Trash the spam strategic email practices that nurture passive candidate relationships
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The landscape of talent acquisition is shifting. Posting jobs and waiting for inbound application is just one of many ways to attract candidates. More and more, teams are focused on capturing the attention of passive talent. This session will share ideas for making your emails more likely to resonate with prospects and encourage responses. Steve Bartel, Co-Founder and CEO of Gem, AKA – THE Platform for Modern Recruiting – has offered to give you 60 minutes of live training and Q&A – he will teach you how to utilize one of the most powerful tools you have sitting right in front of you. Email. Yep. THIS is how you access (and actually get a reply from) those elusive beings known as – The Passive Candidate. You have the tool – you just have to learn how to use it so they’ll stop ignoring you. What you’ll walk away with: The optimal number of email stages How to use personalization to get the best reply rates The best time-of-day to send your outreach emails Top tips from TA pros at some of the most innovative companies …and much more. And don’t worry – if you can’t make the date, we’ll send you a recording of the webinar and educational material just for registering so you can learn on your own time. Convinced yet? Join us to learn best practices for getting the most out of your prospective candidate sourcing emails.
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Trash the spam strategic email practices that nurture passive candidate relationships
- 1. Steve Bartel I Co-Founder & CEO Gem
- 2. THE PLAN Housekeeping You are in Listen- Only Mode. You can hear us, but we can’t hear you. Ask Questions Don’t be shy! Use the Questions Panel in your side bar to talk to Steve. We’re Recording You will receive this slide deck & recording after the webinar. Keep an eye on your inbox. Share We’re LIVE. Use the #rdaily hashtag to share on social media.
- 3. THE EXPERT Steve Bartel Co-Founder & CEO Gem Steve has been heavily involved in recruiting throughout his career at Blizzard, Facebook, and Dropbox. Early on, he recognized a need for technology to nurture passive talent and provide efficiency to teams. This led him to co-found Gem in 2017. Connect with Steve Gem I LinkedIn I Twitter I Facebook
- 4. FORMERLY KNOWN AS ZENSOURCER Best Practices and Benchmarks for Email Outreach
- 5. Agenda Setting the Stage – Why it Matters Best Practices for Email Outreach Gem Demo – How best Practices work Live Q&A
- 6. Why does email outreach matter? Of the global workforce is made up of passive talent 80%
- 7. Why does email outreach matter? Sourced candidates are hired at twice the rate of inbound applicants 2X
- 8. Why does email outreach matter? Of candidates prefer to be contacted by email (vs. InMail or phone) 90%
- 9. Why does email outreach matter? The number of emails the average prospect receives in a day 121
- 10. BEST PRACTICE #1 Use a 4-Stage Email Sequence
- 11. What does that look like? Initial outreach email3 automated followups
- 12. Why send 4-stage email sequence? 1 Email received a 15% reply rate 2 Emails received a 26% reply rate 4 Emails received a 35% reply rate 3 Emails received a 31% reply rate Based on data from 750K prospective outreach campaigns.
