3

Applying and Interviewing

Once you’ve decided what jobs to apply for, the real fun begins. Now it’s time to make contact. This chapter focuses on how to create the best impression at this stage. It starts with the application and extends through the job interview.

Success at this point requires thinking like a recruiter. After all, your application will be evaluated by one or a small number of individuals who will look at your materials, probably without asking you for additional information. The more you know about the way you will be judged, the more likely you are to transition from a few pages in a stack of applications to a personal connection in an interview. The interview has its own dynamic that influences the likelihood you’ll get a job offer.

The application process is also a significant chance for you to learn about the company you might work for. Often, applicants treat their applications and interviews as if information flows only from the applicant to the prospective employer. But employers tell you a tremendous amount about their values and what working for them is like through the way they hire. It’s important to pay attention to these signals.

Your Application

Most job applications consist of a set of papers (or computer files) that provide your primary opportunity to impress a recruiter or a recruiting committee. They may include an application form, a cover letter that allows you to present your qualifications for the job, a brief résumé highlighting your key experience, and possibly a portfolio of relevant work you’ve done. Some companies may also ask you to take some tests. These may evaluate skills related to the job or they may be interest and personality inventories.

Your success with this application depends on impressing the recruiters, so you need to know a few things about how people use the materials you provide to make decisions.

Perhaps the most important thing you should determine is what the hiring organization really wants. That means you have a lot of work to do before you even start to put your application materials together.

I spoke to Alison, who has evaluated job applicants and given advice to countless others. She said, “Research, research, research … knowing as much as you can about the people, place, culture, to determine if it will be the right fit and what the challenges and opportunities are—not just looking at publicly available and public-facing information, but doing a bit of behind-the-scenes work to get people’s impressions from both the inside and the outside. And tailoring your résumé, not just your cover letter, for the job.”

The hiring organization provides some amount of information about what it is and what it wants just in the advertisement for a position. You shouldn’t focus only on what the ad says, though. You should also get a good sense of what the organization does and how it talks about its mission. This information is available on its website and can be found in news stories about the company. And if you know people who have worked for the organization (or better yet, still work there), listen to the words they use to talk about their experience.

I spoke to many recruiters in the course of putting together this book, and every single one said that the biggest mistake an applicant can make is to be unfamiliar with the mission of the organization and unclear about what the job ad said. That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily know all the tasks the organization has in mind for the position, but it does mean you should be aware of everything that was communicated about it.

You aren’t just trying to understand the organization’s goals abstractly. The specific language people use is important. One factor that increases people’s sense that they like something is the ease with which they can think about it. This ease is called processing fluency. Above and beyond what you say about yourself, the more fluently people can process the information you present, the more they will like your application.

How can you ease processing fluency when applying for a job? Repeating the words the organization uses to describe itself and the position is a great start. Robin, who often recruits for startup companies (and has had to apply for a number of jobs over the years), makes this point. He says, “In résumés and interviews I use the same language [the employer] uses. The same thing can be conveyed in so many different ways. If you describe what they want but in your own words, you run a greater risk that they won’t realize you’re exactly what they’re looking for.” He suggests that another benefit of using the same language is that recruiters will process your writing more fluently, so they will like it better.

As you put together your materials, you should also pay attention to the latest trends in formatting. Check out online style guides for résumés to find out what fonts people are using, the preferred format, and (if you need to print a hard copy of your materials), the kinds of paper people are using. While you’re at it, be sure you don’t make any typos.

You might think that the substance of what you have to say is more important than how it looks. But first impressions matter a lot. Much of the information in a résumé and cover letter is not actually that helpful to a recruiter. For entry-level jobs, few applicants are likely to have much relevant experience. For more-advanced jobs, it’s hard to compare the experience of various people. Most letters of recommendation are fairly strong, so they don’t help to distinguish among the applicants. Sloppy formatting or misspelled words make it easy for a recruiter to give your application only brief consideration.

It’s worth saying a bit more about each of these aspects.

Accepting and Rejecting:
Beware the Presenter’s Paradox

At each stage of the application process, recruiters think differently. Put yourself in their position for a moment. They advertised a job, and lots of people sent in materials. At this preliminary stage, the recruiters’ goal is to winnow down the initial applicants to a manageable number that they can look at in more detail.

