What to Do After Your Job Interview

So you've had a job interview and now you're waiting to hear back from the employer. Now what? Do you just sit and wait, or should you be doing anything in the interim? The answer is a little bit of both. These seven steps will help keep your candidacy strong, while also keeping you from going crazy with suspense.

1. Send a follow-up note. Within a few days after your interview, send a follow-up note by email or postal mail. These are often thought of as thank-you notes, but a good one will go well beyond thanking your interviewer for her time. A really effective note will reiterate your interest in the job and build on the conversation from the interview, even referring back to points that were covered and your thinking on them since then.

2. But don't follow up excessively. As eager as you might be to hear back from the employer, following up too frequently can turn a good candidate into an annoying one who won't get hired. Phoning or emailing weekly or checking in before the time when you've been told a decision is overly aggressive and may kill your chances for an offer.

3. Review the questions you were asked in the interview and how you did. Were there questions that tripped you up, or where you felt your answers were weak? Write these questions down so that you can practice better answers for next time.

4. Think about whether you want the job. Too many job seekers just accept any job that's offered to them, without thinking through whether they're the right fit for the work, the culture, and the people. That, of course, is a recipe for ending up in a job where you're miserable. So think through what you've learned about the job and the company. Is this work you'd like to do every day? Is the manager someone you'd want to work for? Being thoughtful about these factors can help you end up in the right job, not just any job.

5. Realize that hiring often takes longer than anyone involved thinks it will. Don't be alarmed if you don't hear back from the employer immediately. The hiring process often takes longer than the employer intends, for all sorts of reasons—the decision makers are out of town, scheduling conflicts have delayed a final interview, the bureaucracy required to finalize an offer takes time to work through, and so forth. It's nerve-wracking, but don't read too much into it.

6. Keep applying for other jobs. Whatever you do, don't stop your job search while you wait to hear back. It doesn't matter how great your interview was, or how much you clicked with your interviewer, or how perfect the job seems for you. It doesn't even matter if the interviewer told you that you were the top candidate and you should expect an offer soon. Until you actually have a firm job offer, preferably in writing, keep applying for other jobs. Too many people have stopped their job search because one particular job seemed like a sure thing—only to have the offer never come through. Don't let that happen to you.

Plus, applying for more jobs is a good way to burn off nervous energy while you're waiting for them to call.

7. Move on mentally, if necessary. If you find yourself agonizing and frantically checking your email every 20 minutes, wondering when you're going to hear something, do this instead: Move on. There's nothing to be gained by the agonizing and waiting and wondering; you're far better off putting it out of your head and moving on. If the employer eventually calls, it will be a pleasant surprise. And if they don't, you'll have already moved on anyway. 

College students are taking many low-wage jobs, so what for the rest ?

Jeanina Jenkins, a 20-year-old high school graduate from St. Louis, is stuck in a $7.82-an-hour part-time job at McDonald’s that she calls a “last resort” because nobody would offer her anything better.

Stephen O’Malley, 26, a West Virginia University graduate, wants to put his history degree to use teaching high school. What he’s found instead is a bartender’s job in his home town of Manasquan, N.J.

Jenkins and O’Malley are at opposite ends of a dynamic that is pushing those with college degrees down into competition with high school graduates for low-wage jobs that don’t require college.

As this competition has intensified during and after the recession, it has meant relatively higher unemployment, declining labor market participation, and lower wages for those with less education.

completed only high school grew 4.3 percentage points to 10.6 percent in 2013 from 2007, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Unemployment for those in that age group with a college degree rose 1.5 percentage points to 3.7 percent in the same period.

‘‘The underemployment of college graduates affects lesser educated parts of the labor force,’’ said economist Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research organization in Washington.

‘‘Those with high-school diplomas that normally would have no problem getting jobs as bartenders or taxi drivers are sometimes kept from getting the jobs by people with college diplomas,’’ said Vedder, who is also a Bloomberg View contributor.

Recent college graduates are ending up in more low-wage and part-time positions because it has become harder to find education-level appropriate jobs, according to a January study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The share of Americans ages 22 to 27 with at least a bachelor’s degree in jobs that don’t require that level of education was 44 percent in 2012, up from 34 percent in 2001, the study found.

Competition can leave less-educated — yet still qualified — individuals with few employment options, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

‘‘College graduates might not be in a job that requires a college degree, but they’re more likely to have a job,’’ she said.

Less-educated young adults are then more likely to drop out of the labor market, said Paul Beaudry, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who studies US employment trends.

The labor participation rate for those ages 25 to 34 with just a high school diploma fell four percentage points to 77.7 percent in 2013 from 2007. For those with a college degree and above, the rate dropped less than 1 percentage point, to 87.7 percent.

‘‘At the complete bottom, we see people picking up the worst types of jobs or completely dropping out,’’ Beaudry said.

