Like so many professionals, recruiters spend a major portion of their day reaching out to others through a variety of communication platforms: email, texts, voicemail, and anything else that might work.
The only problem with this approach is that the average person is flooded on a daily basis by messages like this. They get email newsletters from long-forgotten websites, spam from mysterious businesses that want to sell weird products, calls from employment agencies last heard from years ago, and incomprehensible texts that were apparently sent by space aliens. It’s all too easy to hit the delete button.
So, how do you overcome other people’s natural resistance to out-of-the-blue messages? Good question—here are a handful of potentially useful tactics.
Put Effort into Your Subject Lines – As a rule of thumb, try to make your email subject lines no more than 40 characters or so. You should also avoid vagueness—something like “Employment Opportunity” could easily be confused with common spam.
Avoid All Caps – Please resist the temptation to impart urgency in your email messages with exhortations to CALL RIGHT NOW TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY. It not only looks unprofessional, it sharply increases the chances that your email will be flagged as spam by automated filters.
Avoid Spam Words – Familiarize yourself with terms that are commonly associated with spam emails (search Google for “spam words”).
Be Frugal with Communications – No matter how you contact candidates—email, phone, or whatever—you need to communicate with them sparingly. Nobody wants to see ten emails a week from the person who may or may not have a job for them; that’s a good way to get redirected to the spam folder. Voicemail messages should be infrequent.
Don’t Apologize – When on the phone, speak with confidence. Don’t fall back on obsequious introductions like “I don’t mean to bother you, but …” That will only encourage the candidate to view you as a pest—because you just suggested that you are one. Get to the point, and communicate from a place of authority.
Be Mobile-Friendly – Mobile devices play an important part of our everyday lives, used for both business and pleasure. Any messages you send should be optimized for mobile reading. Above all else, that means keep it brief—rambling messages are hard to read on tiny mobile screens.
Keep Track of Sent Messages – Nobody likes getting duplicate messages, but that can happen if you fail to track the emails you’ve sent. Exelare’s ATS software gives you a convenient way to store your sent emails, so it’s easy to look up past messages and avoid repeating yourself.