The average job posting gets 250 resumes in response, according to Glassdoor. And it takes around 41 days to complete one hire, according to LinkedIn.

For a recruiter, this means inefficient emailing can stretch the average hiring period to way over what their client company would like. And slower hiring ultimately means slower revenue.

Here we’ve shared 7 tips and tools that have helped recruiters globally to ace email communication.

1. Target the Right Candidates

The first rule of a proper recruitment email is to target the right people.

After all, if you’re recruiting for financial services, people in the healthcare sector couldn’t care less about you. This means your emails (and the time it took to write them) will go to waste.

A very effective way to build a qualified and cleaned email list is to use gated content. Gated content requires prospects to give out their contact details for access.

For example, if you are looking to recruit in the digital marketing space, you could create a short ebook about lead generation or host a webinar talking about mistakes to avoid when looking to get hired.

You can place this on your recruitment website, and anyone who wants to download it must give you their email address first. Since only people who are interested in digital marketing will download this ebook, you’ll be able to build a qualified email list.

This will increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and improve your email productivity.

But it doesn’t end here.

It’s a good idea to go one step further and segment your email list. This is especially useful if you’re hiring for an in-house position. You can use the physical location of candidates to divide up your email list and send super-relevant content to each segment.

You’ll waste fewer emails and do more hiring.

2. Learn the 1-Touch & 5-Minute Rules

As a recruiter, you get tons of emails from interested candidates about a range of positions. If not properly tackled, these emails can quickly build up and you might lose the opportunity to spot an excellent hire.

This is where the 1-touch and 5-minute rules come in handy.

According to the 1-touch rule, you must do something with an email once you open it. You can reply to it, delete it, archive it for later use, or forward it. But you can’t ignore it.

The 5-minute says that every time you receive a task, you ask yourself how much time it will take you to complete it. If it’s less than 5 minutes, you do it immediately. If not, you can keep it for later and move on to the next task.

As a recruiter, this is extremely helpful for wading through an overflowing inbox.

You can also combine the two rules to improve productivity and operational excellence — every time you open an email, ask yourself how long it will take you to deal with it. If it’s under 5 minutes, you deal with it immediately. If not, you move on to the next email.

But keep in mind that this combination might not work for important emails, so it’s a good idea to leave room for exceptions. Additionally, you can also use a clock in and out app to accurately track your time.

3. Write Complete Emails

Incomplete emails are a major cause for a cluttered inbox.

That’s because they trigger a back-and-forth conversation between you and a candidate, which could have been easily avoided by providing complete information in the first place.

When writing an email to a candidate, think about the questions they might have about a posting. And try to answer them as completely as possible in the first email to avoid a long back-and-forth email session.

Some email gurus recommend writing 3-sentence email replies, so you don’t spend hours writing emails. While this might apply to replies, it’s not a good idea when reaching out to a candidate for the first time (or for the first few initial emails you send them).

One effective way to make your emails as complete as possible without making them long is to direct candidates to useful links about a posting. Placing naked links in an email makes it look untidy and unprofessional, so make sure you use hyperlinks.

In Gmail, you can simply select the anchor text and hit Ctrl+K on your keyboard to add a link to it.

4. Use Canned Responses

You’ll often find yourself sending the same emails to multiple candidates. For example, you might send the interviewing process and details to a group of candidates you’ve shortlisted or even a professional thank you email after the interview.

In this case, the gist of your email will remain the same. The only differences will lie in personalization details like candidate names and interview timings.

To avoid writing the same emails again and again, you can use canned responses (or templates). They are available in almost all major email providers and recruitment management applications.

Read here: 7 best email templates for recruiters | Ready to send.

For Gmail, you can enable them by going to Settings > See All Settings > Advanced > Templates. Click on Enable in the Templates section and you’re good to go.

You can now create a template when composing an email by clicking on the three dots in the right lower corner of the screen.

It’s also not uncommon for recruiters to send the exact same email to multiple candidates. In this case, sending mass email in Gmail is an excellent idea and can save you a significant amount of time.

5. Find Email Addresses in Bulk

It’s not uncommon for recruiters to reach out to a group of people for a job opening. These people might be already employed at a company and may not be looking for a new opportunity.

In this case, you might want to “cold email ” to find out if they’d be interested in a better job opportunity.

Finding the right email addresses can take a significant amount of time and effort if you don’t use the right tools.