The share of young adults 20 to 24 years old neither in school nor working climbed to 19.4 percent in 2010 from 17.2 percent in 2006.

For those ages 25 to 29, it rose to 21.3 percent from 20 percent in that period, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report in December.

Those with the least education have trouble securing even the lowest-paid jobs. Isabelle Samain looked for work in Washington from April until September of last year.

As prospective employers continually passed over her applications, the 20-year-old mother of two from Cameroon realized she was missing out because she lacked a US high school diploma.

‘‘I don’t even remember how many places I applied,’’ Samain said of the ‘‘frustrating and discouraging’’ search.

Samain passed the General Educational Development test in December and recently started working at Au Bon Pain in Washington for $8.50 an hour for 36 hours a week.

A yearlong survey that ended in July 2012 of 500,000 Americans ages 19 to 29 showed that 63 percent of those fully employed had a bachelor’s degree, and their most common jobs were merchandise displayers and clothing store and cellular phone sales representatives, according to Seattle-based PayScale Inc., which provides compensation information.

The share of recent college graduates in ‘‘good non-college jobs,’’ those with higher wage-growth potential, such as dental hygienists, has declined since 2000, according to the New York Fed study.

Meanwhile, the portion has grown for those in low-wage jobs paying an average annual wage of below $25,000, including food servers and bartenders.

Yet those with degrees have more opportunity to advance, even in lower-paying fields.

Kimberly Galvan, 34, a vice president at One Off Hospitality Group in Chicago, cites her own career as an example.

She got a job as a hostess at Blackbird, a One Off restaurant, while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Germanic studies and communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999.

And what about after 1 month job searching ?

The US economy stirred to life last month, creating more jobs than in the previous two winter months and raising hopes that momentum in the labor market would gradually pick up as the cold weather in many parts of the country eases with the arrival of spring.

The report from the Labor Department for February, which came on Friday after job figures for December and January that were much weaker than the underlying trend, eased fear that the economy was downshifting to a slower pace. The data led some experts to conclude that weather, not a fundamental slowdown, was a major factor behind the recent shortfalls.

With employers hiring 175,000 workers, the payroll gain in February was hardly cause for celebration — it was still well short of the pace needed to return the economy to full employment in the next few years. But it was twice the number added in December, when the cold and snow arrived.

“It’s a normalization,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas. “It’s not clear just how much effect the weather had, but it seems like we’re on a moderate but steady hiring trend.”

The unemployment rate rose 0.1 percentage point to 6.7 percent, a reversal of the sharp downward trend recorded since last summer. Some experts argued that was not cause for alarm, but rather a sign that more people were moving back into the labor force and searching for jobs as openings increased.

The Labor Department announcement had been awaited eagerly and was viewed as a wild card, with economists struggling to estimate the impact of wintry weather in many parts of the country as well as seasonal adjustments by government statisticians.

Before Friday’s report, the consensus among economists on Wall Street called for employers to have added 149,000 positions in February, with the jobless rate remaining flat at 6.6 percent.

In December, the economy added 84,000 jobs, and in January, it created 129,000 positions. Both numbers fell well short of expectations among experts on Wall Street.

The healthier-than-expected gain in hiring in February is very likely to remove some of the anxiety that has been hanging over the economy because of the weak labor market data in the previous two months, as well as other gloomy signals like a downward revision in the government’s estimate of economic growth late last year and a decidedly mixed holiday shopping season for many retailers.

It is also almost certain to mean the Federal Reserve will stick with its plan to slowly ease back its stimulus efforts when policy makers meet at the end of this month. In December, the Fed announced the scaling back after job gains of more than 200,000 in the fall, only to watch the pace of hiring shrivel.

“In our view, the February employment report signals that the United States has returned to moderate job growth and that better economic data lie ahead once weather effects subside,” said Michael Gapen, senior US economist at Barclays.

On Thursday, William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that the “threshold is pretty high” for a major deviation in the course of reducing its monthly bond purchases, adding that his view of the economy had not been shaken by the weak batch of the data recently. Despite the slow but steady pullback in the stimulus efforts, overall monetary policy, he said on Friday, should remain “highly accommodative” given the uncertainty about just how fast the labor market is improving.

For all the anticipation that preceded Friday’s report, Wall Street’s reaction was muted as tensions in the Ukraine overshadowed the jobs report. The Dow Jones average rose 30.83 points to 16,452.72, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 ticked higher to close at 1,878.04. The Nasdaq Composite fell 15.91 points to 4,336.22.

In February, white-collar professions including accounting, bookkeeping, and consulting led the gains, as the professional and business service sector gained 79,000 jobs. Blue-collar hiring was more muted with the manufacturing sector adding 6,000 positions and construction gaining 15,000. After years of being a headwind on job growth, government hiring helped the figures for February, although all of those increases were at the state and local level. The federal government shed 6,000 jobs.