Tips: Recruiting Email Outreach Best Practices – Help Center

According to research, 36% of the workforce is actively looking for a new opportunity at any given time, but 90% is willing to talk and learn more.

There’s a lot that goes into attracting the right candidates. A well-crafted message is critical, but how, when, and where it’s delivered determines whether you’ll win interest or be exiled to email trash.

This article will cover the essentials of successful candidate outreach to help you drive more interviews and convert top talent into hires.

DETERMINE WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Nailing your recruiting strategy is a prerequisite you shouldn’t skip. If you’re crunched for time - and which recruiter isn’t - you must determine your success metrics. hireEZ allows you to track opens, clicks, and replies to monitor the health of your outreach performance.

hireEZ also lets you track progress through your pipeline: how many of these candidates land onsite interviews and how many get hired.

SELECT THE RIGHT RECIPIENTS

An outreach campaign is only as good as its distribution list. Set yourself up for outreach success by sourcing best-fit candidates.

hireEZ uses Artificial Intelligence technologies to aggregate information from over 45 platforms on the open web as well as your internal systems to find and screen top candidates based on your search criteria or job description.

It then uses your feedback (good fit/not a fit) to learn your preferences and fine-tune search results.

The result is a shortlist of candidates who are the closest match to your open roles and therefore highly likely to show interest when you reach out.

SET UP EMAIL INTEGRATION IN hireEZ

Save time and effort by integrating your email provider with hireEZ to send, receive, and track emails. Here’s a list of tips to help you get the most out of the integration:

Sync the same email address that you use to log in to hireEZ.
Under Email Delegation, request a team member to allow you to send emails on their behalf. Sending emails to candidates on behalf of a hiring manager will help you quickly and easily attract more candidates.
Set up your email signature to customize emails with your company or agency’s branding, establish trust, and share key contact information.

DEVIL’S IN THE (CONTENT) DETAILS

Your email’s subject line determines whether candidates scroll past and delete your email or open it. An effective subject line is six words or less and includes, at a minimum, the title of the open role and company name - for example, “Enterprise Account Executive opportunity at Acme.”

Take the time to craft a message that satisfies three Cs:

Customized. Personalize the body and subject line with the use of variables for the first name, their current company, location of the role, etc. Candidates care about what’s in it for them. So make your email about them. hireEZ has a library of pre-built, customizable templates used and proven by recruiters to boost response rates.
Compelling. Do not use JD-speak. If your email reads like a job description, the candidate will lose interest and click away. Get candidates interested to get on the phone because verbal communication is the best for building a relationship and describing the role. Another thing to keep in mind is that most people will not move unless it’s a level up from their current job. Attract them by highlighting how the role will allow them to interact with executives, diversify their skill set, or let them build a team from scratch. Remember, it’s not about you or your company, candidates care about what’s in it for them.

Concise. Never drop all of the details in the first email. Reserve your spiel for the follow-up if you grab their interest. Make your emails just long enough to tell candidates why you are contacting them, what you have to offer, and why they should talk to you. Be specific about the opportunity by always including position title, location, company, and a couple of sentences about the position, team, company’s prospects, product, etc.

OPTIMIZE FOR RESPONSE RATES

Write and format your email for two Rs:

Readability. Choose the right font style and size, such as Verdana font in 14px. Your email shouldn’t look like a wall of text. Break it down into sections with headlines and bold or italicize major words and phrases to make it easy for recipients to skim through.
Responsiveness. Write for mobile because most candidates will be checking their email on their phones. Don’t include the job description inside the email template. Instead, add it as a link or an attachment.

Use email sequences:

Nurture top talent by setting up automated email sequences. hireEZ allows you to set up to four messages in a campaign - you have complete control over the content and the schedule. The sequence stops for any candidate who replies. We encourage our customers to add all three follow-up emails to their email sequence. Our data shows that follow-up emails have a higher response rate than the first email, and the fourth email has the highest response rate.
Separate your follow-ups by two to three business days. Keep a calendar handy so you don’t end up setting up a message during a federal holiday and risk having your email overlooked.
Change up the send-time for each follow-up. Research shows that ideal times for engaging candidates are around mid-morning or mid-afternoon, specifically between 10 and 11 AM and 2 and 3 PM PST.
Your follow-up emails should be super concise - no more than two sentences - because their sole purpose is to direct the recipient’s attention to the previous email.
Use live links in emails, ideally one per email, to see who might be interested enough to view your content even though they didn't reply. Those are great people to call or email again after the current sequence ends.

AVOID BEING MARKED AS SPAM

Avoid contacting the same person multiple times:
- Move candidates from the search results page to the “Good fit” stage before bulk emailing them, in case the candidate is mixed with other candidates next time.
- You can use the in-project power filters or the More Filters menu to screen candidates who have not been contacted by other team members before, so as to avoid the double-reach-out.

Limit your total number of emails sent under 400 per day.
Use different email templates and limit under 500 candidates per email template.
Do not upper-case the whole subject line. A subject line that looks like AMAZING OPPORTUNITY AT FINTECH STARTUP will land you in the spam folder.

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