Right now, the most accurate email finder on the market is Voila Norbert, so it’s a good idea to try it.

In addition to being accurate, Norbert allows you to find emails in bulk, which makes it very useful for recruiters. You’ll have to create an Excel spreadsheet with the names and company websites of your prospects. You feed this to Norbert and get another email-containing spreadsheet in return.

Sometimes, Norbert might not be
able to fetch an address for you. In this case, using Recruit CRM’s Google Chrome extension can be helpful. Simply open the LinkedIn profile of your prospect and click on the extension, which will highlight the contact details for you.

Whatever tool you use, make sure it’s accurate because it can save you a significant amount of research time.

6. Get Rid of Distractions

Distractions are the number one enemy of productivity. It’s not uncommon to find yourself mindlessly scrolling on your phone when you should be engaging with candidates.

To get rid of mobile distractions, I use Daywise, which is a science-based app that lets you receive mobile notifications in scheduled batches. Personally, I receive the first batch at 8 am, the second at 2 pm, the third at 6 pm, and the final batch at 10 pm.

Any notifications between these times will be automatically blocked and delivered with a subsequent batch. This basically means I get only 4 notifications throughout the day, allowing me to focus on recruitment-related tasks and boost my productivity.

One useful feature of Daywise is that it lets you set exceptions (for both applications and contacts).

For example, if you use a recruitment-related application on your phone, you probably want to receive instant notifications from it so you don’t miss something important.

You can do this by adding this app to the list of exceptions. The same is true for important contacts. If you want to receive instant notification every time someone important WhatsApps you, you can add them to the VIP contacts.

The app will still block all other WhatsApp notifications (but allow notifications from the VIP contacts).

If the source of your distractions are excessive (unimportant) emails on your computer, you can simply turn off desktop notifications. In Windows 10, you can do this by going to the notifications panel and then clicking manage notifications (on the top right corner).

7. Write Effective Recruitment Emails

It’s hard to overstate how useful effective recruitment emails are when it comes to boosting productivity. First, effective emails shorten the hiring time and reduce the need to email a huge number of candidates.

Second, they bring quicker results (than non-personalized emails), keeping you happy, satisfied, and motivated.

If you’re cold emailing potential candidates, personalization is probably your best at writing effective emails. I’ve seen countless recruiters stopping at the first name when it comes to email personalization.

While using the first name of your prospect is a good place to start personalization, it’s not a good place to end it. If you want to take personalization to the next level, you should email relevant content to prospects at the right time. As already discussed, list segmentation is a good way to achieve this.

It’s also important to research well about a prospect before emailing them. You should mention their interests, acknowledge and appreciate their work, and explain to them how the new opportunity can benefit them and why it’s a good match for them.

You’ll only be able to do this if you know what they care about, who they are, are they introverts looking for quiet work, or extroverts looking for a job that involves working with many people. These are just some questions you as a recruiter need to ask yourself.

Email enrichment tools are an excellent way to know more about your prospects. That’s because it can provide you with their social profiles based on their email address, which you can use to conduct background research.

Other things you can do to make your emails effective (and in turn increase your email productivity) are–

  • Leave a loud and clear call-to-action (CTA). You don’t want to leave candidates confused about the next step, which will only lead to more emails and reduced productivity.
  • Send emails on a Sunday evening. Not many companies use this time block, which lets you get through the noise. Plus, people are usually preparing for the week ahead at this time, which makes them more receptive to a recruitment email.
  • Optimize emails for mobile. More than half of emails are opened on a phone. If your email doesn’t look good on a phone, it will be ineffective more than 50% of the time. Enable email domain’s security protocols. For an effective email outreach, it’s important to secure the email domain as it boosts the email’s credibility and increases the deliverability rate. Check if you have a DMARC record activated for your email.

In Final Words

Email productivity for recruiters begins with targeting the right candidates and writing effective, complete emails.

The biggest enemy of productivity — distractions — can be tackled using a notification scheduling app like Daywise.

Finally, it’s a good idea to use an accurate email finder (like Norbert) to reduce the time it takes to find contact information of potential candidates.

Happy recruiting!

Written by–

David Campbell is a digital marketing specialist at Ramp Ventures. He helps manage the content marketing team at Right Inbox. When he’s not working, he enjoys traveling and trying to learn Spanish.