Virtual Coffee

I've found myself in a few situations recently in which emailing with a friend felt like a lifeline. Lucky for me, my friend wrote back. Quickly, and repeatedly, as if we were having coffee across the table from each other. Email, texting, and messaging make it remarkably easy these days to communicate without saying a word, or to say lots of words across an enormous distance. It's like a virtual coffee date.

The problem is, as great as these virtual coffee dates can be, they lead us to assume that quick email replies are the norm, which, of course, anyone looking for a job knows is not the case.

I grant that my friend is my friend. She has a genuine interest in my well-being, and we have both been helped by email conversations. No hiring manager has that kind of interest in me or any other candidate, and let's be real, would you invite a hiring manager on a coffee date, virtual or otherwise?

The truth is, job hunting is not like having coffee. The goals of finding a place where you fit in, and where you feel warm and invigorated, might be the same, but the two things are completely different. So emailing with friends shouldn't be just like emailing your résumé.

I am sure that most of us will continue sending our one-page life stories into the job email abyss. That is what we do. Perhaps some day soon, the rate of email response will catch up with the rate of Internet job applications. But I won't count on it. In the meantime, I'll keep having coffee dates--the real AND the virtual kind.