5 Tips for Successfully Pitching Candidates

July 15, 2014 at 6:00 AM by Kathleen de Lara

effective candidate outreachYou’ve only got a few minutes to impress and snag candidates’ attention, but what makes your pitch different from other recruiters’?

Talent is an investment; learn how to stand out from the noise, hire slowly, and you could land an employee who’ll be able to help the company thrive alongside their own professional growth.

Working on your delivery and need some pointers? Try out these tips to improve your candidate outreach.

Don’t oversell the position.

Think twice before creating an unrealistic, romanticized hubbub of the role. Describing opportunities with hyperbolic, nondescript words like “best,” “amazing,” “extraordinary,” “awesome,” “incredible,” “unique”, or “once in a lifetime,” doesn’t tell much about the position, comes off kitschy, harms the company’s credibility, and can reel in disillusioned employees. Avoid the likelihood of damaging the candidate experience by being upfront, explanatory, and authentic about the benefits and duties associated with the position and company.

Prep an elevator pitch.

Fed up and frustrated with entrepreneurs’ overly vague and ambitious pitches, venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki came up with the 10/20/30 pitch rule — 10 slides presented in under 20 minutes containing no font size smaller than 30 points.

Though it’s unlikely that you’d be pitching a position to a candidate with a slide deck, one key takeaway from Kawasaki’s rule is to be concise – treat the pitch as you would a good elevator pitch.

When writing a message to a candidate, remember the four Ps: Personalization, Position, Proof, Press

Personalization: Establish a resonating connection with talent by making it clear you’re not copying and pasting a general outreach template. Customize the beginning of the message to touch on personal points about a candidate’s projects or experiences, like a recent website design or a mutual connection between you and the candidate’s previous company.

Position: Communicate your reason for reaching out, state the position you’re recruiting for, and include a brief summary about the duties the role entails. In tune with mass messaging practices, recruiters often defer to casting a wide net and sending out a general outreach email asking interested candidates to submit their resumes and the recruiter will match up qualified talent with the right position, which results in recruiters either 1) receiving a mass influx of good and bad resumes to sift through, or 2) being ignored, receiving no resumes, and getting marked as Spam.

Proof: Add credibility to the company name by mentioning other companies who are customers and who have given permission to publicly mention their patronage. In this case, name-dropping can work to your favor as it provides evidence that your company is onto creating a serviceable good or product, and that candidates should be psyched to get behind it by joining the team.

Press: Same goes for any recent press coverage. If you’re able to, curate the best articles that tell the story of what your company is up to and why candidates should be excited to have the opportunity to work for you.

Not sure where to start? Here’s a sample template from our eBook, "Effectively Messaging Candidates":

I read your post last week, “How to Speak to Passive Candidates Without Being Creepy” — great piece! I just came across your profile and noticed you have a few mutual connections with our founder, Jon Bischke, and based on your customer success leadership experience and B2B SaaS background, I think you might be a great asset to the Entelo team.

We’re a well-funded tech organization that is working on building a powerful search platform incorporating over 300 million social profiles to improve the overall recruiting process, and we’re building out our sales division. We currently have over 90 customers including ESPN, Box, Yelp, Square, and Groupon. Our customer success team is in its infancy, so this is an opportunity to come in at an early stage to lead and develop the customer success division from the ground up.

Let me know if you’d be open to having a quick explanatory chat with our team.

P.S. We recently announced our Series A round of funding. Read it here on TechCrunch.

Sell the experience, not the product.

Candidates are interested in what they’ll get out of working for your company, and we’re not talking what you’re selling.

Think long-term and short-term benefits, not features. Your company may sell the one of the world’s greatest product, but if you’re not illustrating the problems being solved, the competitive advantage your company has over others, and the management team that’ll help the candidate grow from the position they start off in, you’re selling the candidate short of the opportunity and the company short of what they have to offer customers and employees.

Nix the business jargon.

In tandem with the previous tip, keep in mind candidates are not your customers, and require a different outreach approach. Customers are probably accustomed to phrases like “drinking the kool-aid,” “lots of moving parts,” “corporate values,” “moving the needle,” “big data,” “leader in the space,” “thinking outside the box,” and “window of opportunity.” But to candidates, these words don’t provide sufficient, measurable benefits of working for the company. Explain the company and the open req as you would to someone who knows nothing about the industry.

Prep the counterargument.

Candidates who are interested in the position may poke around about the details on a role.

Some questions asked by “great job candidates “ according to Inc.com include:

  • What do you expect me to accomplish in the first 60 to 90 days?
  • What are the common attributes of your top performers?
  • What are a few things that really drive results for the company?
  • What do employees do in their spare time?
  • How do you plan to deal with…?

Also, take note of common questions asked by candidates to help better prepare your interviews for the long-run.

Want to learn more tips about attracting talent to your company’s open opportunities? Learn tips and techniques to boost your candidate outreach and join us for our social recruiting webinar series!

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