Embrace The Cheese! Recruitment Messaging to Bring Talent Home

July 29, 2015 at 3:01 PM by Rob Stevenson

Death to hot new opportunities.

If you're going to stand out from other recruiters, you've got to bring something unique to the table. Now is not the time to baselessly assume that upping your volume of outbound messaging will lead to a fuller top o' the funnel. Increasing your engagement means having more direct, personal conversations, and avoiding the clinical, middle of the fairway attempt at personalization that talent can see right through. Our Recruiter Evangelist, Loni Spratt, makes great personal use of and advises our customers to enact a common messaging strategy: embrace the cheese.

By cheese, I mean cheesiness; a bit of cheeky, unexpected messaging that stands apart from your standard recruitment outreach. An example Loni shared with me was her recruitment of an engineer who had a significant amount of his photography hobby posted throughout his social profiles. A quick subject line that read "Saw your Flickr!" combined with some email body action including an observation of a particular photograph, and Loni was off to the races. The engineer responded immediately, remarking that he received innumerable messages from recruiters, but no one had ever bothered to point out his photography.

Cheese recruiting works because everyone likes a bit of flattery, especially that which isn't tied to their business accomplishments. Further, recipients know they are the target of a 1:1 email, and that you actually bothered to learn something about them before firing away. 

Some other examples of cheese recruiting's devastating efficacy:

Our Head of Talent, Vivek, himself a former high school tennis practice squad member, will message other tennis fan candidates "Tennis, Anyone?"

To a candidate working for a company with "Spring" in it's title, "Spring in to action, [name]."

 

What are some examples of how you have embraced the cheese to pique a potential hire's interest? Leave a comment!

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