Even though recruiters ultimately want to find a great candidate, their first task is to reject as many applications as possible. Studies by Eldar Shafir suggest that people tend to give weight to information that is most compatible with the task they are performing at that moment, regardless of their overall goal. That means the first pass at evaluating your application will be looking almost exclusively for information that will enable the recruiter to reject you. Any red flag can keep you out of the pile that gets further review—even if your strengths rival those of the best candidates in the pool.

The first thing you must do is avoid giving any obvious reasons for rejecting your application. Proofread all your materials. It’s fairly easy to catch spelling errors, because most word processors highlight them. But read over your application anyhow. You might misuse common words—such as they’re versus there versus their. You must make sure that the names of the position, the company, and the contact person in your cover letter are updated for each application. Addressing a cover letter to the head of HR at another company is a great way to land your application in the wastebasket.

The formatting of your materials may matter as well. A résumé that’s hard to read can lead a busy recruiter to reject it. Even a poor font choice (Comic Sans, I’m looking at you) can be a problem. Make sure you have eliminated factors that might keep you out of the next round.

You also want to take an honest look at the job description. If some qualifications are listed as necessary, make sure you actually have them. In this first stage of the process, recruiters aren’t looking at all the other amazing things you’ve done. They are using required qualifications to filter the applications.

Luckily, once recruiters finish weeding, their mindset shifts. The compatibility principle I mentioned a few paragraphs ago leads them away from finding reasons to reject applications and toward finding reasons to put people on the short list that will get significant scrutiny and (potentially) an interview. They begin to focus on an application’s positive aspects. That means your materials should maximize the impact of the positive information.

Be aware of the presenter’s paradox, a term coined in a paper by Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz. These researchers point out that when figuring out how to present information about themselves, people tend to throw in every positive thing they can think of. Some of the achievements you highlight may be really great—such as winning an award in college or being recognized by a national panel of experts for an innovation. Others may be good but not great—for instance, honorable mention in a pitch competition.

When you’re preparing your materials, you may assume that you’ll be evaluated using an additive strategy. In other words, the people reading your application will add each accomplishment you present to your total goodness. If your application were being evaluated that way, even an honorable mention would increase the strength of it.

But in fact people making evaluations average together the information they get. So three big achievements plus a few lesser accomplishments may actually result in a lower average than three big achievements alone. Be selective about the positive information you present. Focus on your greatest strengths. Resist the temptation to cram your résumé full of mildly positive elements. Less is more.

Make Your Strengths Clear

Often, people putting together applications assume that others will understand the significance of everything they present. As a result, they miss opportunities to highlight their strengths.

One problem is cultural. Your social brain has probably been programmed to avoid boasting (particularly if you’re a woman). It’s unseemly to tout your accomplishments in public. You run the risk of alienating other people or getting negative feedback if you spend too much time talking about what a great job you’ve done. Modesty is the best policy most of the time.

But not when you’re applying for a job.

Job applications are not the place to undersell your achievements. If you led a team that succeeded at a venture that several groups had failed at before, make that clear. You’re allowed to say things on your application that you would never say about yourself in any other context. Describe your accomplishments in all their glory, and make it abundantly clear what role you played in your team’s success.

Again, you have to put yourself in the position of the people reading your application. Recruiters have a large stack of applications to consider, and they may well be trying to fill many positions at the same time. They are looking at a lot of résumés. You cannot assume that a recruiter will understand the significance of your achievements without some guidance. (If you win a Nobel Prize, you probably don’t have to spell out why that’s noteworthy.)

Suppose a professional society that you belong to has named you as a fellow. Is that a big deal? Perhaps. If the society is the biggest one in your field, and if only a small percentage of the members reach that status, then it’s a real mark of distinction, and you ought to annotate this award to let recruiters know that it matters. “Only five percent of the more than 10,000 members of the Really Important Professional Society are named fellows.”

You want recruiters to focus on the most important elements of your application as quickly as possible. Highlight key strengths in your cover letter. Relate those strengths to the particular skills that were listed in the job description. Reinforce them in your résumé by using the same words you used in your cover letter to describe them. In this way you will help the recruiter interpret the information in your application.

Your aim is to be called in for an interview. Quite a bit of research in psychology (well summarized in a paper by Eldar Shafir, Itamar Simonson, and Amos Tversky) has focused on reason-based choice. In many situations, particularly when people will have to justify the choices they make to others, they seek a reason for those choices—a brief statement of why they chose as they did.

