Everyone I know feels harassed by email which has invaded their waking and sleeping hours. —Margaret Heffernan
The ease of finding profiles on LinkedIn has made connecting with new candidates the Mount Everest of recruiting. In-demand candidates find themselves inundated with InMails from recruiters, causing many to create junk email addresses just for InMails. In other words, most are never read. Reaching out via email is tough too but can be way more effective, if done right.
When using email as your first point of contact, the onus is on you to make sure every recruiting email you send, whether to one or one hundred recipients, is well edited, straightforward, honest, polite, and relevant to the recipient; before you hit send.
Top 10 Things to Avoid
This list has evolved overtime with input from both recruiters and candidates. Of course, there may be lots of different things that can lower your response rates, but if you get these right, you’ll be ahead:
- Being too vague and not providing enough detail
- Typos and/or getting the recipient’s name wrong
- People from the same firm email the same person about the same job
- Deceptive subject lines and ignoring unsubscribe requests
- Bragging about a salary too low for the candidate’s experience level
- Casting a mishmash of unrelated terms, just to see what sticks
- Sending a blanket, non-personalized form letter, aka spamming
- Soliciting names from the recipient when you don’t know them
- Assuming a passive candidate is interested in considering a new job
- Sending an email that is not relevant to the recipient.
Learn the Ties that Bind
When looking at recruiting members of a group, such as programmers, auditors, or nurses, look for the ties that bind them together. Search professional websites and articles for the commonalities shared among those within your audience and attune your message towards those connectors.
Programmers love to fix complex problems and build cool stuff. Big four professionals want to eventually move to a cushy job in industry with a better work/life balance and higher pay. Nurses want to go to work each day at a place where they will be valued, and where they feel like they are part of a team that really works together.
Age is another key factor that may make it easier, or harder, to craft the right message. If your audience is largely within a certain age range, for example all Generation Y, then tailoring your message is actually a bit easier as you zero in on what that group considers important. If on the other hand you are speaking to a broad range of ages, you need to adjust the style so that it relies on other common traits within that audience.
Speak to Your Audience Only
Marketers will tell you the key is to really understand the customer segment then match the message to that audience. In other words, your message needs to speak to each recipient as if the email was only intended for them, whether sent to 1 or 1,000 recipients. Once you nail down the commonalities within your audience, you can begin to tailor your messages to be far more relevant to them and thus more likely to be read and acted upon.
Vagueness is for Politicians, not Recruiters
When looking at poor response rates to a recruiting email, being too vague and not providing enough detail is often a culprit. Say who you are and why you are emailing them — at the beginning of your message. Always be straightforward, honest, and succinct. When looking at reasons why a given recruiting email failed, vagueness is often one of the reasons. Presume passive until proven otherwise.
Presume Not
As recruiters we know that everyone eventually makes a move, but timing is everything. For the sake of improving your response rates, treat every candidate as passive until they prove otherwise. Sure you will occasionally hit pay dirt and get an active candidate keen to hear more, but most recipients to your email are currently not looking. Regardless, sending an email that only gives them the option to act like an active candidate is going to flop.
Plant Now, Harvest Later
When emailing multiple candidates, you are not recruiting as much as farming. This may seem counter intuitive to what you want now, which is candidates, to fill your current openings, but given that the recipients are more likely to be passive than active, what you are really doing is planting seeds to be harvested later.
That means that messages that indirectly get you what you want will product more candidates in the long run than direct recruiting emails, by tapping into their networks.
One of the greatest lines I’ve ever read is; “while not presuming you’re interested in a new role, I hoped you might help me with this tough search by …”
Another is, “I am working a really tough search and thought you might be able to help, if I asked nicely.”
Email: Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It
The quote at the top of this post is worth keeping in mind as you write your email. Most of us do not suffer the email fool lightly. Send me a crappy recruiting email with my name spelled wrong and I would likely never open another email from that recruiter.
Your recipients are busy and skeptical about emails from people they don’t know (the sender might be a recruiter). Some messages that sound great just don’t resonate while others get amazing results. Recruiting via email is often an exercise in trial and error. You never really know how your message will be received until you hit send.