- 13. Positive Response Rate Total possible positive replies 1st Email received 47% of positive replies 2nd Email 25% 3rd 14% 4th 7%
- 14. Key takeaways – 4 stage email sequence • Silences does not equal rejection • Emails have a short lifespan • Don’t underestimate the power of a follow-up
- 15. BEST PRACTICE #2 Best Send Days & Times
- 16. Best days – general Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun • Mondays & Tuesdays proved to be strong days across roles • However, we observed nuanced differences when we drilled down into data by role BEST DAYS
- 17. Send days – engineering managers BEST DAYS Sat Sun 3pm Sat – 3pm Sun WORST DAYS Wed – Fri During the workday
- 18. Send days – engineers Sat Sun all day Wed Fri morninguntil 3pm evening BEST DAYS WORST DAYS Wed Fri
- 19. Send days – recruiters Mon Tue lunch lunch Wed – Fri all day BEST DAYS WORST DAYS
- 20. Send days – sales Sun Until 6pm Wed – Sat all day BEST DAYS WORST DAYS
- 21. Key takeaways – send day & time • Send on different days, based on the role to fill • Vary the hour of the send • When in doubt, start testing
- 22. BEST PRACTICE #3 Best Email Cadence
- 23. Most common wait time between emails 3 DAYS First Secon d Third Fourth 6 DAYS6 DAYS
- 24. Why does this work? 1 2 3 4 • Emails arrive to prospects’ inboxes on different days of the week • You increase your chances of catching the prospective candidate when they have time to read
- 25. Key takeaways – email cadence • Speed up the cadence at the end • Avoid 7-day gaps • Test with 6-6-3
- 26. BEST PRACTICE #4 Use Tokens & Personalization
- 27. What are tokens? They look like this: {{company}} Or this: {{FirstName}} Tokens are used to personalize at scale
- 28. The value of personalization Our data shows that reply rates are 10-20% higher when the sender uses a {{reason}} token in the body copy
- 29. The value of personalization Our data shows that reply rates are 10-20% higher when the sender uses a {{reason}} token in the body copy
- 30. When to use personalization For senior-level leadership and very hard to fill roles General Tokens {{First_Name}} {{company}} Personalization at scale; good for roles with higher volume Reason Tokens {{Reason}} Personalization based on research. Good for harder to fill roles Hard to fill roles Fully Customized
- 31. BEST PRACTICE #5 Thinking About Subject Lines
- 32. Personalize – It increases open rates by 26%
- 33. Appeal to Values
- 35. Consider Brevity
- 36. BEST PRACTICE #6 Message Content
- 37. Candidates say they want to know… About the Opportunity About Your Company • Career trajectory • Expectations & workload • What a “day in the life” looks like • Employee perspectives • Culture – 66% • Perks – 54% • Mission – 50%
- 38. BEST PRACTICE #7 Always Be Testing
- 39. Testing ideas • Track links and test which content generates clicks • Track open rates to see which subject lines resonate the best • Message length (short vs. long) • Send from (recruiter, hiring manager etc.) • Body copy tone • Social-Proof • The “breakup” email
- 40. Demo Time What It looks Like in Gem
- 41. Q&A
- 42. Thank You
Hinweis der Redaktion
- So, why send a 4-stage sequence. Well, when you look at the data, response rate goes steadily up from 15% to email 1 all the way to 35% when you send 4 stages. Not too shabby compared to the industry-wide response rate of 13% for InMail. You may be wondering… how many of these responses were actually positive?
- My name is Steve, I’m the CEO of Gem, formerly ZenSourcer. At Gem we build a sourcing automation product that automates a bunch of the manual tedious work that goes into sourcing, including your followups. We also help you nurture relationships with talent over time. Today, we’re excited to share best practices for email outreach based on millions of messages sent through our platform from thousands of recruiters over the past few years.
- We’ll start with: - A few industry stats on sourcing & why email outreach continues to be the best strategy for engaging with passive talent. - Then, we’ll dive deep into best practices for email outreach based on our data. - Lastly, we’ll show you how you can use a product like Gem to automate many of these best practices. - There will be a few opportunities to field questions throughout, so feel free to submit questions as they come up.
- Ok, why source? It turns out that 80% of talent is passive. What’s interesting is that 90% of all talent is open to hearing about new job opportunities, even if they aren’t looking. So, sourcing allows us to engage with everyone out there, often before they’re ready to apply, giving you a unique edge in the talent market.
- The other great thing about sourcing is that sourced candidates are twice as good as applicants! Intuitively this makes sense. When you source, you hand-pick the candidate, so they’re probably an ideal fit for your role. And interviewer time ends up being a big factor in cost per hire, making sourcing a great channel. Personally, one of the reasons I love sourcing, is because it allows companies to take control over their hiring goals. It’s one of the few predictable channels where we can add more resources, reach out to more people, & see more results. This is why more and more companies are investing in sourcing early and making bigger and bigger investments as they scale. cite study
- Ok, so sourcing is important, what’s the most effective channel to reach someone? It turns out that most candidates prefer email over phone or InMail. And in case you were thinking – Gem helps send emails, isn’t that a little self-serving? I wanted to call out that this is one of the few stats that isn’t based on Gem data. It’s straight out of an industry survey. It’s intuitive that cold calling might not be preferred by candidates. But what about InMails? Well, turns out 40% of tech talent have their InMail notifications OFF, and not many engineers are regularly checking their LinkedIn… This means that almost half of the InMails you send aren’t even delivered, making email a much better option. cite study
- The challenge with email is that we need to break through the noise. Your average person receive 121 emails each day. Think about that for a sec and put your self in someone’s shoes… if you’re feeling busy that day, or the reach out feels impersonal, or a job opportunity just happens to land in your inbox as message one-hundred-and-one, you might not respond. That’s what we’re up against and that’s why these best practices are so important. Luckily, many of these best practices are easy to implement. It’s a matter of knowing what to do.
