Your Ultimate Guide to Recruiting Email Outreach
The cover of the 2022 Gem report on recruiting email outreach.
Introduction
Exceptional sourcing is really a two-part strategy: (1) find great candidates and (2) get them interested in your opportunity. We’ll talk more about the first part in a later post, but given that Gem recently released their annual report on data-driven best practices for recruiting outreach, today we’ll be doing a deep dive into the second: how to craft effective messaging campaigns that are likely to engage the best talent.
The 2022 Gem guide to recruiting email outreach is a 66-page document that leverages data from over 1,200 companies and almost 10 million sequences (drip campaigns), collected over the past five years. Given that most of us are running from initial screens to closing calls, and in back-to-back meetings most days, we wanted to provide you with a quick-and-dirty guide to the most important insights from the report.
(The mind map below provides an outline of many topics and key learnings that we’ll explore in this blog post, but feel free to skip ahead and come back to it later if it overwhelms you now!)
Mind map outlining many of the important topics and key learnings explored in the rest of this blog post.
So without further ado, here’s the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) infographic, which I encourage you to look over before reading the rest of this post so that you get a sense of the topics we’ll be covering:
If this sounds like a lot of open questions – and a little overwhelming – don’t worry. We’re here to help you make sense of it all.
First, and perhaps most importantly, the following “best practices” are probably most accurately viewed as “better” practices – in other words, they are good starting places for most recruiters and most job opportunities, but they are not a one-size-fits-all solution.
If you take only one thing away from this post, let it be this: Experiment, Analyze, and Revise.
Experiment: Try different things! The only way to improve your outreach metrics is to use different approaches and A/B test them against each other to determine what works best for you and the req you’re working on.
Analyze: Regularly review the most important outreach metrics to assess the performance of each version of your campaign. Some of these metrics include:
open rates
response rates
interested rates
link clicks
passthrough rates (further down the funnel)
Revise: Based on the data you observe after doing some A/B testing, do more of what works and less of what doesn’t! It really is as simple as it seems, and yet we often don’t take the time to do this type of experimentation, analysis, and revision.
With all that said, there are certain trends that Gem observed in their large dataset that seem to hold true for most campaigns, most of the time.
Here are some of the highlights:
How many messages to send in a sequence
3-4 in the original sequence (1 initial message plus 2-3 follow-ups), and then 1-3 more in a “nurture” sequence over the following 6-24 months
Sending only 1 or 2 messages will lead you to miss out on many good candidates while sending more than 4 messages in an initial sequence has no statistically significant impact on response rates and may damage your company’s brand
The best days of the week are generally Sundays and Mondays.
The best times of day are generally afternoons and early evenings.
The best time interval between messages is usually 6 days between messages. However, sometimes sending messages on back-to-back days (1-day interval) is also effective. Consider alternating between 6 days and 1 day in between messages.
Subject line best practices:
Keep your subject line short. Gem’s data suggests that 4-8 words is the sweet spot.
Use tokens (custom fields) for automated personalization!
the most successful tokens used in subject lines are:
{{first name}}
{{current company}}
{{job title}}
Include what Gem calls “power verbs” – words like “lead”, “disrupt”, “spearhead”, “revolutionize”, etc.
Message body best practices
try to keep the overall length of your initial message to roughly 60-120 words
Shorter messages tend to get more opens, but mid-length messages tend to get more interested responses
Use a custom “reason” field to convey to the candidate why you’re reaching out to them specifically
If using Gem, this is the {{reason}} token
If using Teamable/TopFunnel, this is the {sentence} variable
Social proof works
Consider including a quote from or link to something written by an employee of the company or a well-known person in the industry
Send some “SOBO” messages on behalf of the hiring manager or a relevant company leader, but consider sending some as yourself (the recruiter), as well
Send a memorable final (“break-up”) message – after all, you have comparatively little to lose at that point!
Experiment, Analyse, and Revise.
Leverage data by A/B testing different campaign strategies – do more of what works and less of what doesn’t!
Conclusion
Ultimately, these are all just guidelines, and your individual mileage may vary depending on the role, the company, your personal style, and many other factors. Because of this, the most basic recommendation we can give regarding recruiting email outreach best practices is to experiment based on trends you observe in the data.
Or to use our own little catchphrase: experiment, analyze, and revise.
