When you shake hands with the interviewer and leave the room, perhaps the most important step in getting a job has just begun. Every time you do an interview, you should get better at interviewing.

For this to happen, you need to do a debriefing for yourself. Here’s how to do the debriefing:

• Make a list of every question you can remember. Do this as soon after the interview as possible.
• Then within a day, make notes on how you answered each question. The key here is to capture the key points you made in your response.
• Then for each question and your response, describe how you could have done better. You can always do better, so you need to adopt that attitude.

This process is absolutely critical. If you don’t go through a formal debriefing with yourself, you will likely make the same mistake over and over again.

Another thing you need to do after the interview is to send a thank you note to the interviewer. Below is a sample of a thank you note.
“Thank you very much for interviewing me yesterday. As I thought about the interview and your comments, I became more and more excited about the possibility of working for Tenix. I really appreciated hearing about the opportunities in technical sales.”

Sending the note via email is appropriate.

The final thing to do after the interview is to follow up on your prospects if you don’t hear from the interview. Here’s some guidance for the follow up.

• Wait a week beyond the promised follow up date before you do anything.
• Check with others to see if they have heard anything. If others have received a positive or negative response and you have heard nothing, it probably means you are still being considered. In some cases, companies will send out letters first to those they know they want and to those they know they don’t want. Those they are undecided about will not hear as quickly. If this is the case, wait before contacting the interviewer.
• If a week has lapsed beyond the promised response date, contact the interviewer. This is generally done by e-mail or by phone. Use this phrase “I thought I’d give you a call to see if you have had a chance to review my prospects.”

As you can see from the above activities, finding a job requires that you have a level of self direction that may be challenging..