Unfortunately, there are still too many instances of recruiters mass-blasting form emails to candidates these days, often for jobs that don’t make sense for them. While we encourage taking the approach of being hyper-personalized with every reachout, there are successful tactics you can employ to get the best of both worlds: semi-personalized reachouts leading to the volume needed to build your pipelines quickly and efficiently.
Here’s the approach I take to hiring at Entelo.
Starts with preparation
Before I start any sort of high-volume sourcing campaign, I’ll make sure to do my research on the candidates we’re looking for and why. I build out lists of candidates, and check in with the hiring manager I’m working with to make sure we’re properly calibrated on a role. Do my sample lists of candidates resonate with the kind of employee we need to hire?
In this process I can understand which skillsets and experiences are necessary, nice-to-haves, and what isn’t required. After aligning candidate expectations with our hiring manager, I’ll start building a large list of candidates who appear to be good fits for the role, based on their professional profile or resume.
Segment those lists
Once I’ve built a large list for myself, I take the approach of segmenting my lists to make them more granular. For example, let’s say I’m looking for mid-market sales reps. I'd segment a list of 500 reps into 10 lists of 50 reps who work within specific verticals, take Business Intelligence or Sales Software, for example. I'll then craft a template for each of those 10 lists that calls out the specific vertical.
A sample email may look something like this:
“Hi <firstname>,
I head up talent here at Entelo and I noticed you’ve had a lot of success in your sales career. Given you’ve recently been selling Business Intelligence software (we’ve found that type of sell translates very well to our sales environment here), I thought you’d continue to develop your ecareer and succeed with us.
[Short description of the company and why it’s a great time to join].”
This is ultimately a templated email, but appears far more targeted to a candidate, especially if you’ve taken particular care in building out your lists beforehand.
You can segment on all sorts of information that you can find about a candidate. Some of the areas I’ve segmented in the past include verticals, companies, specific skillsets, such as web crawling, experience with elastic search, closing enterprise deals, or personal information, like being a Star Wars fans or a fan of __insert team here__.
Sometimes you can avoid segmenting
There have been a few occasions where I haven’t had to segment my lists since the role itself was quite specific already (first data-team hire, first devops hire, first sales manager, etc.). When the role itself is already specific, and you've built out a great list of people who would be enticed by the role, sending a form email that details the responsibilities of that position can be enough to attract the right person’s attention.
For example something along the lines of:
“Hi <firstname>,
Noticed you’ve had some excellent experience with analytics frameworks in the past. Given that we’re looking for the first person to lead our <insert specific role>, I thought you’d be interested in learning more about what we’re working on.
[More info about the company and the role].”
This ends up being very similar to what you’d with segmented lists, but since the role is already specific, I’ve found there isn’t as much of a need to drill down further. Of course, time-permitting, response rates will most certainly be higher the more specific you get!
This is my high-level approach to high volume sourcing. Many of these practices are ones that apply to all sorts of roles at varying sizes of companies. If you're looking to learn more about how we're building Entelo to help the world's top orgs grow their teams, I'll be co-hosting How Entelo Uses Entelo along with CEO Jon Bischke. Join us!
