Anyone involved in engineering recruiting knows it's been increasingly difficult to get in touch with great engineers. Startups, agencies and established companies like Google and Facebook are all duking it out against each other to hire the best people. But if everyone is looking for engineers with what is generally a static supply, how do recruiters stand out when they reach out to engineers to convince them to join their companies.
Recruiters have dealt with this intense competition in a variety of ways, but there are typically two major tactics we've seen: increase the number of reachouts to compensate for few engineers responding or figure out ways to increase the response rate so that a higher percentage of candidates respond to your emails or InMails.
At Entelo, we strongly recommend working on ways to improve your response rate as that will set yourself up for success regardless of what stage of a company you are. But what is the average response rate for engineering recruiting emails? And are you doing enough to initiate a reply? Our founder, Jon Bischke, took to Quora to discuss the factors that contribute to response rate percentages.
We talk to hundreds of companies about this and what we hear is truly all over the board. Some people have claimed "zero" and while that's likely extreme and probably a sign that they are doing something wrong, it's likely that for "bad" agency recruiters, response rates are probably in the low single digits. This is especially the case if the message is generic and has the appearance of spam.On the other hand, we've spoke to folks who claim quite high response rates, even over 50%. It's worth noting that a "response" doesn't mean that the engineer is necessarily interested. Rather, one type of response is simply something to the effect of "I'm not interested in opportunities right now." But still, getting anywhere near half of the people you reach out to respond is a minor miracle.
The response rate typically hinges on at least a few things. Some of the primary ones we've seen include the following:
Brand strength of the party reaching out - If you are reaching our from Box or Square, your response rate is likely to be higher than if you are reaching out as a random agency recruiter. The highest response rates we've heard are generally from recruiters who have well-known brands behind them.
Quality of the subject line - If your email doesn't get read, it won't get responded to. The best recruiters we've seen will be A/B test subject headers, looking for the combination that gives them the best response rates (Adam Jackson details how he does this in this TechCrunch piece: How To Get Top Engineers To Open Your Email Then Join Your Company | TechCrunch).
Customization of the message - To the extent that an engineer feels you simply mass-messaged him or her off of a generic template, their likelihood of responding goes way down. On the other hand, if an engineer senses that you've spent a bit of time looking at work they've done or other aspects of their professional capabilities, they are much more likely to get back to you (even if they aren't looking). One of the reasons we built Entelo like we did is to enable more recruiters to send better messages to candidates.
If you have any success stories of how you've improved your response rates, drop us a line at contact@entelo.com- we love to learn new ways to improve the recruiting process!