- And that brings us to our first best practice – use a 4-stage email sequence to more than double your positive response rate! First of all, what’s a sequence?
- Products like gem allow you to send sequences, which are a set of stages, that help you automate your followups. Stage 1 is the initial outreach and stages 2-4 are automated followups. The beauty of sequences is that the followup stages only go out if there’s no reply. In that sense, sequences allow us to put our outreach on autopilot.
- So, why send a 4-stage sequence. Well, when you look at the data, response rate goes steadily up from 15% to email 1 all the way to 35% when you send 4 stages. Not too shabby compared to the industry-wide response rate of 13% for InMail. You may be wondering… how many of these responses were actually positive?
- Well, we took this a level deeper and manually tagged responses as “yes’s” and “no’s”. “Yes” being, I’ll hop on a call or grab a coffee. What we found is less than half of your yes’s come from email number 1. About half come from followups 2-4. So, if you aren’t sending followups, you’re missing out on half of the yes’s. - Although the response rate continued to increase after 4, we saw a big spike of ”no’s”, which can harm employer brand. - All in, a 4-stage sequence strikes the right balance of connecting with talent, while preserving the option to reach out again down the road. Having that optionality to nurture over the next few quarters is key, especially if you’re using a CRM.
- So, our key takeaway here, is to follow up. Silence doesn’t mean rejection. Think of yourself. If you receive an out of network email… and you’re busy… it may not be your top priority to respond. That combined with the fact that emails have a short lifespan, means it’s important to follow up. But also, don’t neglect the timing, which leads us into best practice number two.
- The best times and days to send.
- We looked at open rate to understand the best time of day to reach out. - What we found is that Monday’s and Tuesdays are the on average, usually around lunch time. - However, when we segmented by role, we found this wasn’t always the case!
- Take engineering managers for example. Saturday afternoon – Sunday afternoon performed 10% better than the average and Wed-Fri during the workday performed 5% worse. We have some guesses as to why – does anyone from the audience want to take a stab? Our guess is that Eng Managers are in back to back meetings all day and aren’t getting through non-urgent email until the weekend. (+10%) Sat afternoon - Sun afternoon (-5%) Wed-Fri during workday
- Data for engineers looked somewhat similar with Saturday and Sunday being the best times. (+10%) Sat all day, Sun until 3p (-5%) Wed morning & (-15%) Fri evening
- Outreach to recruiters looked pretty different though! - Mon & Tues at lunch time performed 20% better than the average. This was nearly the biggest spike we saw across all roles. - Wed thru Fri continued to perform worse, except for @ lunch time, which performed 5% above average regardless of the day of week. It seems that, while we spend a lot of our time in email as recruiters in general, it looks like a lot of us are using our lunch break to check personal email. (+20%) 20% on Mon/Tues at lunch time (avg to -10%) Wed-Fri performed worse in general. Except lunch, 5% better
- Last up here, we have sales. Sales people were +20% more likely to respond Sunday afternoon until 6pm. We were surprised by this, so we polled our sales team. Turns out, a lot of our sales team were carving out time on Sunday’s to be online, and plan for the week ahead, so that happens to be a good time to catch them in their inbox.
- So, the key takeaway is to send on different days and times depending on your role. You should also mix up your time of day and day of week across each stage. Just because engineering managers prefer weekends on average, doesn’t mean every engineering manager does. Varying what time you send increases your chances that one of your emails will catch someone an opportune time for them. As a side note, you probably shouldn’t send on the hour every hour, especially during the work week. Think about your schedules at work – you’re probably jumping into a meeting right at the start of the hour. You might want to try sending 5-10 minutes before the hour in case someone gets out of a meeting early and has a few minutes to check email. And lastly, test for yourself. These things change over time. Marketers have been studying send time for a while and they’ve found it changes every year. As more people discover the best time to send, that time starts to become saturated and less effective! So, while we’re giving you these averages, test for yourself on some cadence. On our end, we’ll publish an annual report, so feel free to follow along on our blog.
