Outbound Recruiting 101 (Part 3 of 7): Pick Up the Phone

July 8, 2012 at 12:49 AM by Jon Bischke

This is the third 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 #3: Pick up the phone. Most of us are scared of the phone when it comes to recruiting. And therein lies the opportunity. Now, for starters, you often won’t have a direct phone number for your candidate so you likely won’t be placing phone calls a majority of the time. You can always call the general company phone number for someone (those are easy enough to come by) but this has limited effectiveness and can be perceived as annoying by the person you’re calling.

But if you do have a direct dial there’s a strategy that’s reasonably effective. Send a well-crafted, custom email and then follow up with a phone call at the same time you send the email. Guess what? The vast majority of the time you’re going to get voicemail. And when you do, you simply say something like the following:

“Hey Steve. It’s Brian over at Acme Corp and my number is 818-555-1212. I just wanted to give you a quick call as we’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer and your name came up on one of our screens. I’ve sent you an email just now with more info but on the chance it doesn’t get to you I wanted to make sure you had my number. Again, 818-555-1212 and it’s Brian from Acme Corp. Or feel free to email me at brian@acmecorp.com. Have a great rest of your day.”

This message does a few things. First, it reinforces you and your company as a real person and a real company (voice is more powerful than email in this regard). Second, if the email you have for the candidate is an incorrect one and the candidate is indeed interested, you’re still in the game. Finally, it gives the candidate a phone number and an invitation to call. You’ll need to talk with the candidate at some point and this often expedites the process (vs. an email which, while often containing a phone number, is less of a strong invitation to call).

One last thing: give your phone number at both the start and end of the message.

This way if the recipient has to re-listen to your message to write down the number they don’t need to listen all the way through to get to the number. That can be irritating and at this stage of the interaction you want to be as sensitive as possible to doing anything that would irk the candidate, even if it’s minor.

Stay tuned for more Outbound Recruiting tips and please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!

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