Certainly people make choices in life for which they don’t give clear reasons. They might select a piece of artwork for their home because they like it but be unable to say why it attracts them. They might bet on a particular horse because it feels right. But recruiters will most likely have to justify their choice to someone else or on forms documenting the search. Help them construct that reason throughout your packet of materials.

Finally, be aware that you must be able to back up any claims you make in your application. The number of high-profile cases in which prominent people have falsified credentials makes it worth reiterating that any concrete elements on your résumé should be as accurate as possible. If you attended a particular school without graduating from it, don’t list yourself as a graduate. If you received honorable mention for a prize, don’t list yourself as a winner.

More important, perhaps, be realistic about your accomplishments. Research on egocentric bias suggests that people generally overestimate the importance of their own contributions to the success of a venture. Indeed, if you asked everyone on a team to assess the percentage of effort they contributed toward a final product, the total would be far more than 100 percent.

Nothing is inherently wrong with overestimating the importance of your contribution in the context of a job application, but be sure that you can provide specific examples of what you did. If you are selected to interview for a position you applied for, the recruiter is quite likely to ask you to talk in more detail about the accomplishments you highlighted in your application. You must have specific evidence or anecdotes to illustrate your claims.

The Interview

After you send off your materials comes a frustrating waiting game in which everything is outside your control. The recruiters are evaluating a stack of applications to determine whom they want to meet personally. That is where the interview process begins.

Interviews are labor-intensive for recruiters, so usually they bring in only a few people for each position they have to fill. When you get an interview, you should feel good. Your chances of getting a job offer have just gone up substantially.

Interviews have a big influence on whether you get a job offer, even though it’s unclear just how much valuable information they provide to a prospective employer. An applicant’s résumé spans an entire career. It includes statements of qualifications, certifications, and education history. References reflect reasonably long-term relationships. If the application includes a portfolio, the work provided reflects substantial effort. But an interview is often only a few hours long (or at most a few days, for very high-level positions) and conducted in a highly controlled environment. It’s not obvious that this small sample of information about a candidate ought to outweigh the information on an application.

Perhaps business can learn a bit from the restaurant industry. My middle son works in restaurant kitchens. When he applies for a new job, he has a brief interview, his references are checked, and then he works all or part of a shift (called a stage, from the French word stagiaire, or “trainee”). This trial by fire provides information to both employers and candidates. Employers get a look at candidates’ skills, and candidates get a sense of whether the kitchen is one they would mesh with and enjoy. More than once, my son has done a stage at a restaurant only to decide that it isn’t a place he wants to work, even though it’s willing to give him the job.

What do employers hope to get from an interview? For one thing, they want information about your skills that may not have been clear from your application. A growing number of firms also use the interview as an opportunity to give tests that may indicate your aptitude for certain positions. In addition, they are trying to assess your fit with the organization. Are you likely to be good to work with? One recruiter I spoke to said that a big part of the interview was making sure the candidate didn’t have four heads and spit fire.

But you can learn a lot about your prospective employer through the interview process, just as my son learned a lot about each restaurant from doing a stage. Many people are so concerned with making a good impression at the interview that they don’t think about what they might learn.

Let’s look at some aspects of the interview in more detail.

Skills

It can be hard to get a true sense of your skills from a résumé. You may have some certifications that attest to particular technical abilities, but even then it’s not always obvious what you’re capable of doing. So companies may devote part of the interview time to assessing your skills.

In technical fields, they may ask you to solve specific problems within the areas of expertise that the job requires. Joy was applying for a data analysis job at a big firm, and they sent her several sample problems to solve after an initial screening interview. She then discussed her responses with the interviewer at a second visit. Companies may also ask you to make recommendations on the basis of your knowledge or to predict how much time a particular project would take.

Similar questions may be asked in other fields. Teachers may be asked to develop a lesson plan or to explain how they would deal with a particular classroom situation. Salespeople may be asked to talk through an approach to a hypothetical client. Many of the popular employment websites have sections where people who have interviewed with companies post questions they were asked. Look through these questions to get a sense of what might come up during the interview. If you know anyone with experience at the company, you might run some of your potential answers past them for feedback.

Interviewers are trying to learn about you by asking these questions. Part of what they want to know, of course, is whether you have represented your skills accurately on your résumé. They are also trying to get a sense of how you approach problems. Here are a few things to consider.

