Is It Inappropriate to Call a Principal About a Job Interview After They Emailed You?
I was wiping crumbs off my kitchen table last week when my friend Lila pushed her phone toward me, thumb hovering over the call button. Lila’s a 4th grade teacher who’s been hunting for a new position closer to her 2-year-old’s daycare for six months, and that morning she’d gotten an email from the principal confirming an interview for the following week. “My mom says I need to call to thank her and confirm I got the invite to show I’m serious,” she said. “But everything else about this hiring process has been over email. Is that weird? Is it inappropriate?”
I nodded, because I’d been in her exact shoes 11 years ago, fresh out of my master’s program, desperate for my first full-time teaching job. I got an interview invite via email, and followed the old career advice I’d heard a hundred times: I called the office to confirm. The secretary put me on hold for 10 minutes while she tracked down the principal’s calendar, and when I left my interview a week later, the principal offhandedly mentioned, “You know, you didn’t have to call – we would’ve showed up for you.” I left red-faced, and didn’t get that job.
I’ve subbed in eight different elementary schools in our area over the past five years, so I’ve seen from the inside how admin schedules work. Principals don’t sit at their desks waiting for phone calls. Their days are stitched together from 15-minute blocks: 7 a.m. safety team meeting, two classroom observations before lunch, a parent meeting about a student with behavioral needs, bus duty at dismissal, and an hour of IEP paperwork after the kids leave. They check email during prep periods and naptime, and any unplanned phone call means pushing back something that directly affects kids, whether that’s a check-in with a new teacher or arranging support for a student experiencing housing instability. Most of the time, they don’t even answer their own phones. That call goes to the front office admin, who’s already swamped with ordering new textbooks, answering parent questions about after-school care, and fixing the broken intercom that’s been crackling since October.
Last spring I filled in for a sick admin for three days, and I can tell you first hand: a 2-minute confirmation call from a candidate can throw off an entire morning. We had three teachers out with the flu that week, and I was scrambling to line up subs when a candidate called to confirm her interview that was already confirmed twice via email. I had to pause the sub search, pull up her hiring folder, reassure her, and by the time I got back to the list, the only available sub we had left was assigned to the wrong classroom. Lunch ran 15 minutes late, and a group of 1st graders missed their recess art time. It was a small mess, but it was a completely avoidable one.
Lila’s mom wasn’t wrong, for her time. Thirty years ago, most interview invites went out via snail mail, and a quick phone call to confirm was standard. But that’s not how most school hiring works now. If a principal already reached out to you via email, that’s a clear sign they prefer to communicate that way. They’ve already taken the time to type out all the details you need: date, time, building address, what documents to bring, who to ask for when you check in. A call to confirm just creates extra work for a team that’s already stretched too thin.
That doesn’t mean you should never call, of course. Last year, a different teacher friend got an interview invite that listed the wrong date – the principal mixed her up with another candidate. She replied to the email to correct it first, and when she didn’t hear back 24 hours before the scheduled interview, she called. That was totally appropriate. The unwritten rule I’ve landed on after years of watching hiring work in local schools is this: call only if you have a specific, time-sensitive question that isn’t answered in the email you already got, and you already tried reaching out via reply and haven’t heard back.
If you just want to say thank you or confirm you got the message, a short reply to the email is all you need. Something like, “Thank you so much for the invite, I’m looking forward to meeting you next Wednesday. Please let me know if you need anything from me before then.” It takes 30 seconds, it doesn’t pull anyone away from their work, and it gets the exact same point across. If you do end up needing to call, keep it short and specific: “Hi, this is Mia Carter, I have an interview for the open 2nd grade position tomorrow. I emailed yesterday to ask which campus the interview is at and haven’t heard back, do you have two seconds to share that with me?” Don’t launch into a speech about how excited you are – that’s what the interview is for.
A lot of candidates worry that not calling means they’ll look uninterested, that they’ll blend in with all the other applicants. But from what I’ve seen, the opposite is true. The spring before I got my current job, I helped the principal on our hiring committee sort through applications and schedule interviews. One candidate called three times over two weeks to check in, after we’d already sent her an interview invite. Every time, our office admin had to stop what she was doing to pull the file and reassure her. By the time the candidate showed up for her interview, the whole office already associated her name with extra work. She didn’t make it to the final round. Standing out doesn’t mean creating extra work for the people you want to work for.
Lila ended up deleting the contact from her call screen, typed up that short confirmation email, and hit send. She went to her interview last Tuesday, and when she left, she stopped for gas and texted me that it went really well. She also said the front office admin made a point to tell her how much she appreciated that Lila hadn’t called to confirm – that week, the school was in the middle of state testing, and the office had gotten 12 unneeded confirmation calls from other candidates alone. We’re waiting to hear if she gets the offer this week, so there’s no neat ending to this story yet. But it did make me think that so much of the job advice we get is stuck in a time that doesn’t exist anymore. Back when everything was done over the phone, a call was just how you did things. Now, when the person you’re talking to already chose email, the polite thing isn’t to call. It’s to meet them where they already are. It’s not flashy, it doesn’t check any of the old “how to get the job” boxes, but more often than not, it’s the right choice.
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