At a time when high-performing HR functions are being urged to automate anything they can lay their hands on, is there any place left for pen and ink and the humble handwritten note?

The question isn’t mine – it appeared today on an HR forum on LinkedIn, the business social media site, where someone asked if there’s any benefit in job candidates sending a hand-written note rather an email after a job interview. Amid all the navel-gazing and marketing pitches that creep into these kinds of forums, this particular entry drew a surprising number of comments, with opinion fairly evenly divided.

My answer would have been short and sweet: absolutely not. Partly, I have to confess, this is for selfish reasons. My own handwriting’s worse than a GP scrawling a prescription during a speed-writing competition – while drunk. I really don’t see why anyone else should have the edge over me in a job hunt just because they’ve got time to draw their consonants properly.

But it’s really about the fundamentals of the recruitment process. At a time of high unemployment, many organisations are already drowning in paper job applications. The last thing you want is candidates asking for even more of your time so they can thank you for the time you’ve already spent trawling through their CV and interviewing them. What the recruitment world needs is less paper, not more.

I’ve long argued that recruitment is as much a sales and marketing exercise as an HR discipline. You have to identify prospects and work out the most effective way to reach out to them – the web being an ideal platform to do so. You also have to sell your proposition and use your website to promote a positive brand image about your organisation. It’s about both presentation and capability. Faced with a choice between applying for a job through a well-designed website or writing a letter to an old-school outfit and waiting for them to mail an application form, most Gen Y job applicants aren’t going to stop and think twice.

Incidentally, this same marketing perspective applies to jobseekers as much as recruiters. If you do ever feel tempted to pen a handwritten ‘thank you’ letter after an interview, it’s worth thinking about the expectations of the people you actually met. Some recruiters might well appreciate the touch, if the responses on LinkedIn are anything to go by – but others will be far from impressed. When I ran the idea past a senior executive at a tech company in Silicon Valley, there was a pause and then came the reply “Are you serious? That’s just weird”.