Quickie Thought: Post Job Interview Email

I had my first job interview in a number of years - I think it went really well, but you can never tell from these things.  There have been interviews where I felt I did terribly and got the job and others where I reach the pinnacle of perfection and finished a distant second place (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.).  So, I have no idea.

As any good interviewee knows, you must always send a thank you note of some kind after the interview is complete.  These days, these notes take the form of email, so you best be getting that email off within 12 hours (they say 24 hours, but in the age of blackberries and iphones, that doesn't seem right).  I dutifully sent my note off tonight - plain and simple, nothing too flashy.  But I must admit, I was tempted to take a bit of a risk...try something a little off the wall perhaps.

First I need to give you some context.  As mentioned previously, I've been toying with this notion of creating a personal brand for myself around the idea of "professional craziness", which I've now thankfully renamed "professional eccentricity" (I've always said I'm terrible at naming things).  The idea of creating a personal brand is not new of course, but it has become increasingly important in the age of social media when a quick google search will reveal pretty quickly many aspects of who you are, both good and bad.  I'm kind of a mixed bag of often opposing qualities - creative with a analytical twist if you will - so I feel this idea of being professionally eccentric fits me well.  I often bring up hair-brained schemes as solutions to problems in order to think of ways to solve them in a different way.  But I'm generally grounded in reality - I'm not weird or strange just for the sake of it.  There is a method to my madness.

Of course, this branding has trickled over into my quest for a job in social media.  And I want to work for a place that is going to accept me for who I am and not stifle my creativity and zest for new ideas and ways to do things.  So my cover letters are a little bit more "familiar" than the average potential hires out there with phrases like "get-it-done-ness" and "you won’t see me shiver at the sight of an Excel spreadsheet" and "you need someone fearless enough to walk up to the edge of the cliff, but have the presence of mind to strap on a bungee cord".  Maybe this writing style of familiarity turns off potential employers, but they probably are not places I want to be working at anyway.  Kind of like a weeding out process, similar to my reason for having a beard as I always rationalized that I wouldn't want to meet a girl who didn't like beards.  It worked, I'm now married to a beard-obsessed wife.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I wanted a little something different in my post interview email.  My idea was to end the email with "And in the words of the Gingerbread Man in Shrek 'Pick me! Pick me!'".  Nuts? Yep.  Even nuttier when I recalled afterward that the Gingerbread Man only said this during the menu loop of the Shrek DVD.  I've only seen the movie like 2 times and somehow this stuck in my head.

Yeah.  Probably a good idea I didn't do that.