8
 min read

How to add email outreach to your recruiting strategy

Email is the most widely used communication medium globally, so why are you not using it to its full potential as a recruiter?

September 29, 2020
Yuma Heymans
January 13, 2023
Share:

Chances are you are recruiting on LinkedIn only or that if you use email already, you use it just occasionally and manually.

In this blog you’ll learn two approaches to start doing email outreach and grow your sourcing power by adding another communication channel.

Two approaches for email outreach:

  1. Using multiple tools
  2. Using a single tool

But first, why adding email to your recruiting strategy can double your hiring rate.

Why email outreach at scale will be your biggest win this year

Email is the most used communication platform worldwide. Literally everyone that can be relevant for your recruiting efforts has an email address to reach them on.

Also, sending an email is free, which is great as compared to communication over for example InMails that can cost up to $10 per message.

Nowadays it is important to reach candidates proactively since we're in a candidate market, so that means that you want to expand your outbound recruiting strategies to email as well.

85% of people are open to job opportunities.

candidate openness to opportunities, source: LinkedIn research

So knowing this, how do you start reaching enough candidates to turn them into hires?

The answer is email outreach.

Approach 1. Using multiple tools

1. Targetlist

Use a talent search engine to get your list of candidates you want to reach out to. Your goal here is to get to a list of about 200 - 1000 profiles to send (cold) emails to.

Step 1: Get a list of profiles with a scraper.

Tool of choice: Phantombuster

Find the LinkedIn Search Export Phantom here

You can use a tool like Phantombuster that extracts profiles from for example LinkedIn. Once you have these profiles you will be able to get emails, explained in the next step.

The most important thing is that your list of profiles is exactly the set of candidates you want to reach out to. So make sure to screen the profiles that came up in the search results and only keep the profiles you eventually want to send an email.

When choosing a scraper tool, take the following into account:

  • How the profiles are retrieved (based on session cookie or from harvested database)
  • What the data freshness is of the profiles retrieved (is the data up-to-date)
  • If you get exactly the profiles that you want to target

2. Contact details

You can’t email potential candidates if you don’t have their verified email address. You can find these verified email addresses of the candidate by using an email finder tool.

Step 2: Get the emails of the candidates in your scraped list.

Tool of choice: Lusha

Lusha helps find contact details like email

By using a contact finder like Lusha you can find the email addresses of candidates in bulk. You upload the spreadsheet that you got from your scraper and the contact finder will add email addresses to that.

When choosing a contact finder tool, take the following into account: 

  • Average percentage of emails found 
  • Deliverability rate and bounce rates
  • If emails found are personal or work email addresses, depending on what you need

3. Sending personalized emails automatically

If you want to get a response from candidates you should not send generic messages that don’t address the individual candidates. Personalisation is key for the candidate to feel important and taken seriously. At the same time you want to send your messages at scale in an automated way. So the challenge is personalizing on the one hand and sending emails quickly and automatically on the other.

Step 3: Send personalized emails and send emails automatically.

Tool of choice: Hunter.io

Sending personalized messages at scale with Hunter

With a tool like Hunter, you can set up a sequence of for example 3 emails which will be sent after each other with a certain amount of days in between. The software keeps track of if candidates haven't already replied. You can personalize the individual messages in the sequence using the data of the candidate (for example first name, location and current job title). By uploading your target list with profiles from step 1 including the enriched emails from step 2, you’ll be able to send a set of emails to the candidates over a period of time.

You can easily scale this to 200 emails per day.

Approach 2. Using one single tool

You can also achieve all of the above by using one tool.

For this explanation we use a talent search and engagement tool called HeroHunt.ai.

Goal: Send personalized emails to a target list of qualified candidates based on their emails.

Tool of choice: HeroHunt.ai

1. Targetlist

Based on a job description, a tool like HeroHunt.ai builds your search automatically so you don’t have to build the search yourself.

Turn a job description or list of requirements into an automated candidate

When HeroHunt.ai created your search you turn this search into a list of qualified candidates. You don’t have to search yourself,, HeroHunt.ai searches platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub and Stack Overflow real-time and can find every single profile on their. 

If a profile is a match to your search they will end up in your search results..

Results of your candidate search

You can go through the candidates to check whether they are indeed a good fit for your job. 

Screening candidates in HeroHunt.ai

When you made your final selection you can get the contact details using the same tool.

2. Contact details

Once you have your list you can now find the email addresses for those candidates in one click using the ‘Get contacts’ button.

HeroHunt.ai will find the email address of the candidate from different online sources and verifies if the email address is indeed an email address that the candidate is using.

Get contacts

3. Sending personalized emails automatically

Now you have found the right candidates and their email addresses, you can reach out to them. You don’t want to have to draft a message for every single candidate so you want to build a template that you can use for all the candidates in the list. But the message should address the candidate personally so you want to include the right personalizations in your template.

You can quickly create your own personalized message template

Your message should go from ‘Hi there’ to ‘Hi Jonathan’ and from ‘I saw your skills in Java and Python’.

The software can take care of this automatically.

Auto generated message including personalisations

What’s left is to send the auto generated message to the candidate straight from HeroHunt.ai or include the candidate in a message sequence to send multiple messages over time.

That’s it. You just made your recruiting strategy ready to double your hires. 

You can try it for yourself here.

More content like this

Sign up and receive the best new tech recruiting content weekly.
Thank you! Fresh tech recruiting content coming your way 🧠
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Latest Articles