Articles · 4 min read
The recruiter reply you never saw
The most frustrating failure in a job search, because the hard part already worked.
Of the three things that go wrong in a job search, this is the one people find hardest to believe until it happens to them: the application worked, somebody replied, and the reply never reached you.
Do these two searches now
In your email, search for each of these, and look in spam and promotions as well as your inbox:
- The word "interview", with no date filter.
- The domain of any company you applied to in the last two months, for example @company.com. Not the company's name, the domain: automated mail from a hiring platform often carries the domain and not the name.
Recruiter mail is unusually good at landing in the wrong place. It frequently comes from a hiring platform rather than the company itself, it goes to many people at once, and it is full of the exact words filters associate with marketing: opportunity, role, apply, schedule, position. Every one of those is a nudge towards the promotions tab.
Then stop it happening again
In Gmail: open the search box, click the sliders icon on the right, put your target job title in "Has the words", press Search, then Create filter, and tick "Never send it to Spam" and "Always mark it as important". Do the same for the word "interview".
In Outlook: Settings, then Mail, then Rules, then Add new rule. Condition: subject or body includes your target title. Action: move it to a folder you actually check, and mark as important.
Then open your promotions or focused-inbox settings and drag one recruiter email into your main inbox, so the classifier learns from the correction.
A note on the address you applied with
If you applied from an address you rarely open, or one tied to a provider you have since stopped using, none of the above helps. Check it anyway. It is a dull thirty minutes and it is not unusual to find something in there.