Essential Email Tools for Recruiters

July 9, 2013 at 3:34 AM by Vivek Reddy

email tools for recruiters

As recruiters, you send and receive exorbitant amounts of email. You’re reaching out to a candidate for the first time, following up, and tracking the various emails you’ve sent. And you’re doing all of this while trying to optimize the time you spend doing it. In this post, we outline some great email tools that make your email process easier and more effective.

Following Up Via Email

Say a candidate just emailed you back, but you were in the middle of something important. Or perhaps you keep reminding yourself to respond to those few emails buried somewhere within your inbox. Here are some tools that help you categorize your email, remind you to follow up on certain emails at the proper time, or even respond for you:

Followup.cc

Followup.cc works with any email provider. It enables you to remind yourself, after the amount of time you specify, to respond to a certain email. Say you receive a response from a candidate. She indicates that she’s not actively seeking new job opportunities at the moment but would love to reconnect in six months. In this case, you’d just forward that email to: 6months-3:00pm@followup.cc. This way, in six months, the same email you previously received from that candidate pops up at the top of your inbox, marked as unread.

 



You can also set reminders for yourself, using your email as a to-do list. If you wanted to remember to call someone for an informal interview tomorrow afternoon, you’d merely write a reminder to yourself in the email subject and/or body and send it to followup.cc, indicating the time tomorrow that you want to be reminded. At that time tomorrow, this email from yourself arrives in your inbox.

 

Boomerang

Boomerang for Gmail is a plugin available for both Firefox and Chrome. It’s similar to Followup.cc in that you can remind yourself about an email you’ve received. At whichever time you choose, Boomerang will bring that email to the top of your inbox, mark it as unread, or star it. You can also elect to remind yourself about emails you’ve sent, which can be useful to recall who you've contacted or which emails didn't garner a response.

Boomerang also boasts a handy automation feature. Take the previous case of the candidate who wanted to reconnect in six months. With Boomerang, you can draft a response email and schedule it's delivery.

Mailbox

Mailbox is wildly popular for mobile email organization and productivity. It utilizes mobile features such as swiping and push notifications, which allow you to successfully manage your email. If you are on the go and want to remind yourself to respond to an email at a later time, Mailbox lets you do this by simply swiping and tapping. You can also snooze emails and they’ll return to your inbox automatically. It’s currently only available on iPhone and iPad, but expect wider availability in the near future.

 

 

Tracking Emails

Wouldn’t it be awesome to know if the emails you send are actually being read? Or to know more about the candidates you are emailing as you email them? The following tools enable you to do both.

Yesware

With Yesware, a simple Gmail plugin, you can see if your recipient has opened your email. It even tells you where the person was when they opened it and what device they used to do so. This allows you to optimize based on time of delivery and subject line to increase the likelihood of your recipient reading the email. Also, since Yesware notifies you the moment that your recipient opens the email, you can call them right when they read it. This ensures you'll be fresh in their minds for the phone call.

Yesware also populates the right hand side of your email template with information about the recipient’s LinkedIn. Since most people have LinkedIn profiles, Yesware can be a great way to ensure you have the correct email for your potential candidate. Like the previous tools, Yesware lets you set reminders in your email as well.

ToutApp

ToutApp is more expensive, but also works on iPhone and iPad. Like Yesware, Toutapp lets you know who has clicked on your email and when. In addition, you can see how many times the person has opened it and how many times they clicked on which link in your email. This lets you test which types of links/material resonate best with potential employees. In addition to other functional components such as tracking, Toutapp allows you to set reminders and templates and works extremely well for batch emailing. See their site for more.

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Note: MailChimp and Hubspot are also excellent tools, especially pertaining to newsletters and/or marketing campaigns. They allow you to A/B test emails, providing comprehensive analytics to gather deeper insight into your campaigns.

Rapportive

Rapportive lives within your Gmail. Whenever you send an email, Rapportive displays your contact’s social profile—their LinkedIn, Facebook, recent Tweets and more—inside your inbox. This is a great way to better understand a candidate. Perhaps they Tweet about a topic pertaining to your company, or their LinkedIn indicates that they went to your alma mater. Rapportive gives you powerful context around candidates that you can leverage in your emails.

Bonus: If you're using Highrise for contact management, you can add candidates straight to Highrise through Rapportive.

Composing Emails

Many recruiters love to create personalized emails but lack the time to do so at scale. This oftentimes leads to sending mass emails, which, if done hastily, can result in spamming candidates. No one wants to feel as if they are merely one of many people being targeted, and a candidate is much more likely to respond if they feel your email was intended for them specifically. If the candidate feels as though you took the time to look them up and see if they're actually a good fit before clicking send (after the previous two sections, you should have plenty of ways to do this!), they are much more likely to respond. The following tools will help you balance the necessity to efficiently send a lot of emails with the need to personalize those emails:

TypeIt4Me

This tool, intended for Mac, provides email shortcuts. Say that at the end of each email to a potential candidate, you include a short blurb about what your company does. You might even have a few blurbs you choose between, depending on the candidate. With TypeIt4Me, you assign a short word or phrase to that blurb. Then, all you need to do is type that word and your blurb will surface in your email. These are called “text-expanders,” and a simple Google search will provide you with text-expanders for additional operating systems besides Mac.

WiseStamp

WiseStamp lets you automate and customize your email signatures. You create a signature that both reflects you and your company as well as makes contacting you easier. With WiseStamp’s email apps gallery, you can select the icon representing one of your social profiles (say the “LinkedIn” icon). WiseStamp allows you to include this image in your email signature, so that when the viewer clicks it, it directs them to your LinkedIn profile (or whatever icon/profile pair you choose). This gives engineers or other candidates you are targeting an easy way to get more information about you and your company (and adds a creative touch to your signature!).

 



We hope that you find these email tools as useful as we do. They make the everyday process of organizing, tracking, sending, and responding to email infinitely easier. Recruiters spend a considerable amount of time reaching out and following up via email. Taking the time to set up these tools today may save you an unbelievable amount of time down the road! If you have suggestions for other useful tools for recruiters, please leave a comment or email us directly.

 


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