- But what about the timing of our followups? Essentially, how far apart should you space each email. This is sometimes known as a cadence.
- Turns out, the most common time between emails is 6 days from the 1st to the 2nd, another 6 days until the third, and then 3 days until the 4th. Internally, we call this the ”6-6-3”. At first glance, this might seem arbitrary. pause
- But, when you map a 6-6-3 cadence to a calendar, you’ll notice that each email falls on a different day of week. Arriving in the inbox on different days of the week is powerful, because everyone’s schedule is different, so you’re increasing the chances that you’ll catch someone at a time that’s best for them. 5-4-4 just happens to be another common cadence that mixes up every day of the week.
- The 6-6-3 implies that you may also want to speed up your 4th follow-up at the end. This kind of makes sense. Spacing out emails 1, 2, and 3, gives your prospect enough time to learn about and think about your opportunity. From there, many of our users send one final email shortly after, often-times what we call the “breakup email”. A “breakup email”, as the name suggests, includes something to indicate that this is the last time your prospect will hear from you --- hence --- a breakup email. When they’re done right, they get results. In my experience, the best breakup emails are funny, or a bit self-deprecating, and usually have nothing to do with your role. So, to recap, avoid 7 day gaps and test cadences that land on different days, like the 6-6-3 or 5-4-4.
- Next we have personalization. In an ideal world, we would all personalize every single email, but there’s a real tradeoff between personalization and speed. I’m going to jump straight to the punchline – based on our data, it may not make sense to do heavy personalization for every role. Before we dive into the data, let me explain how personalization works in Gem, so you can understand the results. There are three ways to personalize in Gem ranging from completely automated to completely manual. I’ll explain each method in more depth in a the next few slides, but at a high level: - The first is completely automated by using what we call tokens, which substitute things like name, company, title, school into your message. - The second is semi-automated where you write a 1 or 2 sentence reason for reaching out, which also gets populated into your message. - The third is completely manual, where you customize big parts of your initial reach out or followups for every single candidate. This is a highly personalized approach where you still benefit from the automated followups.
- To expand on each, who here knows what tokens are? For those of you who don’t know, tokens are kind of like Madlib for your reach outs. They allow you plug in information specific to each candidate into your message. The great thing about tokens is that they’re automatically pulled from someone’s LinkedIn profile, so they’re no extra work. For that reason, tokens are great for light personalization at scale. This technique is also known as mailmerge. For those of us not using mailmerge or tokens, we’re almost certainly typing out someone’s name if not more each time we reach out. Any questions about tokens?
- The second approach is semi-automated, using what we call the {{reason}} token. The idea is to take a minute to write one or two sentences about why you’re reaching out to the candidate. You can do this alongside LinkedIn, and from there, the reason token gets plugged into your outreach when you send, just like any other token. We see a 10-20% increase in response rate on average for messages that include a {{reason}} token.
- The last option is to do heavy personalization. Gem users do this by dropping someone directly into an email sequence alongside LinkedIn. Your basic tokens auto-populate, and now you can personalize any aspect of the reach out, including the message, subject line, or even a follow up. The great thing is that you can do this all from LinkedIn while looking at their profile. Gem also serves up other social media like Twitter, Github, Dribble, in case you want to dive even deeper. One common technique that can feel even more personal is to send the messages on behalf of a hiring manager or even director. If you want to be even more high touch, you can send from different senders per stage. For example, at Gem, we just hired our head of design. Emails one and two came from Nick, our CTO, with email one being highly personalized. Then, emails 3 and 4 came from me. Because we sent email 3 as me, it went something like – “Hi {{first_name}}, was catching up with my cofounder Nick, who said he reached out last week. We were both really excited about your experience doing XYZ, so I thought I’d shoot you a note to see if you’re open to grabbing a coffee”. Feels pretty good, right? What’s cool about send on behalf of is you can set up the sequence yourself, but send as someone else. The followups still happen automatically, and if you’re sending from multiple senders, the sequence stops if they respond to either inbox.
