Immediately Disqualified by Your Voicemail?

Polished resume? Check. Tailored cover letter? Check. Professional voicemail?

It might sound crazy, but something as simple as not having your voicemail greeting set up can immediately disqualify you from that job or internship you spent so long applying to. Below is a confirmation email from a real employer that students’ received earlier this year while applying.

Thank you for your interest in our firm.

Note, we occasionally receive applicants from candidates (typically undergraduates) which provide a phone number without a working voice-mail box and a clearly identifiable voice-mail greeting. We sometimes call candidates as part of our screening process.

Applicants without a working voicemail box and greeting are immediately disqualified from our recruiting process (in addition to signaling a degree of maturity significantly below the minimal expectations of our profession).

In terms of our process, if your qualifications and experience match our needs we will be in contact you. While we would like to respond to each applicant individually, unfortunately this is not feasible for us given the number of applications we receive. Should you not hear back from us within 2 weeks, we ask you to please assume that we did not have a role on the team in line with your skills and experience.

We evaluate applications on a rolling basis.

Thank you again for your interest in our firm. We appreciate that you thought so highly of us to write us.

Signed,

Recruiting Team

Don’t get caught by surprise — update your voicemail today!

(Image credit – image provided by https://dorothyjoseph.com)

By Amanda Helfand
Amanda Helfand Senior Assistant Director, Undergraduate Career Services