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Text-speak lapse could prove costly for job candidates
Emoticons, shorthand are frowned upon
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Published: August 3, 2008
After interviewing a college student in June, Tory Johnson thought that she had found the qualified and enthusiastic intern she craved for her small recruiting company. Then she received the candidate's thank-you note, laced with such words as "hiya" and "thanx," along with three exclamation points and a smiley-face emoticon.
"That e-mail just ruined it for me," said Johnson, the president of Women For Hire Inc. in New York. "This looks like a text message."
Hiring managers such as Johnson say that an increasing number of job-hunters are just too casual when it comes to communicating about career opportunities in cyberspace and on mobile devices. Thank-yous on paper aren't necessary, but some applicants are writing e-mails that contain shorthand language and decorative symbols, while others are sending hasty and poorly thought-out messages to and from mobile devices. Job-hunters are also using such social-networking sites as Facebook and MySpace to try to befriend less-than-willing interviewers.
These incidents typically involve college students and recent graduates, and recruiters say that such faux pas can be instant candidacy killers because they hint at immaturity and questionable judgment.
The trend may reflect a cultural divide between younger and older workers, said David Holtzman, the author of Privacy Lost: How Technology Is Endangering Your Privacy.
"It's driven by the communication technology that each generation has grown up with," Holtzman said.
Workers in their 20s and younger are accustomed to online and cell-phone messaging, and the abbreviated lingua franca that makes for quick exchanges, he said. "It's just natural for them. They don't realize that it's perceived to be disrespectful."
Travis Hawk, a May graduate of Drake University, said he prefers sending text messages to making phone calls and almost fell victim to his text-lingo behavior in e-mails to recruiters during his recent job search.
"I had to focus on not doing it," said Hawk, 23, who just got an entry-level sales position at Principal Financial Services Group in Des Moines, Iowa.
Now an intern at the company, he said that his penchant for using such abbreviations as "r" for "are" is sometimes hard to manage. "Occasionally, on accident, I throw one in an e-mail at work," he admitted.
Other job-hunters, however, don't see any need for restraint. Consider, for example, that smiley faces, hearts and other icons appear in about one of every 10 thank-you e-mails sent to hiring managers at KPMG LLP, said Blane Ruschak, the New York accounting company's national director of university relations and recruiting.
But KPMG's staffing specialists, who hire about 2,700 college graduates and 2,300 interns each year, aren't amused.
"We don't feel emoticons have a place in any formal communications," said Ruschak. "It's not professional."
And seeing them makes KPMG's hiring managers wonder whether that sort of unprofessional communication will follow the applicant to the workplace. Graduates who commit the offense may lose out on a job if "there are other candidates similar to them that didn't," he adds.
Some job-hunters are earning the rebuke of recruiters by taking thank-yous to another extreme -- by sending them hastily from their mobile phones. The move suggests an on-the-fly mentality, as if the applicants haven't taken time to think about why they want the job or why they are saying thanks, said Wendi Friedman Tush, the president of Lexicomm Group, a boutique communications company in New York.
"It always says ‘From my Blackberry,'" Friedman Tush said. Candidates "should sit down at their computer in a thoughtful way and do it, not while they're on their way somewhere," she said.
Executive recruiter Hal Reiter recently received such a thank-you from a chief-financial-officer candidate sent by BlackBerry just minutes after wrapping up the interview.
"You don't even have time to digest the meeting and you're getting a thank-you note," said Reiter, the chairman and chief executive of Herbert Mines Associates, a search firm based in New York.
This year, hiring manager Cathy Chin received a thank-you on her cellphone from a candidate for an entry-level job at ReThink Rewards Inc., a marketing company based in Toronto. She said that her cell number is on her business card, which she gave to the candidate, but all prior correspondence had been through her office phone and e-mail.
"It's infringing a bit on your personal space," Chin said, adding that the candidate wasn't hired partly for that reason.
And a candidate for an assistant account-executive job recently sent a "friend" invite to Friedman Tush on her personal Facebook page after an interview. Her company doesn't have a page on the social-networking site.
"I'm not his friend. I'm not even his employer. I was somebody who interviewed him," she said. "They are called social-networking sites for a reason."
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