Is It Inappropriate to Call a Principal About a Job Interview After They Emailed You? A Teacher’s Perspective
The chipped blue ceramic mug on my kitchen table was still half full of cold coffee when Lila leaned forward and tapped her phone screen, knuckles white. She’d graduated from our local ed program in May, picked up a long-term sub spot that ended that week, and had been checking her email every 10 minutes for a month waiting for a full-time opening. The night before, she’d gotten what she’d been waiting for: a two-sentence email from the principal at Lincoln Elementary, inviting her to interview for the open 2nd grade position. “It just says ‘reach out to coordinate a time,’” she said, picking at a loose thread on her cardigan. “I want to call right now to lock it in. But everyone says if the principal emailed you first, you can’t call. That’s inappropriate, right? That makes me look desperate.”
I get it, I told her. I’d been in that exact panic five years ago, when I applied for my current 4th grade spot. The former principal sent me the same open-ended invitation to interview, and I followed the unwritten rule I’d heard in my ed classes: I emailed back the same day, gave three possible times, and waited. Three days went by, no reply. I waited another two days, sent a polite follow-up email, still nothing. I was convinced I’d blown it, that he’d changed his mind and didn’t want to tell me. Finally, a week and a half after my first reply, the school secretary called. The principal had gotten pulled into a sudden staffing emergency the day after he sent my invite, she said, and my email had gotten buried under 60+ new messages. The only interview slot left was 7 a.m. the next day, which meant I had to beg my sister to watch my then-toddler an hour earlier than his usual daycare drop-off, and I showed up to the interview jittery from rushing through a gas station coffee. If I’d just called when I didn’t hear back after a couple days, I would’ve saved everyone the hassle.
A couple years later, I asked my current principal about this exact question when we were wrapping up hiring for a new paraeducator. She told me she gets between 70 and 100 non-spam emails a day, not counting the 10+ impromptu check-ins from staff, parent calls, and IEP meetings that fill every block of her calendar. Half the time, she sends initial outreach emails to candidates between classes or right before she heads out for a family emergency, and she never gets back to the inbox to check for replies. “I don’t think anyone who calls politely is pushy,” she told me. “I think they’re organized, and they care enough to make sure it happens. The only time it’s annoying is if they call 10 minutes after I send the email, before they’ve even tried to reply, or if they ramble on for 15 minutes when I have a waiting room full of parents.”
The line isn’t “don’t call because they emailed first.” The line is how you call, and when. If the principal’s email specifically says “please only reply to this email to schedule” or includes a calendar link to book your own slot, calling is unnecessary. That’s when it would be inappropriate, because they’ve already given you a clear system to follow. But if the email is open-ended, like Lila’s, with no specific instructions to only use email, calling is totally fine—even helpful, most of the time. Even if you already emailed and haven’t heard back after 48 hours, a quick call is not out of line. That 48 hour window gives them time to check their inbox on their own schedule, and it keeps you from sitting around waiting for a reply that’s gotten buried under more urgent issues.
I gave Lila the quick, no-fuss script I would’ve used, nothing fancy to memorize: “Hi Principal [Last Name], this is [Your Full Name], the candidate for the [open position] you emailed [yesterday/two days ago]. I just wanted to quickly lock in an interview time, since I know how busy your inbox gets, and I didn’t want this to fall through the cracks. Do you have two minutes to chat about what works for you, or should I call back at a better time?” It’s short, it acknowledges their busy schedule, and it gives them an out if they can’t talk right then. That takes all the awkwardness out of it.
She took a deep breath, stepped out onto my back porch, and made the call. Two minutes later she walked back in, grinning. Principal Mendez picked up right away, and laughed when Lila explained why she was calling. She’d just dealt with a bus running late that dropped 20 kids off at the wrong spot right after she sent Lila’s email, and she’d completely forgotten to check for a reply. They scheduled the interview for that Thursday, right before her lunch break, no scrambling required.
A lot of the unwritten rules we hear in education job searching don’t actually hold up. We hear “don’t be pushy” so often that we end up sitting around waiting for someone else to move things along, even when the person who reached out to us is just too busy to follow through. The thing most new teachers don’t realize is that if a principal has already taken the time to email you to invite you for an interview, they already want to talk to you. They’re not testing you to see if you follow some random unwritten rule about communication. They just need to fill a spot, and they’re swamped with a hundred other things that feel more urgent than scheduling an interview that week.
Is it ever inappropriate? Yeah. If you call within 24 hours of getting the email before you’ve even sent a reply, that’s too soon. If you call three times in one day, that’s pushy. If you ramble for 10 minutes about your resume when they just have 30 seconds to spare, that’s a bad look. But a quick, polite call when the invitation is open-ended, or when you’ve waited a couple days for a reply, isn’t inappropriate. It’s just practical.
Lila had her interview two days ago, and she’s waiting to hear back this week. We grabbed iced coffee after it yesterday, and she said even if she doesn’t get the job, she’s glad she called. She would’ve spent another week waiting around for a reply that might never have come, if she’d followed the rule that said calling was off-limits. I’ve been thinking about that this week, about all these little unwritten rules we pass from one generation of teachers to the next, that don’t serve anyone. Most of the time, the people on the other end of the line are just busy, and they’d rather get it sorted out in two minutes on the phone than play email tag all week. It’s not that complicated.
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