This is the second post in a seven-part series entitled "Outbound Recruiting 101". It focuses on best practices when reaching out to passive candidates during recruiting. Reaching out to passive candidates is something that almost every fast-growth company does as part of their recruiting efforts. That being said, it can be done respectfully or disrespectfully. We strongly encourage the former. :) Please keep in mind throughout this series of posts that your company's brand is at stake when you are contacting candidates and treat the person you're contacting as you would like to be treated (we call this the Outbound Golden Rule!).
Tip #2: Multiple channels for maximum effectiveness. For the vast majority of candidates you can discover multiple routes to get to them (especially using a tool like Entelo). Perhaps you have an email address or a LinkedIn profile. Or maybe a phone number or even someone in your company knows the person (very easy to discover using the Entelo Company Connections feature!). Here’s a hint: Don’t just reach out to a candidate through one channel.
Here’s why. Different channels will have different levels of effectiveness for a given candidate. Some people will be very responsive on email because, after all, it’s email. But others won’t be because if they get an email from you it might not be clear who you are immediately and it’s easier to just hit delete than to do that research. Plus, almost everyone is WAY overloaded with email these days.
Our recommendations are the following: Email + phone (we’ll get to phone in our next tip), Email + LinkedIn InMail or Email + in-person (with Entelo, you’ll know the right meetup groups to attend). Besides the differing effectiveness of these mediums another reason for multiple channels is a concept called effective frequency. Basically effective frequency is the number of times a person must be exposed to a message before a response is made. You are not going to contact someone five times. But by reaching out on two channels you up the chance that you’ll get a response.
Our recommendation: No more than two channels. At a certain point this just becomes annoying and, like form letters, starting to reflect poorly on your company. An email with a quick phone call? That’s reasonable. An email + InMail? No big deal. But push it further than that and you’re playing with fire. We’d advise not to do that.
Stay tuned for more Outbound Recruiting tips and please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!