On the Job Hunt Front, A Thank-You Note Gone Wrong

BETWEEN JOBS An occasional look at how job hunting legal professionals cope with a crisis economy.

The horrors of the job search have many faces. Even if you triple check your e-mails before you hit send, you can't be sure how they’ll look when they arrive.

Marcia Delgadillo says she's been on a couple of interviews since Manatt, Phelps & Phillips laid her off from her marketing post in mid-January. This past Thursday, she was feeling particularly good after her first interview with a midsize San Francisco law firm. "The interview went well," she said. It felt like a good fit. She and the interviewer clicked, she thought. But that same day an e-mail arrived in response to her thank you note that made her hair stand on end.

If you use e-mail, you'll want to read the jump. So yes, that means all of you ...

The firm's business development director wrote that Delgadillo's note sent from her gmail account arrived in such a sad state that it would have been a "deal breaker" if it turned out that was the way she wrote. Lucky for Delgadillo, the director had already checked with the firm's IT guys. They thought her gmail message had been stripped of punctuation, she learned, including apostrophes, and the é in the word "cliché" went missing completely.

"I was horrified," Delgadillo said. "I was really glad that she was honest enough to tell me — it was really good to know for future reference."

Since then, Delgadillo said, she's checked with one other law firm where she sent e-mail from her gmail account. It was okay, she said. Now she's thinking of switching to Outlook.

—  Petra Pasternak

Comments

[luis]

Could easily be the fault of those IT guys. I know some IT shops that strip 'sophisticated' (read: not in the alphabet on the kindergarten wall, like é) characters from 'untrusted' sources as a 'rudimentary' (read: stupid and ineffective) anti-virus measure. And yes, gmail is sometimes untrusted (again by idiots) but outlook may well have the same problems if at the end of the day she is still using gmail behind outlook. May be other odd things going on there, but if I had to put my money on a cause that could explain this particular kind of snafu, I'd put my money on that cause.