- So tying this all together, different levels of personalization make sense for different roles. The tradeoff is speed vs response rate. If your talent pool is big enough, it might make sense to stick with tokens. For example, if we’re hiring junior sales reps, our response rate is already going to be high, so tokens allow us to source more candidates in less time. When your role is harder to fill, it can make sense to write one or two sentences to get that 20% boost. This might be roles like machine learning, experienced hires, or diversity candidates. And for very hard to fill roles, like leadership, or super specialized roles, like a senior engineer with self-driving-car experience, your talent pool might only include a few dozen qualified candidates. In this case, it’s crucial to put your best foot forward every time and that’s where highly personalized reachouts from someone senior in your company can be effective.
- Next, we’re going to talk about subject lines and we’ll highlight a few examples from Gem users.
- Continuing with the theme of personalization, we find that a personalized subject line increases open rates by 26%! Some Gem users use tokens, like name, school, or company to get that light-weight layer of personalization. Others will use a second {{reason}} token for harder to fill roles. Because subject lines are shorter, so we typically recommend a few words if you’re going to use a reason token. Perhaps, you could highlight a skillset or a previous project that stood out.
- If you have a strong mission statement that you think will resonate, you may want to speak to something your prospect may value. Here are some cool examples from our customers.
- Alternatively, you could appeal to someone’s curiosity and get them thinking. Consider some of these subject lines and the types of questions they might invoke.
- But no matter what, keep your subject lines short. Up to 60% of emails are opened on mobile, where there’s limited screen real estate. For that reason, we recommend under 50 characters. One technique I always do, is send myself a preview, to see whether the subject line gets cut off on my mobile device. This is also a great best practice for testing your message content. The goal being to make sure your most important content is visible before scrolling on mobile.
- Which leads us to message content itself.
- In a recent survey, candidates stack-ranked what they want to know about your opportunity and your company. The hard part is knowing which information to lead with. One technique we recommend is to highlight the areas where you think you’re strongest in the initial message, and then introduce new topics in each of your follow-ups. Some content works better outside of your email, such as a blog post about the “day in the life” or your company values. Linking to content is great because it helps keep your message short, while giving your prospect the opportunities to learn more about you. And if you link to multiple pieces of content, your prospect can self-select into the things they care about most. We’ve compiled a ton of examples of great messages from our users. If this is an area you’re interested in, check out our the Definitive Guide, which includes all the best practices discussed in this webinar and more. You can find it in BrightTALK and we’ll email it to you after this webinar.
- Alright, this brings us to our last best practice, and arguably the most important one, which is to always be testing! While we’ve shared a few best practices that are a good starting point, every company and role is different. And remember that things like time of day change over time.
- Here are a few ideas to test: - Track link clicks to see which content is most engaging, whether that’s a blog post about your values, your culture, or some positive press. - Track open rates to see which subject lines are working. - Test different lengths of messages or subject lines. - Try sending from a teammate or different team members per stage! - And a whole lot more more… On our end, we’ve already tested most of these. Again, you can check out our findings in the definitive guide that we’ll send out afterwards.
- Next up, we’re going to show you how to automate many of these best practices in Gem. Before I hand the mic over to Joe for the demo I want to remind you that we will have a live Q&A session at the end so if you have questions about these Best Practices, please send those questions over now and we’ll address them after the Demo. Keep the questions coming. Joe, over to you…. While we don’t recommend more than 4 stages for the initial outreach, some of our most advanced Gem users set up 6 or even 7 stage sequences. Their strategy is to have the first 4 stages go out in month 1 and then subsequent stages go out every few months. Remember how 80% of talent is passive? A 6 or 7 stage sequence allows us to keep in touch over the entire year, increasing our chances of connecting with someone when they’re actively looking. And again, because the followups are automated, everything’s on autopilot. The trick is to get really creative with stages 5, 6, and 7, so it doesn’t sound like you’re pinging the thread over and over again. And of course, we’d probably mostly want to use this technique for evergreen roles that we’re always hiring for.
- Seed Questions: 1) 2) 3)