How to Maintain Relationships With Past Employers

Just because a job or internship ends doesn’t mean contact with your boss does. Here are our tips to staying in contact with previous employers to develop your relationship and potentially secure future opportunities.

The Boss Perspective

This is the time of the year when most successful employees are reflecting both on their accomplishments in 2015 and their 2016 goals. If you were an intern in 2015, hopefully your former employer remembers you fondly and appreciates all you were able to accomplish on his or her behalf. You formed a relationship and now are part of one another’s network. This means you should stay in touch and maintain the connection–after all, you worked hard for it! Personally, I quite enjoy hearing from former interns and catching up on all they have been doing since we last connected. It encourages me to stay connected with them as well.

Believe it or not, in most cases, your former employer will be delighted to hear from you. Remember, he or she selected you from what was probably a large pool of candidates. He or she mentored and coached you throughout your internship to ensure your success, whether or not you were fully aware of it. Therefore, your continued success is of interest to him or her.

I’ve always appreciated interns that establish a connection with me by both reaching out and providing new formation. For example, one of my former interns reconnected with me and sent an attachment describing what she most enjoyed about her time working in my department. Best of all, she included a section suggesting how to sell future interns on the unique benefits of working in our organization. I found that really helpful because it came from a millennial perspective (more on that in later posts!). I used her ideas to find a really great intern the next summer. In return, I helped her find an internship in the part of the country in which she wanted to spend a summer. We were thus able to help each other.

The Intern Perspective

One of the best summer internship setups I’ve had came as a recommendation from a previous boss I had, and was a completely unexpected consequence of having sent a friendly follow-up email. In January after the summer I interned at a particular position, I sent an email to my boss just to say hello. I asked about how she and her family were doing, the current status of a project I had worked on over the summer, and let her know what was going on in my world, i.e. school, work, and my upcoming summer internship search. I let her know casually at the end of the email that I was looking to return to DC for the summer but I didn’t ask for any help just yet – I was only hoping to reconnect after a couple of months without steady communication. After this connection was established, I was then able to provide further details about my summer internship search, and my employer ended up suggested a program that I applied to and eventually did – and she even wrote my letter of recommendation since she knew I would apply. One simple follow-up email lead to an amazing summer opportunity that I might not have otherwise heard of.

One of the reasons I think this initial contact worked was because it didn’t demand anything from her employer right away. Because the main purpose of the email was social, it was more about the relationship than an intern who needed help – a much quicker email for a boss to answer!

This is a great time of year to reach out and update your former employer on how your academic year is progressing and your plans for the summer, to the extent you have any.

Our surefire tips for reaching out:

• Keep it simple–a paragraph or two should be sufficient unless you have significant news to share. Don’t overwhelm your boss with too much information, because they may not have time to read it all
• Keep it positive and upbeat
• Ask a question or two about your former employer’s world that will illicit a response
• Consider attaching a short article, blog or webpage link on a topic you know your former boss will find interesting
• Don’t ask for anything in this initial reconnect email (e.g., can you help me find a job…please!!). Reestablish the connection before you ask for something and be prepared to give something first

Best of luck reaching out to your employers! Let us know how it goes on twitter (@jumpstartbypwa) or share your stories by email!

APW & NW

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