Ingredients of a great cold outreach email for recruiters

The purpose of your cold email is to get read and responded to. If you are not able to write effective emails that get candidates to respond to you, all your efforts prospecting, endlessly browsing through GitHub and LinkedIn, and using a myriad of chrome extensions to find their emails, is just a waste.
Sorry for being so blunt. If you want to succeed as a sourcer and recruiter with your outbound efforts, you need to start thinking like a sales rep and start thinking from your candidate’s perspective.
While it is hard to figure all of this out from scratch, there are a few proven scientific methods that can help you multiple your candidate email outreach conversions. Thank god for that!

Craft each sentence to get the next one read and registered

Goes without saying. Compose your email always assuming the worst — The candidate is not interested. That’s your starting point and start writing from there. Majorly, any cold recruiting email will have three ingredients. The subject, the connect, and the ask. The best way is to treat each of them separately and conduct experiments on their combinations to find what works best.

It is your job to convert that no to a maybe and a maybe to a yes

Build familiarity

Our brains are designed to take a split-second decision between fight or flight.  Evolution has trained us to see anything out of order immediately, assess it quickly, and make a decision about whether it’s harmful or not. You can leverage this simple psychological fact and alleviate your recipient’s brain to assess whether this is familiar or not. There are multiple ways to bring familiarity. Talk to them about their work, about a mutual connection you have. More tips on writing recruitment emails that get opened over here.

Bring a smile to their face (Be funny or compliment them sincerely)

Nothing gives your email a sunnier disposition than the smile that you can bring to your recipient. All of us are just too tired of emails and we can actually use a breather of something new and fresh that arrives in our mailbox. There are a couple of ways to do this.

• Compliment them- Mention their work. Nothing builds familiarity like this. When you know someone is aware of what you do and what you stand for, you are much more likely to look at them with a sunnier disposition.
• If you don’t know enough about them, just bring in a joke. Don’t try too hard. Just imagine meeting this person at a casual party and you are trying to introduce yourself to them. You would be surprised how many people will take the time out to respond to you just because you made them smile in the middle of a busy day.

Don’t ask them to make a big decision.

Whether to go through a grueling exhausting process of an interview or not, is a big decision. Especially for the passive candidate who is doing great where they are and isn’t really looking for a change. Asking them whether they are interested in the position or not, is just going to make it harder. Instead, ask them if they are open to a call – a much much easier decision to make and thus more likely to come as a Yes.

Be persistent

Sometimes you don’t get replies to brilliantly crafted emails just because they arrived and got ready at a bad time. Write a follow-up email. If even that email doesn’t get a response, get the hiring manager to write a follow-up email. The best way to go about it is to use Recruiterflow’s drip email campaigns to automate the entire process.

Create FOMO

FOMO stands for “Fear of Missing Out”. Make the candidate realize that by ignoring your email, they might be missing out on the next big thing or the amazing team they can work with, or the perfect next move for their career. Use your experience with people to figure out what that could be for the candidate. If you can, highlight how some of the top performers are flourishing at your company or the amazing things your team has been doing in overcoming great challenges. Highlight what’s in it for them- It’s a teaser for what’s to come. It might be solving a big challenge or just being a part of a company that is a rocket ship they don’t want to miss.

Here’s a cool template we prepared to help you get started. Get recruitment email templates that get replies.

Cold email – Connect with praise