases with boxes checked off for "good pubs," "poor grants," "good papers given," "no book," etc.

Everyone who has ever interviewed for a grocery bagging job knows that a clingy, desperate demeanor is a huge turnoff. People who are confident don't send "reminder" notes, which is what thank-you letters are, and even if they don't get the job, they remain confident because they have a great vita and tested interview "personality," and they know that someone else was just a better fit. If they don't feel confident, they need some coaching, either professionally or from mentors and peers with whom they can practice interviewing.

When I was on the market, rather than on the hiring side, I met several great people on committees who didn't wind up hiring me. Instead, I sent them an e-mail a few months later and asked them to contribute a chapter to a book I was editing or a paper to a conference session. Every single one said yes, and these people became great assets. That is a better strategy than bugging people in a totally transparent way, even with a well-written letter.

[Anon]

You take so much time out of your busy day, you wine and dine us, answer our questions, and put us at ease.

Maybe it is not desperation ... maybe it is gratitude!

[Invisible Adjunct]

In response to your initial question:

The official line in the academic job-hunting guides is: Write a brief  thank-you letter to everyone who interviewed you. And not just for campus interviews, mind you, but for convention interviews as well.  

I agree that they seem forced and artificial. I have only written such letters in a couple of cases, and it made me feel uncomfortable to do so. The problem is: I don't have a full-time tenure-track job. And my not having written thank-you letters after convention interviews is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night wondering: I didn't cross all my "t"s and dot all my "i"s; is this why they didn't put me on their shortlist? I don't really believe my not sending thank-you letters has anything to do with it. But the thank-you letter is fast becoming the norm, and many candidates are not going to risk flouting this new convention.

[E.C.]

This is a response to the posting by Chairing a Search: When I was on the market, I was told to write letters. Perhaps this is an outdated practice ... all of the members on my committee had earned their degrees more than 20 years ago. I've also attended job-search workshops that instructed me to send letters.

[Anon]

Friends,

Even if you are not desperate and are sincerely thankful, Homo sapiens are not tele-empathic. The "search committee monster" who gets your letter cannot tell your "thankful" motivations from those of 50 other people's "desperate" motivations -- no one states "I'm desperate," they all state "I'm so thankful" -- so clearly we need to think outside our own heads and imagine the recipient and their concerns. This way of taking the whole world into consideration, not just our own internal world, is called by various terms, the "big picture," "emotional intelligence," "mindfulness," and many other phrases.  

Every action we take in public is going to be perceived by an "audience." Not just our own internal self. It is fine, philosophically and hypothetically, to "be true to your feelings" and act only on your gut instinct and personal motivation, but it isn't smart all of the time.

Our culture is so incredibly self-centered that we think that our personal motives are justification for just about anything. People complain in other columns about students who get a C and want an A because they "worked hard." Of course, the harried professor says, "if you worked hard but still got it wrong, you don't get points for just working hard." Some of the posters in this column sound like those students: acting from personal motives and feelings, expecting others to understand this through magic osmosis, and being offended and indignant at the idea that just because they felt it was polite, correct, etc. that it is the right thing to do.

Clearly, if it is a bad thing to do and puts people off, you shouldn't do it. Your grandmother's reprimands about not sending notes for birthday gifts don't have any place here. It may be impolite to not send our thank yous for social occasions, but not employment situations. Even if there are folks out there who just love getting notes from job seekers, they are few and far between. Since you have no way of telling what type of person you are writing to, why risk making yourself look bad?