First, don’t panic if you aren’t immediately sure how to answer a question. Interviews are stressful situations, and research on the cognitive brain suggests that stress decreases the amount of information you can hold in your mind—what is called your working memory capacity. Working memory is important for solving complex problems, so stress can make it harder for you to succeed at the problems you’re given. If you panic, you’ll feel even more stress, and your working memory capacity will decrease further.

Second, remember that many companies develop their own terminology for talking about things relating to their business. Suppose you were interviewing for a position at Procter & Gamble, and you were asked about strategies for improving performance of a product at the first moment of truth. You might be unsure how to approach this question, because “the first moment of truth”—the company’s in-house term for the first few seconds of the interaction between a customer and a product on the store shelf—is a phrase not commonly used outside P&G.

If an interviewer uses a term unfamiliar to you, it’s OK to ask for clarification. Don’t assume that every jargon term an interviewer employs is in common use. It’s important to make sure you understand the question you are being asked.

Third, you should feel free to use questions as an opportunity to engage in a conversation with the interviewer. For example, if you’re asked to estimate how much time a project might take, ask what tools the company routinely uses for project scheduling and what groups usually meet to go over deadlines and responsibilities. Such questions show that you’re familiar with the key barriers to solving the problem you’ve been asked about and want to learn how the company addresses them.

At one time, companies also asked very general kinds of reasoning and logic questions at interviews. Google, for example, was famous for asking interviewees to solve outlandish puzzles. This technique has fallen out of favor, however, because the ability to solve problems with no connection to real situations does not predict how well an applicant will perform in a job. Real problem solving is a knowledge-intensive process.

Traits

A number of companies also test for traits to match people with jobs. A trait is a long-term motivation that affects your behavior—as opposed to a state, which is a motivation or a feeling you experience in the moment in a given situation. As part of an application or interview process, you may be asked to respond to several questionnaires that aim to assess core personality characteristics.

Throughout this book, I talk about a variety of traits that relate to performance in the workplace. For now, though, I want to make three key points.

First, your personality characteristics reflect the default settings of your motivational brain. Each person’s motivational system is wired slightly differently, with different preferences. Some people gravitate toward social interactions, while others prefer to work individually. Some are motivated to think things over carefully, while others prefer to do something and see what happens.

Once you reach adulthood, these default motivations remain fairly stable over the course of your life. If you generally prefer to work alone, you are unlikely to suddenly become motivated to engage in lots of social interactions at work. That’s why it can be useful for companies to do these assessments. They provide a snapshot of some general factors that affect your motivational brain.

It’s in your best interests to answer the questions on personality inventories as accurately as you can. Companies that use them well are trying to ensure that you don’t end up in a role that you’ll find grating because it asks you to consistently fly in the face of your default motivation. It isn’t worth trying to guess what kind of responses a company wants on these questionnaires, because you might be offered a position that isn’t well suited to your traits.

Second, personality traits are not destiny. Most studies of personality suggest that people’s differences in a particular trait predict at most about 20 percent of their differences in a specific behavior, because many factors determine what you do. A situation itself often guides your behavior. Your goals affect you as well. As a result, you may perform a number of tasks at work that are incompatible with your personality traits and still love those tasks because you believe in your organization’s mission, are excited about the goal you’re achieving, or care about your coworkers.

That means you should pay attention to the results you get on personality tests but not use them as the sole reason for decisions about your career. Your traits are just one of many factors that affect your success in a position.

Finally, be wary of any organization that gives you the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as part of the interview process. A popular inventory, the MBTI classifies people along four dimensions that are rooted in the psychological theories of Karl Jung. Unfortunately, the MBTI has a number of problems. In particular, its test-retest reliability is low, meaning that if you take it several times, you may get very different results. Because it fails to predict behavior consistently, it rarely appears in scientific studies of behavior. And the MBTI makes you appear more extreme on the four dimensions than you really are, because a lot of personality research suggests that most people fall toward the middle of them. If an organization gives you this test as part of its hiring process, it doesn’t have people on staff who truly understand how personality traits should be used in the workplace.

Social Skills

One thing it’s impossible to tell from a résumé is what a person is really like to be around. That information is valuable, because central to the success of any workplace is the degree to which people get along and work together to accomplish key tasks. If your job will require a lot of group problem solving, and the specific tasks of it are constantly evolving according to what your teammates are doing, the company needs to know that you can play well with others.

