4 useful tips on how to write an outstanding follow-up email

dennis kibet

April 28, 2017 5:27 PM

Most job seekers end up losing out on jobs they'd have gotten simply because they did not do a follow up.

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So you applied for this all-important job but did not get a response after a while. Do not be upset, the person is not ignoring you. Could be that he/she is a bit busy.

Don’t forget that the professional contact receives hundreds of email so it might be a bit strenuous going through each one of them.

The most advisable thing would be to do a follow up. In fact it’s your job to do so and as many times as you can.

However, you have to do it in the right way and perhaps some of these tips might finally get you the feedback you’re looking for:

1: Be Overly Polite and Humble

Quite a number of people tend to take matters personally once they don’t get immediate feedback. The worst thing you would do is taking your feelings out in an email, saying something like, “You haven’t responded yet.” Avoid being upset or mad and maintain an extremely polite tone throughout the entire email. Your contact will be interested in you once he/she is aware that you understand about his/her busy schedule.

2: Keep on persisting, but not every day!

Sending follow-up e-mails each and every day shows that you don’t respect the person’s time. You ought to give your email at least one week before doing a follow up. If you do it before then, it would seem that you are quite impatient while doing so after a couple of weeks shows that you are not really interested in the job.

3: Attempt something new

This is put down to the right timing and being a bit creative when sending that follow up email. For example, don’t send the exact email at the same time of day and same day of the week. If you send the first email, say, on March 6 in the morning you can try send a different follow up email on March 15 in the afternoon.

4: Be honest and ask if you should stop following up.

You don’t want to keep sending too many e-mails to the person so it’s advisable to directly ask if you should stop following up. You can say something like “I know how busy you are and completely understand if you just haven’t had the time to reach back out. But I don’t want to bombard you with e-mails if you’re not interested. Just let me know if you’d prefer I stop following up.”

dennis kibet