by Anony Mili

Created on: February 25, 2007   Last Updated: August 03, 2010

I would actually advise against following up resume submissions with a phone call. I recruit staff for my organisation and if I got phone calls for every resume/CV that was submitted, I would be tearing my hair out by now! On average, we get over 50 submissions per job we recruit for (often many more than that) - I don't have the time or inclination to take calls from every person who submitted a resume. To be frank, if people did call and bug me about whether or not I'd received their resume it would actually have the opposite effect to what they were hoping for. We have our HR email set up so that people get an auto-response to say we've received their application and they will be contacted shortly. I always insure that people are contacted with a few days to advise if they've been selected for interview or if we are not taking their application further.

So in general, if you don't want to tick off the person who is reviewing your CV (they often have a lot more work to do than just sift through resumes all day and take phone calls asking if the resume has been received) don't follow up applications with phone calls.

In general I'd even advise people against follow up phone calls if they've attended an interview. It doesn't hurt to send an email thanking them for their time during the interview and highlighting any key strengths as this could really help your application and you could also mention something you might have forgotten at the interview but with phone calls it's all verbal for starters and if you do add anything to what you had said at interview it might not be written down.

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