Even candidates who on paper have all the skills needed for the job may be a bad fit if they’re unlikely to get along with their coworkers or to resonate with the corporate culture. For this reason, recruiters assess your social abilities. Lucas told a story that summarizes this. When he went to his second interview at a company, he was told that the first interview had been designed to determine his ability to do the job, and the second was meant to “make sure [he] wasn’t an asshole.”

For this aspect of the interview, you want to display an authentic business self. That may seem obvious, but interviews are stressful situations; you may not think carefully about how you want to come across. You may end up saying or doing something that you later regret. So here are a few things to bear in mind.

Your appearance at the interview really does matter. A lot of work has been done on thin-slice judgments demonstrating that people make up their minds quickly about a person they meet. Some of their impression comes from engaging with the person, but some comes from their appearance. Does the person look like someone they would be comfortable with?

Anything about your appearance that calls attention to itself may negatively influence people’s initial impression of you. And that impression can affect how people evaluate the things you do during an interview. Just as there is potential ambiguity in the factors you list on your résumé, there is ambiguity in understanding your behavior. Was a comment you made funny or snarky? Confident or arrogant? Charming or sucking up? Someone with a favorable initial impression of you is likely to interpret your behavior charitably. When people have a positive impression of you, they tend to interpret your behavior more positively, which leads to more favorable judgments about you. This phenomenon is called the halo effect.

When advising people about interviews, several of them have argued that they should be able to display their authentic selves at all times—even during an interview. I hate to sound like a dinosaur, but dressing professionally is not inauthentic, even if it’s not how you normally dress. It simply demonstrates that you understand enough about the context of an interview to let it guide your behavior. There will be many times during your work life when you won’t say what’s really on your mind or do a particular project exactly the way you wanted to do it. Dressing well during your interview shows that you understand the rules governing work behavior—even if you never again have to dress well for work again.

The people you meet are likely to remember only a small amount of information about their encounter with you later—usually about three things. If one of them is an aspect of your appearance, the other two had better be really good.

You should also do what you can to enhance the impression your interviewer gets. Martin Pickering and Simon Garrod have reviewed a lot of evidence that people mirror one another during social interactions. If you smile, your conversation partners are likely to smile. If you lean forward, they will lean forward. If you engage with energy, they will as well. If you project enthusiasm, joy, and energy, it will rub off onto your interviewer.

Being energetic is even more crucial in an interview than in a typical social interaction, because it’s quite likely that the person who interviews you is engaging in a whole day (perhaps even many days) of interactions with potential candidates. It can be hard for interviewers to stay engaged for every interview. If you’re the last one before lunch, you may find that your interviewer’s enthusiasm is flagging—which can lead you to display low energy as well. So bring your own energy and carry the interviewer along.

Speaking of lunch, prepare yourself for any meals you may have during a recruiting visit. If you have dietary restrictions, let the people coordinating your interview know about them ahead of time. Eat slowly. If you eat less at an interview than you normally would, that’s fine. And be judicious about alcohol. If you normally have a drink with dinner, take the lead from your hosts. But stop at one drink no matter what they are doing.

Be personable, but stick to the kinds of interactions that you’re most comfortable with. If you don’t generally try to be funny, don’t test out a comic persona for the first time in an interview. Don’t trot out new entries in your vocabulary—you may use words incorrectly or pronounce them wrong. Impress people by being the best version of yourself, not the person you think the company wants you to be.

That said, try to sand off any rough edges in your interactions with people. If you tend to be blunt or opinionated about your industry or current events, you may want to leave such opinions aside until after you’re hired.

Most important, focus on the positive. It’s easy to get into a spiral of criticizing others and making disparaging comments. It can feel empowering to criticize, but you may say something negative about something the interviewer feels strongly about. Success in the workplace involves not just identifying problems but generating solutions. Getting stuck in a cycle of criticism may obscure your ability to solve problems. Finally, the more negative a conversation you have with someone, the more concepts and feelings are negative in their mind as they talk to you. Some of that negativity may attach to you, ultimately decreasing how much you are liked.

Your goal is to be the kind of person the company wants to spend more time with. You may object that you should display your true self—warts and all. Your friends love your bluntness, your offbeat sense of humor, or your tendency to create awkward silences. And your colleagues may come to enjoy them as well after they get to know you. But you don’t need to highlight your interpersonal foibles on the first day.

What Should You Be Learning?

It’s easy to walk into an interview fixated on how you’re going to be judged. After all, you have a lifetime of practice at being evaluated by other people. You know that when you take an exam, it’s all about your performance.

But interviews are bidirectional. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’re being interviewed, the company has some interest in you. Although you’re trying to impress the interviewer, this is also their opportunity to show you what it’s like to work for this company. Don’t miss out on that.

For example, Lisa told me, “Whenever I go to an interview and there is a surprise task, I turn down the job. Those people will not respect you or your time.” Regardless of how you yourself feel about such surprises, the key point here is that the company is showing something about the way it treats employees through the way it handles an interview.

Some of what you learn from the interview should come explicitly through the questions you ask. Consult as many resources as possible about the firm you’re interviewing with. Find out what positive and negative things people say about working there before you get to the interview. Come prepared with questions about what it’s like to be an employee. Such preparation is valuable because it demonstrates that you’re seriously interested in the job.

Certainly, specific answers to your questions matter; but how they’re answered matters as well. If you raise a criticism other people have made about working for the company, find out how willingly it will admit to past complaints. True learning organizations embrace criticisms made in the past and talk about how they’ve attempted to improve the work environment. Companies that brush off criticism are often unwilling to change even after you arrive.

A lot of what you can learn about a firm, though, comes from observing the interview itself. Consider a situation in which the interviewer stumps you with a question. Perhaps you’re asked how you would approach a particular interaction with a client. You aren’t sure, so you ask some questions to clarify and possibly even ask how the interviewer would handle it. You might think that you’ve blown the answer, spelling doom for your chances of being hired.

Some companies assume that you come equipped with all the skills you need to do your job. Others invest in your potential. They see you as someone who can work with others and solve problems. If you haven’t yet mastered some bit of knowledge or a particular skill, they treat that as an opportunity to develop you further. An interviewer who frowns and downgrades you for not knowing an answer is communicating that the firm wants a fully formed employee from day one. An interviewer who is willing to engage in a discussion about a hard problem and teach during the interview is communicating that the firm believes in growing the capacities of its employees. One of my early interview experiences was for a sales associate position at a retail electronics chain when I was in college. The interviewer was the district manager. When it became clear I didn’t know much about sales, he spent the interview teaching me about how to interact with customers. And I got the job.

From this perspective, it can actually be valuable to have a (mildly) negative interaction at some point during the interview. Not every day at work is going to be bliss. At times a project will go badly or you’ll make a mistake. Organizations that allow you to recover from a mistake during the interview are showing you what they believe brings success. For many people, an organization that supports their growth provides a satisfying work environment. Look for information during the interview about how organizations handle these situations. If you have no negative interactions during the interview, that’s great—but then ask questions about training opportunities for employees. Talk specifically about what happens when someone makes a mistake. Find out whether the HR process allows for a development plan to improve your skills.

To maximize what you learn about the organization from the interview, get your cognitive brain ready. Make a list of the biggest unknowns about the organization, and bring it to the interview. Read it over before the interview starts so that you’re primed to pick up on information related to those unknowns. Make notes during the interview as well—don’t rely on your memory. Keep track of things an interviewer says that strike you as particularly important.

This list can be particularly helpful if you get an offer, because you’ll have to negotiate the terms of your position before deciding whether to take the job. Chapter 4 explores that part of the process, but it’s important to remember that the recruitment process has actually started with the interview.

After the Interview

When the interview is over, don’t forget to send an email thanking the recruiters for their time. If you’re excited about the position, say that as well. Your email will keep the lines of communication open in case the recruiters have any issues they want to follow up about.

After that, though, you have to be patient. Feel free to ask during the interview when a decision is likely so that you’ll have some idea of what to expect. Bear in mind that the process of filling one or more jobs at an organization is time-consuming. It’s not up to the company to relieve your anxiety about the job search.

The only time you should reach out again to a recruiter while you’re waiting is when some significant new information comes up. Suppose, for example, you applied for a patent at your previous job and the patent has come through. This information may be valuable to the new firm, so you might send it a note with an updated résumé. Similarly, if you’re particularly interested in one job and you receive another offer, you can let the company know that you’re entertaining another offer and hope to hear from it before your deadline.

It’s hard to just sit and wait, though; the decision process is utterly out of your control after you complete your interview, and that’s frustrating and anxiety-provoking. Your motivational brain wants to have a certain amount of agency. It’s natural to wish to somehow reassert control. In this case, though, you’re better off letting the process play out. If you approach recruiters at this stage, you’re likely to just annoy them, which cannot help your application.